Abstract

Will Cartwright evaluates two prevalent theories of responsibility in terms of how well they apply to people with sociopathic personality disorder. His analysis shows that neither theory is adequate and that both arguably rest on a fiction. This leaves us with no positive theory of responsibility, which is unacceptable given the important role that responsibility plays in structuring our social lives and maintaining social order. In this paper, I review Cartwright’s critique of the two candidate theories and add three new objections. I then propose a third alternative, which evades the problems that afflict the first two views. This new view not only adequately measures responsibility in cases of mental health disabilities, such as sociopathic personality disorder, but also contributes to the debate about moral responsibility, which has developed in the ethics literature over the past two decades.

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