Anti-Climacus

WELL: Dara in the comments below:

"Yes. So, the way I see it, a sociopath is "responsible for his actions" but not morally so, since he cannot distinguish between right and wrong. We can hold him responsible in that we convict him of a crime, etc., but it's difficult to make a moral judgement if this person is truly incapable of making moral judgements. Having free will, he's still able to make decisions, and therefore holds that kind of responsibility. Is that what you mean?"

Er, well, maybe: it depends on what you mean by "sociopath." I'm at the end of moral thinking that says that the could've done otherwise criterion is the primary or sole determinant of moral responsibility, or, at least, that could've done otherwise entails moral responsibility. So I think everyone is potentially responsible for just about everything they do (there are lots of actions and decisions that just don't have any moral character, uncontroversially).

There's a famous paper about a dictator with such a ridiculous name I'm not going to rewrite it here, which essentially argues that sociopaths shouldn't be on the hook morally, but not because he can't distinguish right from wrong*: but because his conceptions of right and wrong are reversed, and he's never been in a position to know otherwise. He would be, on my view, stil morally responsible for his actions because I believe that the basic tenets of morality are sufficiently obvious that it's reasonable to expect people to come up with them on their own, even if they've never had other exposure to them.

But you could imagine cases of a condition which effectively wipes out the ability to do otherwise: OCD is a generally given case, though not usually moral in character: you can't but engage in the behavior again, regardless of what you want or think is best. Paradigmatically unfree. Then you have the case of the addict acting in the throes of addiction, generally considered to be unfree but (in my view), still a situation in which moral responsibility can be assigned because there's still a relevant could've done otherwise (not done whatever action began the addiction, which should be paradigmatically free.

The grey areas where we might assign blame but not of the same kind would be, for example, acts you did under hypnosis, where you couldn't (for generally physiological or unalterable-by-you psychological reasons) avoid doing what you did.

I hope that's a little clearer.

*this is generally, I think, not taken to be a good reason to suspend moral judgment, ergo "ignorance of the law is no excuse"