In recent months, it seems as if newsmakers have made an art form of shrugging off responsibility: Baseball player Darryl Strawberry has blamed his alcoholism and drug addiction on the demands of being a celebrity. Erik and Lyle Menendez say they were abused by their parents and therefore not guilty of their murders. And when tennis star Jennifer Capriati was arrested recently for possessing marijuana, her father took the public rap by saying he pushed her too hard to compete when she was young.

Many of us remain perplexed: If a victim of privilege is not responsible for his actions, if a victim of poverty is not responsible for her misdeeds, if victims of addictions are blameless, if people who come from broken homes or dysfunctional families are not to be held accountable for their behavior . . . well, who is?

Uncertainty about the nature of personal responsibility has been brewing for a while, says Stephen Vicchio, philosophy professor at Notre Dame College. Since the 18th century, Western culture has embraced Jean Jacques Rousseau's notion that humans are "basically good" and that "if they do bad things, it's because something has happened to them."

But these days, it seems as if bad behavior is not so much explained as it is excused.

"It has become a kind of cultural reflex to think of people as being 'sick' rather than 'bad,' " says Charles J. Sykes, author of "A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character."

"Our tendency is to redefine bad behavior as disease and to take behavior we used to regard as a function of character and redefine it as a medical complex. We have taken the seven deadly sins and redefined them as complexes.

"In the old days, if I spent my weekly paycheck on neckties instead of on my family, people would have called me greedy. Now they would say I suffer from compulsive shopping syndrome. If the reason is greed, then I am responsible. If it's compulsive shopping syndrome, then it's a disease and I am responsible to a lesser degree."

Fred Guy, co-director of the Hoffberger Center for Professional Ethics at the University of Baltimore, believes people have unconsciously replaced making judgments about morality with formula explanations from "so-called science and pseudo-science."

"It's uncomfortable to talk about ethics and character because it seems so quaint and the language seems so unknown. It's much easier to talk about [someone's actions] in terms of their environment or upbringing. When you go to a discussion of the soul or character of the individual, you risk sounding like a fool. It sounds too medieval -- or too religious."

Or too judgmental.

"In college in the 1960s and 1970s, a lot of us got hoodwinked into thinking that cultural relativism was the best explanation of the nature of moral good," says Dr. Vicchio. "It's as if everyone has their own values and you just have to uncover what they are. Of course, no one ever thinks that if you hold that view, you've got to hold it for Charlie Manson, too.

"It's almost as if there's a fail-safe mechanism that if you do good, then we give you credit. But if you do evil, then we excuse you."

How has this happened?

Over the past few years, various articles and books have attempted answers. Generally implicated are aspects of the legal system, the social sciences, Freud and the recovery movement: the 12-step programs designed to help people with such conditions as alcoholism and gambling.

:. And, of course, there's always television.

Blame it on TV

Some cultural critics believe talk shows such as "Oprah!" -- programs stocked with recovering sex addicts and victims of dysfunctional households -- have led audiences to develop a kind of knee-jerk sympathy.

"These shows operate on the [premise] that self-expression and self-esteem -- rather than rationalism and self-control -- are primary moral imperatives," says Wendy Kaminer, author of "I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional."

And they may impair everyday judgment. Media critic Mark Crispin Miller, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, thinks watching television is causing people to give more importance to subjective and confessional material than ever before.

Calling the hung-jury Menendez decision "a triumph of emotion over thought," Dr. Miller speculates that some members of those juries formed their judgments as if they were watching Erik and Lyle Menendez on television.

Deciding the brothers' childhood tales of victimization were emotionally compelling enough to excuse their acts of murder, some members of the jury judged the situation, rather than the persons, to be guilty of the crime.

Dr. Miller believes the manipulations of "what makes for good TV" puts people at greater risk of succumbing to the kind of skillful demagoguery that suggests culprits are actually victims.

"We have become a nation that can be manipulated through certain kinds of emotional effects, and we are vulnerable to anyone who can get us to empathize. When Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court, the arguments [on his behalf] were irrational. They were all part of his personal story about coming from 'Pinpoint, Georgia.' They had nothing to do with his qualifications, but with creating a crude visceral effect that the Bush administration sought."

Television emphasizes the tearful wisdom of gut feelings over reason, Dr. Miller says.

"People interviewed during the Gulf War would colloquially say 'I feel' rather than 'I think.' Even though it's grammatically incorrect, I think there's something accurate about it. When you ask people's opinion on something now, they're talking about how they're moved by something rather than about thought."

Some wonder if empathy has become automatic, if the benefit of the doubt has become a substitute for critical thinking. Social historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead of New York's Institute for Family Values believes compassion and judgment should strike a balance in public life.

"Talking about the social sciences or therapeutic sciences shifts a discussion away from judgments about personal conduct or responsibility. There's a kind of etiquette that says that in our public discussions we should not judge people for their actions for fear of seeming to blame them," she says.

However, Wendy Kaminer believes people love to judge others -- selectively, that is.

"People only hesitate to judge the people they identify with because that would feel like judging themselves," she says. "But they are very quick to judge those with whom they don't identify. They are very quick to judge people who get arrested. If not, then there wouldn't be the loud clamor for three-time-loser laws. We want to arrest those people and throw them in jail forever."

In contrast, she mentions public reaction to Lorena Bobbitt. Tales that Ms. Bobbitt had allegedly been a long-suffering victim of spouse abuse made her a surprisingly sympathetic character in some feminist circles.

Historian Joseph Amato, author of "Victims and Values: A History of Suffering," says people who are cast as victims carry a lot of power in our culture, especially if they can claim suffering.

"Victim is fundamentally a religious word that means 'a living sacrifice.' Saints and gods undergo great suffering. We often attribute wisdom or virtue to those who have suffered, or we argue that it is a way to cross a threshold so the good is purchased by blood, tears and sacrifice. We often purify ourselves by suffering. In great part, suffering and unjust suffering purchase justice . . . Asking for pity was often a way to ask for justice."

Americans have become accustomed to rewarding people for suffering. Consider the legendary "Queen for a Day," the 1950s-era television show in which the housewife with the hardest-luck story was presented the brand new refrigerator.

"In some ways, the philosophy that undergirds that show has won the day," says Christopher Leighton, director of the Institute for Christian-Jewish Studies. "What's of greatest concern is that suffering is increasingly translated into a kind of moral calculus: The person who can lay claim to having suffered the most can also lay claim to being owed the most by the society that damaged them."

Celebrating the victim

"It seems everyone wants to maximize their victim status," says Dr. Amato. "In the old world, of course, everyone suffered. Everyone had a grandma who raised the kids alone or a father who got kicked in the head by the cow."

However, says Dr. Amato, in generations past, "it was a matter of shame to show suffering. That's what beggars did.

"Today, even as we more successfully clean up suffering, more people specialize in the language of it. We see a growth of representatives of the various causes of suffering which vie for public space.

"You could almost say there's a stock market of pity, with fashionable and unfashionable victims depending on the period. Sometimes we only see a group for a month or two, other groups have been rather abiding, like women. They've had general victim status for the last 25 years."

Dr. Amato says technological and social improvements have changed the cultural definition of victims.

"In the 18th century, a significant portion of the philosophic elites begin to say, 'Nobody should live without fulfilling their potential.' Eventually, the push has become that anyone who doesn't reach his or her full emotional and intellectual potential -- anyone who hasn't been taught to read or who doesn't have adequate health care, for example -- has been wronged and is the victim of injustice.

"He or she may be a victim of omission," Dr. Amato adds, "but still a victim."

In modern minds, the notion of being a victim often merges with the notion of being helpless. Ms. Whitehead points out that contemporary dilemmas are often presented in a narrative "that tells us we are helpless to alter these things ourselves because we are victimized by our families, our gender, our race, or our life circumstances and therefore cannot take full responsibility for our actions."

Author Charles Sykes does not envision this script will change any time soon.

"In the short term, there are a lot of social and economic benefits to people claiming, 'I'm not responsible, don't blame me,' he says. "As long as that's the case, you'll get more of that [behavior]."

Is there an all-purpose responsibility test that can guide moral thinking through the blizzard of unconscious motivations, environmental triggers, childhood injustices and extenuating circumstances?

Philosophy professor Stephen Vicchio recommends the wisdom of Aristotle, the man who created the West's notion of personal responsibility some 2,000 years ago.

"His first rule is to determine whether the person intended to do the thing. The second is if he knew what he was doing when he did it. The third is 'Did the person have the ability to not do it?' "

The only difficulty, he says, lies in knowing when the conditions have been met.

"The jury [that] found John Hinckley innocent thought that he intended to shoot Reagan. And they decided he knew what he was doing. But they also thought he couldn't keep himself from doing it, and that was enough to keep him innocent."

And enough to enrage a lot of observers.

"But if you asked them about their own lives, they would want to be judged by the same three conditions that they don't want to judge John Hinckley by."