Could psychopathy be a condition exculpating criminal liability? Our common-sense intuitions about psychopathy probably rest on figures such as Ted Bundy, the serial killer who performed acts of unspeakable cruelty, collectively torturing and murdering dozens of people. This kind of people is model of evil. Because their actions appear ‘rational', in the sense that they are aware of what they are doing and harbor no illusions about the nature or consequence of their conduct, such psychopaths are generally held to be criminally responsible for their actions and thus are punished by jail and even execution.
Nevertheless, academics and jurists have repeatedly suggested that psychopaths should be excused from criminal liability for their actions on a variety of several theories. Fundamentally, they assert that the capacity to feel empathy toward others is a necessary part of how human beings make moral decisions and respond to morally relevant stimuli. In the absence of these emotional capacities, psychopaths are either less than fully rational or lack the requisite mental equipment to appreciate and act in conformity with conventional morality. Therefore, while steps may be taken to protect the public from psychopath's future dangerousness, they should not be regarded as fully moral agents for whom punishment is appropriate.
These arguments are as follows. 1) Psychopaths are less than fully rational because they are unable to understand the moral worth of others, and the insanity defense is meant to except those with serious rationality failings(the Kantian argument); 2) Psychopaths, because of a biological deficiency in their ability to feel emotion, lack the necessary cognitive structures to feel the motivational force of moral norms(the first Humean argument: the biological motivational deficiency argument); 3) Psychopaths stand outside our practice of moral blame because they fail to appreciate the interpersonal nature of moral norms and their ‘immoral' acts do not express disrespect nor are an appropriate subject of the reactive attitudes that constitute our moral practice(the second Humean argument: the interpretivist moral practice argument)
