Psychopathy and internalism

Abstract

Do psychopaths make moral judgments but lack motivation? Or are psychopaths’ judgments are not genuinely moral? Both sides of this debate seem to assume either externalist or internalist criteria for the presence of moral judgment. However, if moral judgment is a natural kind, we can arrive at a theory-neutral criterion for moral judgment. A leading naturalistic criterion suggests that psychopaths have an impaired capacity for moral judgment; the capacity is neither fully present nor fully absent. Psychopaths are therefore not counterexamples to internalism. Nonetheless, internalism is empirically problematic because it is unable to explain psychopaths’ moral deficits.

Keywords:

• Psychopaths
• moral judgment
• motivation
• internalism
• natural kind
• moral/conventional distinction
• moral concepts

Acknowledgements

For helpful feedback I am grateful to Michael Bukoski, Richmond Campbell, Michael Doan, Terry Horgan, Stephen Latta, Theresa Lopez, Alice MacLachlan, Shaun Nichols, Peter Railton, Nolan Ritcey, Mark Timmons, Jon Tresan, two anonymous referees for this journal, and audiences at the University of Arizona, the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and the Canadian Philosophical Association.

Notes

1. An experimental approach might only provide evidence against internalism, not evidence in support of it. The reason is that even if participants uniformly deny that psychopaths’ make moral judgments, and even if well designed studies show that they deny it for the reason that psychopaths’ lack moral motivation, this might be due only to a common belief that there is a tight, synthetic link, rather than due to a stronger, conceptual link. Furthermore, it is doubtful that experimental investigation of folk intuitions could be used to undermine a sophisticated version of internalism, like Smith’s (1994), that postulates a necessary link between moral judgment and motivation only in a rational or normal agent. We should not place much confidence in the folk’s ability to determine whether an agent is rational or normal. These points are owed to an anonymous reviewer.

2. Besides being serious, general, and authority-independent, morality is also conceived as objective (Kumar 2015). That morality is conceived as objective explains why participants think that in moral disagreement at least one of the parties must be wrong (see Nichols 2004b; Goodwin and Darley 2008). I will ignore this more complex account of moral concepts in this essay, since the studies of psychopaths discussed below depend only on the simpler account.

3. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing this issue.

4. In what follows I will rely on a theory of the conceptual content that is constitutive of moral judgments. Because possession of moral concepts is only a necessary condition on moral judgment, assessing whether psychopaths have moral concepts can serve only as a negative test.

5. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this issue.

6. To be fair, Nichols’ primary target is moral rationalism, not motivational internalism. He argues that affective processes play a causal role in the process of moral judgment. Psychopaths have an impaired capacity for moral judgment and the explanation, according to Nichols, is that they have severe affective deficits. Thus, moral judgment is not based on reasoning alone (Nichols 2004b, 65–96; cf. Maibom 2005). More on this in the final section.

7. Degree internalism is implausible too on independent grounds. Although moral judgments and motivation do tend to correlate, it does not seem as if, in general, the degree to which someone makes a moral judgment correlates with degree of motivation. You and I both form full-fledged judgments that secret government surveillance is morally wrong, even though as an activist you are far more motivated than I to do something about it.

8. There is much controversy about whether emotions are among the causes of moral judgments, but all sides agree that there is a correlation between moral judgments and emotion. Even so-called ‘moral rationalists’ like Mikhail (2011) who whold that internally represented rules produce moral judgments accept that emotions are typically produced downstream of moral judgment.