Psychopaths and Moral Identity

I am grateful to the editors of PPP for the opportunity to comment on Professor Zhong’s paper. I find much to agree with, but also think that his paper raises further questions (as good papers should!), specifically about the nature of psychopathy as a concept and what it means to be a moral agent. My comments are based on my clinical work with men who have been violent and who are detained in a secure psychiatric hospital, many of whom are categorized as ‘psychopaths’; and some empirical work on moral reasoning in antisocial men that I carried out with Professor Jonathan Glover with the support of the Wellcome Trust (Adshead et al. 2008).

Since Plato, philosophers have linked ‘goodness’ with wisdom, truth, and rationality (Russell 1946). Although people can have bad intentions, actually acting on them is often assumed to be evidence of a disturbed mind that is not thinking clearly or coherently. Many philosophical theorists (such as the Stoics or Spinoza) assumed that it was human ‘passions’ that led to wrong doing, passions that were operating in the absence of reason. Political philosophy also suggests that rational societies pursue policies that foster cooperation and mutual welfare as much as competition. It is no accident that some version of the ‘Golden Rule’ exists in every culture, that is, the principle that we should pay as much attention to the welfare of others as we do to our own.

Given an assumed link between goodness and rationality, it naturally follows that philosophers would devise thought experiments about persons who challenged the assumption. The key questions then are:

1. (a). What if there were humans who seemed perfectly rational but did bad things that seemed to have little purpose or effect beyond the inherent badness of the act?

2. (b). What should be the proper social response to such people?

The concern here is with people who do bad things that do not seem to profit them in any way or are actually self-defeating (Feinberg 1984). ‘Cui Bono?’ is still the starting point for most considerations of the causes of crime, although it is clear that the ‘bonum’ in question may be psychological and social as well as material. We may note in passing that it is apparently rational (although undesirable and blameworthy) to do bad things to others to profit yourself.

The first psychiatrists naturally became involved in debates about the connections between mental disorders, rationality, criminal rule breaking, and badness. They were frequently puzzled by people who seemed unwilling or incapable of cooperating with the social rules that connect people in kinship or other social groups; a group described as having a ‘mask of sanity’ (Cleckley 1941). These men and women broke social rules, promises, and the criminal law (although they were not characterized as either violent or ‘evil’). The key finding was that they did not seem to be moved by others’ distress, and in fact, seemed surprised when others were distressed by their behavior. Cleckley hypothesized that these men and women did not respond to emotions in others because they lacked relational emotions, that is, they suffered an emotional deficit that he called ‘a semantic aphasia.’

The theoretical landscape changed when Cleckley’s ideas were applied to violent criminals by Robert Hare (1999, 2003). He developed the concept of criminal ‘psychopathy’ to describe a subgroup of violent offenders, who (like Cleckley’s group) seemed not to engage with moral emotions and who seemed not to have any concern about the distress or harm they caused.

However, there were significant differences between Hare’s and Cleckley’s groups. Hare’s group were identified through their violence perpetrator status; Cleckley’s group were generally identified by their families as having a psychiatric problem. Hare’s group were recidivist criminals with long histories of violence to the vulnerable, and they were dangerous in terms of the harm they caused. They attacked strangers as well as family members, although (unlike Cleckley’s group) they often had few family ties. Hare’s group seemed to take pleasure in conning, exploiting, and deceiving others, whereas Cleckley’s group...