More deeply rooted, perhaps, than the disparagement of praise, is the compassionate revulsion from blame.  “He meant well”; “His conscience is clear”; “How could he help sinning with such a bringing-up!” such pleas pull us up in the midst of our condemnation.  And they must have their weight.  Conscientiousness must be praised, while in the same breath we blame the folly or fanaticism it led to.  And the visibly degrading effects of environment should make us tender toward the erring, even while, for their own sakes and the sake of others, we continue to blame the sin.  Society cannot afford to overlook sin because it sees provocation for it.  There is always provocation, there are always causes outside the sinner’s heart.  But there is also always a cause within the heart, an openness to temptation, and acquiescence in the evil impulse, which we must try to reach and influence by our blame and condemnation.  No doubt in like circumstances we should do as badly, or worse.  But to blame does not mean that we set ourselves up as of finer clay; it means only that we continue to use a weapon of great value for the advancement of human welfare.  A man always “could have helped it” he could have if his inward aversion to the sin had been strong enough; and it is precisely because blame tends to make that aversion stronger in the sinner and in all who are aware of it, that we must employ it.  Reward and punishment are the materialization of praise and blame and have the same uses.  We reward and punish men not because in some unanalyzable sense they “deserve” it, but ultimately in order to foster noble and heroic acts and deter men from crime.  The giving of rewards for good conduct has never been systematized (except for Carnegie medals, school prizes, and a few other cases), and the practical difficulties in the way are probably insuperable.  Indeed, the natural outward rewards of fame, position, increased salary, etc, would be spur enough, if they could be made less capricious and more certain.  But to restrain its members from injury to one another is so necessary to society, and so difficult, that elaborate systems of punishment have been used since prehistoric times.  To a consideration of the contemporary problems concerning punishment we shall return at a later stage in our study.

What is responsibility?

There is one plea which exempts a person from blame- when we say he was not responsible.  Responsibility means accountability, liability to blame and punishment.  We do not hold accountable those classes whom it would do no good to blame or punish.  Babies, the feeble minded, the insane, are not deterred by blame; hence we do not hold them responsible.  Beyond these obvious exemptions there are all sorts of degrees of responsibility, carefully worked out in that branch of the law known as “torts.”  The principle upon which man has instinctively gone, and which the law now recognizes, in holding men accountable or, in other words, imputing responsibility-is the degree in which they might have been expected to foresee the consequences of their acts.  The following set of cases will illustrate the principle: