To hold criminals responsible for thier crimes involves a

To hold criminals responsible for thier crimes involves a failure to recognize that criminal actions, like all actions are ultimately products of the enviornment that forged the agent's character. It is not criminals but people in the law-abiding majority who by their actioins do most to create and maintain this environment. Therefore, it is law-abiding people whose actions, and nothing else, make them alone truely responsible for crime.

The reasoning in this argument is most vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that

a) it expolits an ambiguity in the term "environment" by treating 2 different meanings of the word as though they were equivalent
b) it fails to distinguish between actions that are socially acceptable and actions that are socially unacceptable
c) the way it distinguishes criminals from crimes implicitly denies that someone becomes a criminal solely in virtue of having committed a crime
d) its conclusion is a generalization of statistical evidence drawn from only a small minority of the population.
e) its conclusion contradicts an implicit principle on which an earlier part of the argument is based