The End of Responsibility
How therapeutic reasoning is replacing moral reasoning
What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing
Hannah Arendt – The Human Condition
Rape has always been excused. Though illegal on paper, in practice it is effectively decriminalised. It is rare that rapes ever get to trial, let alone lead to a conviction. There is an entrenched male presumption of ownership over women’s bodies, and the state has long been reluctant to push back too hard against what men feel entitled to – lest men turn their aggression towards the state. “Boys will be boys” remains our dominant social – and legal – attitude.
Last week in the UK three teenage boys were convicted of raping two teenage girls in separate attacks in late 2024 and early 2025. The boys filmed the attacks, making a guilty verdict by the jury difficult to avoid. Yet in sentencing Judge Nicholas Rowland displayed not only an extraordinary leniency – issuing rehabilitation orders, rather than a custodial sentence – but he went to great lengths to excuse the boys’ behaviour. Given this leniency the government has announced a review of the sentences.
Excusing the behaviour of boys and men for sexual abuse is unsurprising, it is, after all, the MO of justice systems, as they are often unduly concerned with the reputations of men and boys, rather than justice or sympathy for victims. However, what was astonishing were the excuses given by Rowland as they revealed a new suite of rationalisations that are now at the disposal of justice systems.
Rowland cited the boys’ ADHD, anxiety, and low IQ as mitigating factors, alongside a finding that they had a limited understanding of consent – which was, of course, the entire point of the trial, not a mitigating circumstance. However, more troubling was the highlighting of the boys’ ADHD and anxiety as grounds for leniency, factors that seem incredibly weak for diminishing accountability. In doing so, Rowland may have set an extraordinarily consequential precedent at precisely the wrong cultural moment.
Recent years have seen an explosion in ADHD diagnoses – a phenomenon that may reflect greater clinical awareness, but is also due to a significant broadening of definitions. Alongside this has been a wider tendency to medicalise what were once understood as ordinary difficulties: concentration, motivation, self-discipline. ADHD has quietly shifted from a defined developmental disorder into an expansive social identity, one that increasingly encompasses behaviours sitting well within the normal spectrum of human temperament.
This sits within a wider cultural shift to the therapising of everything. There is now an expansion of psychological frameworks beyond clinical necessity into the everyday interpretation of discomfort, conflict, and responsibility. Institutions, workplaces, schools, and online culture have absorbed the language of trauma, harm, and vulnerability to the point where straightforward moral reasoning is now being replaced by therapeutic reasoning.
Rowland looks to have internalised this pivoting from moral reasoning to therapeutic reasoning. When that logic reaches a court sentence hearing for a gang rape, the stakes of this cultural drift become difficult to ignore. It makes accountability more difficult, as expected standards of behaviour are minimised with excuses based on psychological diagnoses that may reflect nothing more than normal human traits.
What this does is minimise agency and responsibility, and severely undermines the social expectation that we be self-regulating beings. It has created the conditions where the excuses we make for rape now have a whole new menu to choose from. Not to mention widening the perceived legitimate defences rapists can claim for their own behaviour.
There is a desperation at the heart of modern progressive political culture to display empathy – to perform it, to signal it, to prove it. This creates a contest within this culture to try to out-empathy one another to achieve social status. But such a contest inevitably requires new territories in which to place empathy, and it is here something goes horribly wrong. Empathy migrates away from those who need it the most – as this is deemed too obvious – and instead finds itself attached to those who don’t deserve it at all.
In this case, it landed on the perpetrators. Three boys who filmed themselves raping girls became the subjects of judicial compassion – their ADHD, their anxiety, their low IQ were carefully considered, and given tenderness by the judge. The victims, meanwhile, were sidelined in a courtroom that was meant to provide them justice. It was empathy catastrophically misplaced, and misplaced using the extraordinary power of the state.
That this could be perceived by anyone as “progress” is genuinely bewildering. It is the language of care and inclusion being used to insulate perpetrators of sexual violence from consequence, while victims are asked to accept that the justice and dignity they deserve will be tempered by the weak therapeutic needs of those who violated them. It is a deep, dark regression of the human condition wearing the costume of social advancement.
The social signals this sends are dire. Young men need strong, consistent signals about acceptable behaviour – delivered with clarity and conviction. That is not what happened here. Instead, the judge has created more leeway, more ambiguity, more room for those who would take it. This sits within a culture that is already failing badly on this front – from the vicemaxxing of the American president all the way down to the increased brutality of modern sexual norms. The message about what is and isn’t acceptable is growing murkier.
Alongside young men, society more broadly needs a clear set of principles it governs itself by – this the platform on which social trust and cohesion is built. The state has a role not just in punishing wrongdoing but in projecting these principles, in drawing lines that inform people where they stand and what their societies are about. Throughout the West we are now failing to do this. We’ve instead created a choose-your-own-adventure ethics that has unmoored us as people, and made us susceptible to both poor legal decisions and authoritarian manipulation alike.
People need to trust institutions, and to deserve this trust institutions have to be able to think – clearly, rigorously, and with the intellectual resilience to resist fashionable concepts that may be mirages in advancing their fields. More importantly, institutions must understand how these concepts are incentivised and advanced into cultural, political and legal thinking without proper scrutiny.
The failure of Judge Rowland goes beyond the standard legal brutality towards victims of sexual violence. It was a submission to a new form of groupthink – one so desperate to locate victimhood in perpetrators that it has lost the ability to recognise it in victims. The result is a culture that looks to psychologically excuse people from personal responsibility, and institutions built on that culture will ultimately protect no-one.