Exemptions

Abstract

This chapter explores the complexities of who is in and who is out of our moral community. First, it considers agents who are not impaired in any obvious way, but who are in the grip of a false moral view. Such agents are exempt from ordinary blame even if they could, in principle, be brought into our moral community. There are also agents who understand Morality, but have some sort of motivational incapacity. Proceeding through a discussion of Susan Wolf’s asymmetry thesis and Bernard Williams’s account of moral incapacity, the chapter argues that just as a psychological incapacity to do bad things does not undermine praiseworthiness, so a certain sort of incapacity to act well does not undermine blameworthiness. Last, the chapter argues that there is a way to understand psychopaths such that they do not have moral knowledge, and so are exempt from ordinary blame on that ground.