Renee Nicole Souris

In this article, I contribute to the debate between two philosophical traditions—the Kantian and the Aristotelian—on the requirements of criminal responsibility and the grounds for excuse by taking this debate to a new context: international criminal law. After laying out broadly Kantian and Aristotelian conceptions of criminal responsibility, I defend a quasi-Aristotelian conception, which affords a central role to moral development, and especially to the development of moral perception, for international criminal law. I show than an implication of this view is that persons who are substantially and non-culpably limited in their capacity for ordinary moral perception warrant an excuse for engaging in unlawful conduct. I identify a particular set of conditions that trigger this excuse, and then I systematically examine it as applied to the controversial case of former-child-soldier-turned leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Dominic Ongwen, who is currently at trial at the International Criminal Court.

This paper critically examines two formulations of the view that the crime of using child soldiers is less serious than other international crimes. The first formulation presents a sociological argument that using child soldiers is not as serious as other international crimes involving rape or murder, and the second formulation relies on deontological moral norms to argue that using child soldiers is less serious than crimes involving murder because child soldiering does not violate fundamental human values, like the right to life. After critically examining each formulation of this view, I argue that using child soldiers does violate a fundamental human value by attacking the dignity of the developing child, where dignity is understood in terms of a person’s moral agency.