(3) A warranted blame’s interrelationship with excuse creates uncertainty because the analysis of excuse turns back on the issue of moral responsibility.

As Darwall establishes, blame is warranted when a moral agent fails to comply with a moral obligation without a valid excuse. Warranted blame by definition depends on the clear outcome of whether there is a valid excuse. The examination of excuse turns on the issue of whether the moral agent should bear the moral responsibility under the circumstances. It therefore turns on the issue of moral responsibility itself.

The debate on moral responsibility turns on the issue of free will and determinism, the difficulty of which has been demonstrated in our modern debates. In 1924, Clarence Darrow used the problem of free will and determinism to argue that Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb should not be given the death penalty. In 1979, the “Twinkie defense” advanced in Dan White’s murder trial argued that White suffered from diminished capacity due to the consumption of sugary junk food. In 1982, John Hinckley Jr.’s lawyers successfully argued ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’ using the image of Hinckley’s brain scan in his trial for attempting to assassinate President Reagan. These legal cases demonstrate the difficult issue of adducing moral responsibility brought by the analysis of excuse. It would seem fair to conclude that, because the examination of excuse leads us back to the analysis of moral responsibility, free will and determinism, the problem of moral normativity Darwall hopes to solve under the framework of moral obligation and blame provides no conceptual guarantee, and is therefore not easier.