How to Be Fair to Psychopaths

Neil Levy’s provocative paper raises a number of fascinating issues. Here we want to focus on just one of these—the role of principles concerning fairness in his basic argument that we should not punish psychopaths. For present purposes, we will simply go along with Levy’s claim that psychopaths lack moral knowledge (but see Vargas and Nichols [2007]). In the background of Levy’s central argument is the assumption that a person is not morally responsible for things that fall entirely outside his scope of control. This assumption shows up in the following claim: “If an agent comes to be bad through a process that entirely bypasses her ability to appreciate and to respond to reasons, including moral reasons, she is not a responsible agent at all” (2007, pp. 133–134). Psychopathy is a wonderful example here, because there is reason to think it has a strong genetic component. But why should we accept his claim that we have to absolve those who are born irrevocably bad? It would seem that Levy here appeals to a familiar and powerful intuition that it is unfair to blame and punish an agent for a characteristic (or behavior) that was caused by factors outside the agent’s scope of control. For instance, Levy writes, “It would be unfair to blame me for my bad art if I lack talent, because there was nothing I could reasonably have been expected to do to make myself a good artist” (2007, p. 133, emphasis in original). Let us give this principle a label: