Actually, they don't have a __hash__ either -- they just inherit the default __hash__ from object, just as they inherit __eq__ from object (and both just use the address of the object). I can see many concerns with trying to define __eq__ for exceptions in general -- often there are a variety of fields, not all of which perhaps should be considered when comparing, and then there are user-defined exceptions which may have other attributes. I don't know what your use case was, but if, as you say, the exceptions you care about already have `args` attributes, maybe you should just compare that (and the type).