In The Virtues of Vengeance, I maintained that there are two types of morally impaired people and that the differences between them are crucial for whether or not they ought to be held morally responsible for what they do. I want to offer some reasons that I believe suggest that a potential source of one of the types of moral impairment for individual members of groups is the “collective memories” of those groups.

The Morally Challenged

Throughout the history of moral philosophy and in ordinary discourse, we find various versions of the “could-not-have-done-otherwise” argument to justify not holding a person morally responsible for what he or she did. As previously noted, Harry Frankfurt famously attacked such arguments, maintaining that unavoidability is not what John Martin Fischer calls “a responsibility-undermining factor.” What then does undermine moral responsibility? I think that it is the absence in a person of what I will call (with a major debt to Fischer and Mark Ravizza) the moderately moral-reasons responsiveness of the person's own “springs of action.” What that means is that a person may be held morally responsible when his or her actions issue from a process in the person that is at least moderately moral-reasons responsive, regardless of whether or not the person could have done otherwise in the circumstances. In cases where a person's actions issue from a process that is not at least moderately moral-reasons responsive, the person is morally incompetent with respect to that case and should not be held morally responsible for his or her behavior in that case. If a person's actions never issue from his or her own moderately moral-reasons-responsive springs of action, the person is profoundly morally incompetent and ought never to be held morally responsible for what he or she does.