Neil Levy: ‘Psychopaths and Responsibility’ – Podcast

In this talk, (which you can listen to here) Neil Levy brings a new perspective to the debate concerning the moral responsibility of psychopaths. Previously, this debate has been thought to turn on the question of whether psychopaths have moral knowledge. Here, Levy argues that regardless of whether psychopaths count as having moral knowledge, we ought to believe that they lack moral responsibility on the grounds that their intentions don’t have the kinds of contents that can underwrite full-blown moral responsibility.

Having provided a brief overview of psychopathic traits, Levy frames his argument by beginning with a discussion of some of his earlier work concerning the question of whether psychopaths have moral knowledge. Rather than appealing to widespread intuitions in order to claim that psychopaths lack moral knowledge, Levy argues for this conclusion by appealing to data on psychopaths’ performance on moral/conventional tasks. On these tasks, subjects are initially asked about the validity of certain norms (for example, ‘is it wrong to steal?’) before being asked if it would be permissible to transgress that norm if they were given permission by an authority figure. Early research by James Blair in this area suggests that psychopaths are in fact able to recognise an offence as being morally wrong, even if there is no authority enforcing the norm which the offence violates.

According to Blair, this early data suggests that psychopaths are unable to pick out a core set of moral wrongs because they have very low levels of empathy; as such, they do not regard the fact that an action causes harm to another as being a moral reason not to perform that act. The fact that they claim the violation of norms are authority-independently wrong is explained, on Blair’s account, by the fact that psychopaths have a reason to present themselves to others as appearing to be bound by these norms in order to appear reformed. Levy on the other hand speculates that psychopaths fail to regard conventional norms as being morally binding because, for them, they are not backed up by 2^nd order norms (like they are for normal people); as such, for psychopaths all wrongs have the status of trivial transgressions of conventional norms. He suggests that psychopaths thus lack adequate moral knowledge.

Rather than address objections to this particular position, Levy goes on to argue that one can establish that psychopaths lack moral responsibility regardless of whether they have moral knowledge. Levy suggests that psychopaths do not understand moral norms because they lack an understanding of the fact that harm is sufficient for the obtaining of core moral concepts. On Levy’s account, the fact that the welfare of others fails to even figure in the practical deliberation of a psychopath (on account of this non-culpable lack of understanding) means that they exhibit neither a contempt for the welfare of others, or an indifference to moral norms (both of which would make the psychopath an appropriate target of negative Strawsonian reactive attitudes); rather, when psychopaths cause harm they do not even realise that they are doing something morally wrong. The fact that an action harms another thus does not even provide psychopaths with a pro tanto reason not to act in that way. As such, Levy claims that psychopaths cannot be said to ever intend harm in a morally reprehensible sense; their intentions just lack the sort of content.

Finally, Levy bolsters this conclusion, by pointing out that psychopaths are unable to comprehend a particularly central moral norm in so far as they cannot intend harm to persons. On Levy’s view, personhood requires a set of psychological capacities which allow them to engage in cross-temporal planning or what Levy terms ‘mental time travel’. However, empirical research shows that psychopaths have severe deficiencies in these sorts of capacities. For Levy, this means that psychopaths cannot fully intend harm to persons, since they lack an understanding of the fact that they can impair another person’s autonomy, insofar as they lack an understanding of what it is for a person to have cross-temporal plans of the sort that undergird autonomous agency.

Levy presents a fascinating new perspective on this salient practical debate which raises some new and important questions. In particular, I thought that the final section concerning harm to persons raised an interesting question with regards to the moral status of psychopaths. Although Levy argues that psychopaths lack a proper understanding of personhood, he also intimates that he does not want to endorse the conclusion that psychopaths themselves lack the capacity for personhood. This view is appealing; after all, the claim that psychopaths are not persons would lead to some problematic practical implications. It seems that one way in which it could be possible to cash out the claim that psychopaths have the capacity for personhood is to claim that they have some lesser degree of autonomy that is sufficient for personhood. An interesting corollary of endorsing this view in conjunction with Levy’s conclusion regarding the moral responsibility of psychopaths would be that one would be making the claim that psychopaths can be autonomous and yet lack moral responsibility. This would be an interesting position to maintain, given that these two concepts are often (although perhaps mistakenly) thought to be coextensive. As such, as well as addressing obvious practical issues, I believe that Levy’s talk potentially raises an interesting theoretical puzzle for those interested in the relationship between autonomy and moral responsibility.