Psychopathy, Emotion, and Moral Judgment

Many thanks to Gwen Adshead and Shaun Gallagher for their helpful and inspiring comments. I would like to take this opportunity to address their criticisms and suggestions regarding several parts of my original article.

Psychopathy

Let me first sketch the outline of my paper “Internalism, Emotionism, and the Psychopathy Challenge.” In this paper, I argued that the group of psychopaths, who seem to have no motivation to act upon their moral judgments, is a powerful counterexample to motivational internalism (the view that there is a necessary connection between moral judgment and moral motivation). I considered and then rejected an influential response to the psychopathy challenge, namely, the emotionist response. According to this response, psychopaths do not make genuine moral judgments because they lack emotions of a certain kind. By appeal to most recent empirical research in relevant areas, I attempted to show that emotion is not causally necessary for moral judgment.

For my purposes, I used the term ‘psychopaths’ in a broad sense, referring to people who suffer serious emotional deficits and have no concern about others. Different researchers may adopt different concepts of psychopathy. As Gwen Adshead indicates, there are significant differences between Cleckley’s and Hare’s notions of psychopathy. For example, whereas Hare’s group is identified through the status of violent perpetrators, violence is not an essential feature of Cleckley’s group. Furthermore, whereas Hare’s psychopathic group seems to take pleasure in ‘conning, exploiting and deceiving others,’ Cleckley’s group does not exhibit such a trait. But what is more relevant to my paper is the similarities (rather than the differences) between the two groups. Both groups of psychopaths have emotional deficits and are unmoved by others’ distress; both seem to make genuine moral judgments as normal people do; both seem to have no motivation to act upon their putative moral judgments. For the purpose of the paper, we should put both groups into the category of psychopathy.

Moreover, as Shaun Gallagher rightly points out, my paper also did not make the distinction between primary, low-anxious psychopathy and secondary, high-anxious psychopathy. Although the primary subtype of psychopathy reflects ‘emotional deficits,’ the secondary subtype arises as a consequence of ‘excessive emotionality’ (Koenigs et al. 2012). But because my discussion was concerned with whether emotion is causally necessary for genuine moral judgment, I was more interested in people who seem to make moral judgments but are emotionally deficient (rather than emotionally excessive). My paper thus mainly focused on the primary subtype (although I did not use this terminology). I return to this distinction later.

Moral Emotions

According to emotionism, a judgment is a genuine moral judgment only if it is caused by emotion of a certain kind. There are different emotionist accounts concerning what kind of emotion causes moral judgment. But because I aimed to argue against emotionism in general rather than a particular version of emotionism, I did not specify what kind of emotion is the source of moral judgment. I used the term ‘moral emotion’ in a broad sense, according to which any emotion that causally produces commonly assumed moral judgments is a moral emotion. A list of moral emotion may include sympathy, empathy, guilty, indignation, shame, and disgust.

Gallagher seems to deny that emotions like disgust and empathy are moral emotions. But I suspect that he may use the term ‘moral emotion’ in a different sense than I do. In my terminology, if an emotion causes (some) moral judgments, this emotion should be labeled as a moral emotion. Precisely in this sense, some emotionists put disgust in the list of moral emotion (Haidt 2001), and others regard empathy as one of moral emotions (Slote 2010). Emotionists appeal to disgust (and perhaps empathy) in explaining moral judgments of personal dilemmas, such as the judgment that it is impermissible to push a person to death for the purpose of saving five others. On their explanation, the reason why normal people regard this action as morally wrong or impermissible is that the up-close and personal nature of pushing the other person makes it emotionally disgusting. If...