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Psychopaths may be held responsible, at least to some ext... — Carmelics

Statements: 321,452
Perspectives: 108,905
Topics: 42

Home/Moral Responsibility

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Psychopaths may be held responsible, at least to some extent and in certain ways.

Moral Responsibility

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1 reason for

2 reasons against

Reasons For

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Reason for

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Even if psychopathy is primarily a cognitive impairment, psychopaths may still possess a sufficient capacity for distinguishing right and wrong, or sufficient related capacities.
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Reason against 1 of 2

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1.Moral responsibility requires not merely knowing a rule but caring about it as a moral demand, which psychopaths demonstrably cannot do.
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2.Psychopaths show intact rule-knowledge yet systematically fail to represent moral norms as categorically binding rather than merely conventional.
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3.A capacity that is structurally severed from motivational uptake is not a sufficient capacity for moral responsibility but only its simulacrum.
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Reason against 2 of 2

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1.P.F. Strawson's reactive attitudes framework grounds responsibility in reciprocal emotional engagement within the moral community.
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2.Psychopaths lack the affective prerequisites—guilt, empathy, indignation—that make reactive attitudes like blame intelligible and fitting responses.
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3.Holding psychopaths responsible thus constitutes a category error: applying practices whose conditions of appropriateness the agent constitutively cannot satisfy.
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Moral Responsibility

Related

A capacity that is structurally severed from motivational uptake is not a suffic...Even if psychopathy is primarily a cognitive impairment, psychopaths may still p...Holding psychopaths responsible thus constitutes a category error: applying prac...Moral responsibility requires not merely knowing a rule but caring about it as a...

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P.F. Strawson's reactive attitudes framework grounds responsibility in reciproca...Psychopaths lack the affective prerequisites—guilt, empathy, indignation—that ma...Psychopaths show intact rule-knowledge yet systematically fail to represent mora...

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Source

AI-extracted2/3 agreementValid

SEP: moral-responsibility

Glannon 1997, Greenspan 2003, Maibom 2008, Shoemaker 2014, Vargas & Nichols 2007

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One interesting question is whether the psychopath’s inability—or at least consistent failure—to respond appropriately to moral incentives is primarily the result of a motivational rather than cognitive failure: does the psychopath in some way know what morality requires and simply not care? If a positive answer is given to this last question (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 76–81; Nichols 2002), then it seems likely that the psychopath could be responsible for at least some of his bad behavior. And some have argued that even if psychopathy is primarily a cognitive impairment, it may still be the ...

Extraction notes

Validity: The passage explicitly states that "some have argued that even if psychopathy is primarily a cognitive impairment, it may still be the case that psychopaths possess a sufficient capacity for distinguishing right and wrong—or that they possess sufficient related capacities—to be held responsible, at least to some extent and in certain ways," which directly matches the extracted argument.

Confidence: Explicitly attributed argument in the text.

Details

Type: claim
Perspectives: 3 (1 for, 2 against)
Edits: 1 edit