Time as a Moral Defense?

When an individual A is accused of having committed a morally impermissible action X, it is generally accepted that they may invoke three types of defenses to mitigate, or even eliminate, their moral responsibility (or at least the fittingness of blame): justifications, excuses, and exemptions. However, another consideration – one that does not prima facie fall under any of these three types of defenses – also appears capable of influencing moral responsibility: the passage of time. A might argue that, although they did indeed commit the morally impermissible action X, the fact that it occurred twenty years ago partially absolves them from responsibility. This idea, which underlies several legal principles – such as statutes of limitations, rehabilitation, and sentence reduction – raises underexplored philosophical issues. In this paper, we argue that the passage of time does not constitute an autonomous moral defense. Rather, it is morally relevant only insofar as it makes possible certain transformations – including psychological reform, repentance, and processes of moral repair – capable of modifying the normative conditions under which it is appropriate to hold an agent to account. Accordingly, the attenuation of diachronic responsibility is best understood not as a direct consequence of temporal distance itself, but as a consequence of changes in those normative conditions.