Are Psychopaths Responsible? 

Are Psychopaths Responsible? 
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong 

I will examine a question that sits at the intersection of moral psychology, philosophy, and criminal law: are psychopaths morally and legally responsible for what they do, and if not, what should we do with them? This is not only a theoretical problem about moral judgment, but also a deeply practical problem, because psychopaths are few in number yet responsible for a strikingly large proportion of serious crime. 

I begin by clarifying who psychopaths are. Psychopathy is a well-studied clinical construct, most famously operationalized through the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. It includes traits such as superficial charm, pathological lying, manipulativeness, grandiose self-conception, impulsivity, and—most importantly for my purposes—a profound lack of empathy, remorse, or guilt. Psychopathy is not an all-or-nothing category but a continuum, though there is a conventional diagnostic threshold. Despite representing less than one percent of the general population, psychopaths make up a disproportionately large share of prison populations and commit a very large fraction of violent crime. The social and economic costs are enormous. So whether they are responsible matters a great deal in practice. 

To clarify the issue, I distinguish two different senses of responsibility. Following work by Shoemaker and others, I separate attributability from accountability. Attributability concerns whether an action expresses an agent’s character. In that sense, psychopaths are clearly responsible: their actions reflect stable vices and character traits. The more philosophically and legally interesting question, however, is accountability—whether they are appropriate targets of blame, resentment, punishment, and remorse. Accountability, I argue, is the sense of responsibility that matters for criminal punishment. 

To frame this question, I focus on a dominant philosophical account of accountability: reasons-responsiveness. On this view, an agent is accountable if she is responsive to reasons, and this has two components. First, she must be receptive to reasons—able to recognize that certain considerations count for or against an action. Second, she must be reactive to reasons—capable, at least in normal circumstances, of regulating her behavior in light of those reasons. While psychopaths are often impulsive, the core concern in both philosophy and law has not been their reactivity, but their receptivity: do they genuinely grasp moral reasons at all? 

This focus on receptivity mirrors the structure of insanity defenses in criminal law. In many jurisdictions, a defendant is not criminally responsible if, due to mental disorder, she lacks the capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct. Importantly, “appreciation” is explicitly distinguished in the law from mere knowledge. One can know that an act is legally or socially prohibited without appreciating its moral significance. This notion of appreciation, though central to the law, is left frustratingly vague in statutes and case law. My proposal is that we can give it empirical and philosophical content by linking it to implicit moral attitudes. 

This leads to the core empirical question of this work: do psychopaths have the implicit moral attitudes that they need in order to appreciate moral wrongness? Psychopaths are famously articulate. They can tell you that murder, rape, or assault is wrong. But given their manipulativeness and pathological lying, we have good reason to worry that this is mere verbal performance—moral language used strategically rather than sincerely. So, how do we test whether their moral claims reflect genuine moral understanding and appreciation rather than empty words? 

Here I draw an analogy with the literature on implicit bias. Many people explicitly endorse egalitarian moral principles while nevertheless harboring implicit racial or gender biases that operate automatically and outside conscious control. Inspired by this work, my collaborators and I turned to methods designed to detect implicit attitudes—in particular, a sequential priming task analyzed with a process dissociation procedure. The key idea is simple: if someone has an implicit negative moral attitude toward wrongdoing, then morally charged words like “murder” should automatically prime negative responses. 

We administered these tasks to incarcerated populations and measured psychopathy using validated scales patterned on the PCL-R. The results were striking. Individuals low in psychopathy showed the expected priming effects: moral wrongs automatically triggered negative responses. Individuals high in psychopathy, by contrast, showed a markedly reduced or absent priming effect for moral wrongs, even though their responses to non-moral negative stimuli were intact. Crucially, these effects occur in under a second, cannot be consciously controlled, and cannot easily be faked. This strongly suggests that psychopaths lack the implicit moral attitudes that normally accompany moral judgment. 

From this, I draw a cautious but important conclusion: psychopaths do not make moral judgments in the same sense that ordinary agents do. They can state moral rules, but they do not appreciate them. Their moral discourse is, in effect, in inverted commas—something they deploy instrumentally to manipulate others or conform outwardly to social expectations. This lack of appreciation maps directly onto the legal criterion for insanity: the inability to appreciate the wrongfulness of one’s actions. 

I do not claim that this settles every case. There are gray areas, especially in morally controversial domains where even non-psychopaths disagree or lack shared implicit attitudes. But for core moral prohibitions—paradigm cases like murder or serious assault—the evidence strongly suggests that psychopaths are missing something central to moral understanding. 

Finally, I turn to the practical question: what follows from this? If psychopaths are not accountable, we should not simply punish them as if they were ordinary offenders. At the same time, releasing them would be disastrous, given the risk of recidivism. I therefore argue for a third option: psychopaths should be found not guilty by reason of insanity or an analogous doctrine, confined securely, and placed in specialized facilities focused on management and treatment rather than retribution. Evidence-based programs, such as Caldwell’s intensive behavioral interventions, show some promise in reducing harm, even if they do not “cure” psychopathy. 

This approach, I suggest, has several advantages. It better aligns criminal law with its own responsibility principles. It reduces harm to guards, other inmates, and the public. And it may allow us to shorten sentences for non-psychopathic offenders, who do possess the relevant moral capacities and pose a lower long-term risk. In short, taking psychopathy seriously as a disorder of moral appreciation is not only philosophically defensible but also morally and socially preferable.