In epistemology, the project of Vice Epistemology promises to reveal crucial information about our concept of knowledge, and more generally about the ethics of belief, by attending to the characteristic ways in which negative aretaic character traits impede successful inquiry. These character traits are the titular epistemic vices. This paper proposes and partially develops a parallel project for the concept of moral responsibility.

According to this project, certain character traits may impede successful resolution of conflict within our responsibility-practices in characterstic ways. And we can learn important information about the functioning of these practices, as well as the concept of moral responsibility, by attending to such `hypological vices'. I focus, in particular, on the undertheorised practice of taking responsibility. Within this practice, resolution of conflict is systematically impeded by the following bundle of dispositions (vices), which together comprise an inability to take responsibility for one's actions:

(i) a disposition to misrepresent legitimate moral address as abuse, (ii) a disposition to represent the putative transgression as an outcome of external circumstances, (iii) a disposition to trivialise the normative fallout of the transgression, and (iv) a lack of proper motivation concerning ones compensatory duties and a merely instrumental motivation to offer apologies.