Prior to the publication of Hart's The Concept of Law, it was not uncommon for legal philosophers to identify jurisprudence with the quest for a definition of “law.”The subject of this paper is “law” as it pertains to systems of governance of human conduct. Therefore we are not offering an analysis of “law” as it pertains to regularities in nature and thus we do not explore the semantic or metasemantic relations between the two.See, for example, Herman Kantorowicz, THE DEFINITION OF LAW (Cambridge University Press, 1958). In a similar vein, see Lewis Zerby's suggestion that “the most famous definition of law [sic]… is that made by Justice Holmes when he said: ‘The prophecies of what courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by law.‘” Some Remarks on the Philosophy of Law, 46 J. PHIL. 773–779 (1949). Hart explicitly resisted this characterization of the ambition of jurisprudence; the subject matter of jurisprudence is law, not “law.” Notwithstanding Hart's assertions to the contrary, in Law's Empire Ronald Dworkin argues that Hart's own legal positivism as well as other familiar jurisprudential theories (like natural law) are semantic theories: that is, accounts of the meaning of “law.” Dworkin further identifies semantic theories with criterialism, according to which the meaning of a term is given by shared criteria for applying it. The meaning of the expression “law” on this view is given by a rule or set of criteria specifying the conditions that must be satisfied in order properly to employ that expression, and the project of a semantic jurisprudence is to identify that rule.

Reasons appear to fall into well-recognized types: pro tanto or decisive, moral or nonmoral, and so on. Nowadays, it is widely held that reasons can also be “content-independent.” This paper is directed against this belief.

In this paper, I restrict discussion to cases of psychopathy in which it is assumed that psychopaths who satisfy epistemic requirements of responsibility, including the requirement that one is culpable for an action only if one performs it in light of the belief that one is doing wrong, can and do perform actions they take to be immoral or illegal. I argue that in such cases, the well-documented emotional impairment of psychopaths fails to subvert moral culpability. In particular, it does not undermine the sort of control required for moral blameworthiness and, hence, assuming all other conditions of responsibility have been met, the psychopaths of concern are indeed culpable for their behavior. Drawing, however, from certain lessons regarding the effects of coercion on responsibility, I propose that emotional impairment is a factor that should abate, perhaps even significantly, negative reaction to or treatment of such agents.