 Sarah Buss argues against Wolf’s view in a way that is not agency-denying, because rather than appealing to the agent’s circumstances as determining his reasons, Buss believes that such circumstances give this kind of agent a justified failure to “tell right from wrong” (1997). Buss embellishes Wolf’s example of the Victim, who as a child came into contact mostly with people who either beat him, supported those who beat him, or ignored his misery. Whenever the victim was beaten, he was first taunted. Years later, when he is taunted with a threatening comment, he hits his taunter. Buss believes that the Victim is responsible for hitting his taunter, since there are moral reasons not to hit one who taunts you: hitting one’s taunter is morally wrong. But Buss believes that the Victim is justified in hitting his taunter because he has excusing reasons to act thusly, which are grounded in his circumstances. Excusing reasons free him and other similar agents from blame, at least in certain circumstances, depending on the nature of the wrongdoing, whether there are alternative actions available, and the details of his background. Generally speaking, he can be absolved from blame because he has a justified failure to tell right from wrong—anyone in his circumstances has reason to act the way he does, even though they also have reason not to act immorally. Buss defends what she calls “the Basic Intuition,” according to which “simply because they have exceptional backgrounds, certain wrongdoers have a different moral status from that of more ‘privileged’ wrongdoers who perform the very same type of acts” (337). A person would have to be truly exceptional not to see things as the Victim sees them and write off his experiences as ones not indicative of human nature. Buss offers this analogy: the Victim no more has good reason for thinking that his taunter is not like the hostile people he grew up around, than does the person who has been bitten repeatedly by dogs has good reason to think that the growling dog in her path will not bite her (350). The Basic Intuition attributes to the victim not an incapacity for making the correct moral distinctions, but a justified failure to “tell right from wrong.” He has excusing reasons for acting as he does. Buss’s non-deterministic argument might be employed by feminists as an agency-protecting way of absolving women from blame for certain immoral acts. They might also use it to absolve women from responsibility, if they can show that the acts in question are in themselves justified, perhaps by showing that they are legitimate responses to threats to a person’s intrinsic value (see Superson 2010).