Response to the Commentaries

In the interesting and valuable commentaries on my paper “Freedom, Resentment, and the Psychopath” there is a shared unease about my suggestion that if we regard some individuals as irretrievably lacking a moral and participant reactive dimension, then it may be right to treat them as ineligible for certain rights. In particular, Carl Elliott, James Harold, and Gwen Adshead take me up on this point, and cover some common ground. My suggestion was admittedly a brief thought and highly tentative. I stressed that even if this is the correct conclusion, there are always important indirect considerations against enacting the policies in question, and that Kantian considerations about according rights only to autonomous and rational beings should not be regarded as the sole guide for our behavior. Far from it: we must find a secure place for sympathy and virtue, as well as well as for a deontology of rights and duties. This becomes clear after any half-decent reflection about how to treat animals, as Elliott and Harold also suggest. Some have argued, very implausibly, that because animals cannot enter into rational agreements, they are entirely outside the sphere of proper moral concern, and we have no direct prima facie reason even to alleviate their suffering. Well, if this really is an implication of Kantian contractualism, then so much the worse for that ethical theory. Similarly with psychopaths: even if the Kantian notion of ends in themselves applies only to those who possess a suitable range of participant attitudes, and even if psychopaths lack these attitudes, it would not follow that we could disregard their interests altogether.

On the other hand, the dilemma I posed will not quite go away. The dilemma is this: either we regard psychopaths as morally bad (“sons-of-bitches,” as Slovenko nicely puts it), or we regard them as outside the sphere of moral responsibility, probably due to some incapacity. (No doubt there is a continuum between the bad and the incapacitated, but I do not think this destroys the point.) If we think they’re just bad, as Slovenko perhaps thinks, then we might wish to punish them. However, if we wish (partially) to excuse psychopaths from blame, then this is because we detect in them a deficiency in rational agency. But if we also accept that it is this rational agency that forms the basis of Kant’s injunction to treat humanity as an end and never merely as a means, then there are hard questions about whether we owe all the core Kantian duties to psychopaths—principally, whether we should treat them always as ends. But as I suggested, if we don’t so treat them, this doesn’t mean that the non-Kantian dimension of morality is inapplicable to them. Indeed, this nicely illustrates how futile it is to think that any of the main secular moral theories can claim to have the whole of, and nothing but, the truth: for example, there are valuable insights in Aristotelian, Kantian, and utilitarian thinking.

In any case, as Adshead perceptively remarks, we need to take apart the issue of rationality when investigating these matters. Perhaps she also means to hint that Kantian moral autonomy, which for Kant is the basis of the moral law, is only one aspect of rationality. This is surely correct. She is also sensitive to distinctions between psychopaths, with respect to their capacities for participant reactive attitudes, and correctly qualifies my remarks about the people with whom it is possible to have meaningful dialogue. Again, she is probably right to say that we still have participant attitudes to those who lack them, though I don’t find all her examples convincing.

Take the dead, for example. People love or resent dead individuals, but this is usually because they had relationships with them when they were alive, and the emotions are directed onto a genuine object of reference, even if not a now-existing person. In other cases, like “hating cyclones,” the reactions probably arise from an imaginative exercise of personification and suspense of disbelief: you imagine the cyclone wanted to destroy your house, and the reaction is an imaginative surrogate...