Moral Responsibility and Psychopathy: Why We Do Not Have Special Obligations to the Psychopath

摘要

Addressing concerns about the treatment of psychopaths, Grant Gillett and Jiaochen Huang (2013) argue that we ought to accept a relational or holistic view of psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder (APSD) rather than the default biomedical-deficit model since the latter “obscures moral truths about the psychopath.” This change in approach to the psychopath will bothmitigate at least some of their moral responsibility for the harms they cause, and force communities to incur special obligations, so these authors claim, because the harms endured by psychopaths will be understood as part of the cause for the harms they are guilty of committing. However, as I argue here, even if we accept that a relational or holistic approach is better suited to understand psychopathy (which is itself contentious), it does not follow that their responsibility is mitigated in a way that causes communities to have special obligations to them as Gillett and Huang suggest. A diagnosis of APSD or psychopathy does not, prima facie, exculpate an agent or suggest a different way of treating them. My discussion focuses on the widely accepted excusing conditions one must meet for responsibility to bemitigated and conclude, contra Gillett and Huang, that psychopaths are no different from you or me with regard to having a causal history that leads to action. Outside forces play a role in all of our behaviors. If the psychopath is owed anything because of the way they have come to understand the world, then we all are owed that same debt.