The significance of a successful provocation plea as an extenuating ground is usually that it reduces murder to manslaughter, despite the fact the defendant intended to - and did - kill in anger. The unique feature of provocation is that the plea may extenuate even though it is accepted that, in killing, the defendant was not seeking to save him or herself from death or injury (as he or she would have been doing, in a bona fide excusing duress case). In inflicting provoked retaliation one acts retrospectively, as if punishing the victim, whereas in duress cases (as in justificatory cases of self-defense) one acts prospectively to avert anticipated harmful wrongdoing. This unique feature of provocation cases makes it particularly hard to understand why provoked killings are even partially excused by reducing murder to manslaughter. One possible explanation might be that what really matters is the effect of anger on the defendant's mental state. On this explanation, there is an analogy (albeit imperfect) between a plea of provocation and a plea of diminished responsibility. If provocation extenuates for the same kinds of reasons as any diminished capacity defense, then the quality of D's action - whether it was, say, prospective or retrospective, just or unjust - should have no bearing on the success of the plea: the focus will be entirely on D's state of mental disturbance. An alternative, diametrically opposed, explanation would be that what matters is that D is responding to a grave provocation: D's anger is merely the setting in which one should analyze his or her retaliation as a just riposte - what Narayan and von Hirsch car a response[1]- to (ex hypothesi) great wrongdoing. On this analysis, D's retrospective retaliation will perhaps be seen as justified through a broad analogy with other kinds of supposedly justified retaliatory killing, such as capital punishment. Yet, provocation does not fit neatly into either a purely subjective category, or into a purely objective category of defense (a lack of fit one also finds with excusing duress cases). Hence theorists have striven to find a capable of accommodating both provocation's excusatory element found in the fact that D was driven to act by great anger, and provocation's, justificatory element found in the fact that (inmost jurisdictions) this anger must have been sparked by grave provocation. Narayan and von Hirsch have recently developed such a third theory, focused on what they call the moral brought about within the defendant by his provoked anger.[2] For them, when someone (X) is provoked, conscience both spurs on the passions to take revenge, yet simultaneously bridles them with regard to the means of expression.[3] If X resolves this conflict by retaliating violently, our sympathy - and X's excuse - is based on the difficulties posed for the agent by the divided role of conscience (as both spur and bridle) in such cases. I will consider this excusatory theory in more detail below. The methodology employed by Narayan and von Hirsch in arguing towards their is an all-too-familiar one. They set up what they take to be two extreme alternative explanations for the provocation defense (the impaired volition and proportionate response theories), and seek to show that these explanations cannot account for the excusatory basis of the defense. They then present their as the sensible via media between the extremes. Something immediately strikes anyone familiar with the literature on provocation as odd about this strategy. This is that we already know only too well that the defense cannot be explained in terms purely of impaired volition or of proportionate response. My book on the subject,[4] which Narayan and Von Hirsch implausibly present as endorsing the theory of proportionate response, opens with John Austin's observation forty years ago that provocation appears to be a mixture of excusatory and justificatory factors,[5] and Andrew Ashworth made much the same kind of remarks in his justly celebrated article on the legal and philosophical foundations of the doctrine twenty years ago. …