Discretion and Blame Avoidance

Abstract

This chapter explores discretion from a blame-avoidance perspective, focusing on the idea that there is a trade-off between discretion-defined as the ability or duty to exercise judgement-and blame avoidance. It argues that the idea of such a trade-off is plausible up to a point, but that it is limited in at least two ways. One is that there are some half-way houses between discretion and blame avoidance (including pooling of discretion to share blame, partial or apparent delegation to diffuse or transfer blame and the validation of discretion by others), though half-way houses of that kind are likely to be precarious and unstable. The other is that any trade-off between discretion and blame avoidance is liable to break down, particularly in times of crisis, to the point where officeholders come to incur blame for failing to exercise discretion.