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  • Travelers, Mercenaries, and Psychopaths
  • James Harold (bio) and Carl Elliott (bio)

When it comes to the responsibility of psychopaths, many of us have conflicting intuitions. The impulse to absolve them from moral responsibility for their actions comes from the intuition that there is something about morality that psychopaths just don’t understand. Responsibility requires understanding, and moral understanding seems to require equipment which the psychopath doesn’t possess. The impulse to hold psychopaths morally responsible, on the other hand, comes from the intuition that their problem is not one of understanding but of motivation. Psychopaths understand morality perfectly well, we think; they are just not bothered to conform to its demands. How are we to understand psychopaths? Are they like travelers in a strange land, expected to understand and abide by norms and practices which they find incomprehensible? Or are they more like a hardened mercenary soldiers, so inured to wrongdoing that they no longer find it troubling?

If we take Piers Benn’s valuable essay seriously, we might well conclude that psychopaths are more like foreign travelers. Benn suggests that psychopaths are deficient in their ability to form reactive attitudes, and for this reason they cannot fully participate in our “shared moral and social world.” Those who cannot fully participate in this world cannot be held fully responsible for violating the norms which govern it, this argument goes, because these are norms which they cannot fully understand. The qualifier “fully” is critical here, because there is clearly quite a lot that psychopaths do understand. They are able to use at least some moral language with ease, reason their way through theoretical moral problems, and comprehend the rules and laws which govern everyday social life. In fact, some psychopaths are able to make their way through our social world with such facility that they can exploit its conventions, manipulating others so successfully that they achieve brilliant careers as swindlers and con men. One of the points that Cleckley makes in The Mask of Sanity is that the traits which distinguish psychopaths are often present, to a lesser degree, in ordinary people—many of whom are very successful at the mechanics of corporate capitalism. The successful psychopath, who perhaps has a firmer grasp of her or his own self-interest than most, may well have made his or her way up the corporate ladder by coldly exploiting others in the same way that has landed a less intelligent or less prudent psychopath in jail.

What the psychopath seems to lack is the deeper, more long-standing, more complex reactive attitudes that are woven into our moral lives. Psychopaths can clearly get angry at other people, but can they hold a grudge? It is hard to imagine a psychopath nurturing the kind of deeply rooted resentment that can fester for years, if only because [End Page 45] it is hard to imagine a psychopath dwelling on such a thing for very long. Likewise it is hard to imagine a psychopath being disappointed in another person, because it is hard to imagine her having failed expectations—particularly expectations about another person’s moral character. Some attitudes, especially those tied to morality, require a depth of character that the psychopath does not seem to possess. Hence it is easier to imagine a psychopath forgetting than forgiving, easier to imagine him hating than despising, easier to imagine him happy than it is to imagine him fulfilled.

Some words, such as cruel, or bully, or forgiving, are what philosophers such as Bernard Williams would call “thick” ethical concepts—mixtures of fact and value (1985, 129). Unlike factual descriptors such as square, or green, thick ethical concepts do not simply map onto the world in a straightforward way. This is because thick ethical concepts also represent evaluations of what they describe. Yet they are not purely evaluative, like “good” or “right.” Thick ethical concepts map onto things in the world like purely factual concepts, but they also represent moral evaluations of those things onto which they are mapped. They have both factual and evaluative elements, fusing “is” and “ought.” So to call a person, say, cowardly, or humble, or forgiving, is to pick out and describe something...

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