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2 results

  • Chapter 6 - Psychopathy in the Criminal Law

  • Jim Baxter, University of Leeds
  • Book:
    Moral Responsibility and the Psychopath
    Published online:
    27 August 2021
    Print publication:
    16 September 2021, pp 163-186

  • Summary

    In the final chapter, I turn to the question of how psychopaths should be treated in the criminal law. I begin by sketching the distinctive problem that psychopathy presents for the criminal law, and some broad observations on how it is dealt with currently. I engage first with an argument by Paul Litton which states that the criminal law is an expression of democratic norms, and therefore that any attempt to excuse psychopaths based on their psychopathy should be rejected because it would not command the respect of the public. I then turn to the question of whether psychopaths deserve punishment. I review the various ways in which judgments of criminal responsibility are instantiated in legal tests, and the conditions of responsibility that are implicit in these. Ultimately, I conclude that psychopaths lack capacities which ought to be considered a condition of criminal responsibility, essentially the ability to respond to moral reasons, and not just the ability to know that their actions are legally proscribed.

  • Moral Understanding and Cooperative Testimony

  • Kenneth Boyd
  • Journal:
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy / Volume 50 / Issue 1 / January 2020
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    23 October 2019, pp. 18-33

  • It is has been argued that there is a problem with moral testimony: testimony is deferential, and basing judgments and actions on deferentially acquired knowledge prevents them from having moral worth. What morality perhaps requires of us, then, is that we understand why a proposition is true, but this is something that cannot be acquired through testimony. I argue here that testimony can be both deferential as well as cooperative, and that one can acquire moral understanding through cooperative testimony. The problem of moral testimony is thus not a problem with testimony generally, but a problem of deferential testimony specifically.