A promising strategy for figuring out what makes paradigm agents morally responsible is looking at “marginal agents,” people who seem to have one foot in and one foot out of the moral responsibility community, in order to see what’s missing in them that is necessary for paradigm moral agency. The go-to marginal agent for many moral theorists interested in this strategy has been psychopaths. For those thinking they are not morally responsible, it has been thought to be in virtue of their incapacity for (or mitigated) empathy. Consequently, empathy is thought to be one necessary condition for paradigm moral responsibility.

However, there have been three major recent attacks on the thought that empathy is necessary for morality, namely, (a) we’re just too bad at it for it to be a condition for morality, (b) empathy is actually morally pernicious; and (c) the moral understanding allegedly delivered by empathy can be reached in numerous alternative ways. In this presentation, I will show how empathy really is essential for moral responsibility, and in so doing I will defend it from all three of these attacks.