Psychopaths, Incorrigible Racists, and the Faces of Responsibility

Abstract

Psychopaths pose a puzzle. The pleasure they take in the pain of others suggests that they are the paradigms of blameworthiness, while their psychological incapacities provide them with paradigm excuses on plausible accounts of moral responsibility. I begin by assessing two influential responses: one that claims that psychopaths are morally blameworthy in one sense and not in another, and one that takes the two senses of blameworthiness to be inseparable. I offer a new argument that psychopaths, as understood in the debate, are blameworthy in neither sense, while showing how the two senses of blameworthiness nevertheless come apart.

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