Causation =/= responsibility

Causation =/= responsibility

This Twitterer posted on Cage's comments about MI5 "radicalizing" Mohammed Emwazi: 

 

Mr. Tickle‏@MrTickle3

If you are annoyed with #CAGE's MI5 made me do it because it takes agency away, how is that different from #Quilliam's Islam made me do it?

This Tweet (intentionally or not) raises some interesting questions about the distinctions between causation and responsibility. A moral agent's actions may have a number of causes, and if you are a hard determinist (incompatibilist), you might say that his actions are caused and that person has no responsibility. 

If you are a soft determinist (compatibilist) or a libertarian, you believe that there is free will under certain circumstances. If you are a compatibilist, causation is not incompatible with free will. 

In the law, although it is recognized that many factors can contribute to an offence or act of negligence or whatever issue is in question, not all of these can be taken into account directly. In criminal law, a wider range of factors affect sentencing than affect criminal responsibility.  Thus a difficult background may reduce the sentence on the grounds that this affected the person's chances in life. However, it wouldn't provide an excuse and thereby exoneration. Circumstances that affect an individual's ability to choose may provide a defence. Duress, insanity and automatism are examples where the defendant's actions may not be considered criminal because of factors that affected his practical reasoning ability. 

The term "radicalization" full stop is problematic for me. It implies a process that at least reduces the person's moral agency, like the older term "brainwashing". Whether the term "radicalization" is used with respect to MI5 or ISIS, I disagree with it. 

There is a distinction between the two statements "MI5 made me do it" and "Islam made me do it". MI5 is an organization of people, and people are moral agents. Islam is a belief system. Blaming MI5 entails blaming moral agents, and thereby transferring some moral blame onto them. Blaming Islam entails no moral blame. Therefore the two statements are fundamentally different. 

This is without even going into the details of Cage's statements about MI5, their plausibility, and the likely agenda behind them. Cage is an organization with noted jihadi sympathizers among their ranks. They have acted for a number of individuals that have gone on to be convicted in a court. Make of that what you will.