Sentiment or Reason?: Can Research on Offenders Tell Us?

Tankersley has provided an interesting collection of data about various groups of antisocial individuals. Is this a paper about the moral reasoning of psychopaths, or is it an attempt to address a philosophical question—whether moral behavior is primarily driven by emotions (moral sentimentalism) or by reasons (moral rationalism)—empirically? I think it attempts a little of both, although I concentrate on the latter.

The trouble with much of the literature on psychopathy is the terminological confusion, and Tankersley has not escaped this. Several disciplines, with their own languages, have an interest in antisocial individuals and use similar sounding words in different ways. It is easy to get confused. Doctors make diagnoses. Antisocial (or dissocial) personality disorder is a medical diagnosis, and has a clear, operationalized definition. By virtue of being a disorder, it must result in some impairment in the functioning of the individual. Psychopathy is a psychological construct, not a diagnosis, and attempts to measure (in a reliable and valid way, using the Psychopathy Checklist) aspects of a person's mind particularly relevant to antisocial behavior. Psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder are different approaches to the same natural phenomenon, but they are not coterminous. There are many individuals with antisocial personality disorder who are not psychopaths. There are some individuals who are psychopaths who do not have any medical diagnosis (e.g., the so-called white collar psychopath). Psychopathy is not a subset of antisocial personality disorder (pace Tankersley 2011, and Herpertz and Habermeyer 2004).

Lawyers are also interested in such people, and the English Mental Health Act 1983 contains the term "psychopathic disorder." This is a legal concept with its own legal definition. Again, this clearly has some overlap with the above terms, but they are not the same.

Finally, Tankersley also uses the word "sociopath," sometimes with the rider "acquired." This seems to mean a group of individuals, previously thought to have normal brains, who have an acquired neurological lesion that seems to have led to antisocial behavior and/or to the cognitive/ affective deficits of the psychopath (it is not quite clear from the paper which). This seems to be a resurrection of and a new use for the term coined by Partridge in the 1930s. Its use adds further to the confusion, I fear.

We are told at the outset that "psychopath" in the paper actually refers to the primary psychopath—an individual scoring highly on the Psychopathy Checklist who also has low levels of anxiety and arousal, and is said to commit crimes largely of instrumental (i.e., cold-blooded, planned, and premeditated) violence. From my own clinical experience, these are a rare breed, but they may nonetheless offer interesting insights for the philosophical question posed at the outset.

Unfortunately, I think that the literature cited by Tankersley has not particularly been concerned with helping choose between moral sentimentalism and moral rationalism. And for the very good reason that it has been concerned with other questions. Scientists are interested in understanding the etiology of the condition, clinicians with helping make it better, and policy makers with reducing antisocial behavior [regardless of whether this also makes the perpetrator feel better (or even, worse, as the moral sentimentalists would have it)]. I wonder if there is a problem, too, with the philosophy—is it really morally superior, as Tankersley suggests, for me, a man with no pedophilic interests, not to sexually assault children than it is for Joe, a man with pedophilic desires, to resist them? I suspect I might think that Joe is doing more moral work than me in this instance. I certainly do not feel as though I am doing anything worthy of approbation by not assaulting children, whereas I think Joe might have a claim.

The scientific literature may not have approached the question Tankersley hopes to answer. It does not, however, follow that we might not be able to use empirical evidence to choose between moral rationalism and moral sentimentalism. Surely the appropriate tool would be to compare the psychopath who is also antisocial with the "white collar" psychopath who...