The Intoxication Excuse: a Challenge to Reason?

Abstract

How might we account for the perennial and pervasive popularity of an appeal to intoxication for our moral failings? We invoke the excuse of intoxication for many acts of social and sexual impropriety, when we seek the exoneration, understanding, forgiveness or leniency of family, friends, colleagues, strangers and law enforcers, in informal situations, starting in the home, and formal ones, including courts of law. In this latter context, criminal offenders and their legal representatives persist in proffering the intoxication excuse even though the law officially rejects it.