I hypothesize that the "the individual is culpable" and the "the social setting is culpable" approaches (like the free will vs. determinism debate they are clearly a variant of, or vice versa) are akin to Kantian antinomies of pure reason. Both lead to absurd conclusions when their internal logics are relentlessly applied, and they are a product of how our minds process ethical matters, not reflective of the actual world.
[WS:] Thanks for spelling that out, Chris. This was actually the guiding principle that I had in mind when composing the prose on the subject that I posted to this list yesterday. However, I think I went beyond Kant and adopted Durkheim's solution to Kant's problem of a priori categories of perception and reasoning - namely that these categories are created and "imprinted" in human mind by social organization/order, which is pretty much the position adopted by cognitivists (cf. Lakoff) or linguists like Noam Chomsky (Chomsky argues that the capacity to learn a language is innate to the human species, but the actual form of that language e.g. English, Chinese or Russian) is socially constructed.
The most important consequence of this position is that the individual vs. environment culpability issue is pre-rational, embedded in a priori cognitive categories of perceiving and explaining the outside world, and thus very difficult to resolve in a rational way. One either accepts a particular interpretative frame attributing responsibility either to the individual or the environment under particular circumstances, or one does not.
Clearly, many people of the liberal persuasion (including this list) see the world through the blame the environment cognitive frame (at least in relation to the underclass), and become visibly annoyed when that frame is being questioned. But so do the people of the conservative persuasion. Of course, this is hardly surprising, for as Harold Garfinkel's "breaching experiments" demonstrated - people generally do like it when their taken for granted priors are being questioned.
What I find a bit surprising, though, is that many otherwise intelligent, critically thinking and out-of-the-box people seem to fall into same trap when their own taken for granted frames are concerned.
Wojtek