“The psychopath’s response to people who suffer indicates that what we recognise as morality might be grounded not simply in positive, prosocial emotions but also in negative, stressful and self-oriented ones. This is not some cuddly version of empathy, but a primitive aversive reaction that seemingly has little to do with our caring greatly for the humanity of others.
Yet what exposes our common humanity more than the fact that I become personally distressed by what happens to you? What could better make me grasp the importance of your suffering? The personal part of empathic distress might be central to my grasping what is so bad about harming you. Thinking about doing so fills me with alarm. Arguably, it’s more important that I curb my desire to harm others for personal gain than it is for me to help a person in need. Social psychology research has focused on how we’re moved to help others, but that’s led us to ignore important aspects of ethics. Psychopathy puts personal distress back in the centre of our understanding of the psychological underpinnings of morality.
The last lesson we can learn concerns whether sentimentalists or rationalists are right when it comes to interpretations of the moral deficits of psychopaths. The evidence supports both positions. We don’t have to choose – in fact, it would be silly for us to do so. Rationalist thinkers who believe that psychopaths reason poorly have zoomed in on how they don’t fear punishment as we do. That has consequences down the line in their decision making since, without appropriate fear, one can’t learn to act appropriately. But on the side of the sentimentalists, fear and anxiety are emotional responses. Their absence impairs our ability to make good decisions, and facilitates psychopathic violence.
Fear, then, straddles the divide between emotion and reason. It plays the dual role of constraining our decisions via our understanding the significance of suffering for others, and through our being motivated to avoid certain actions and situations. But it’s not clear whether the significance of fear will be palatable to moral philosophers. A response of distress and anxiety in the face of another’s pain is sharp, unpleasant and personal. It stands in sharp contrast to the common understanding of moral concern as warm, expansive and essentially other-directed. Psychopaths force us to confront a paradox at the heart of ethics: the fact that I care about what happens to you is based on the fact I care about what happens to me.”
We’ve all experienced the inner hardening, and turning away when faced with another human being in need. Of course it isn’t indicative of us being a psychopath, but the ability to realize that ethical distance is trait we all share. I realize the pain and suffering of people who are starving, but they are far away and I can turn away and ignore their suffering and get along with my life.
Seems kinda shitty once you think about it, and the fact that most people do it doesn’t lessen the gravity of this particular ethical failure. Yet, the behaviour will persist, a dubious solution to the real life situations that run up against our moral understanding of the world.
This sort of ethical dilemma is illustrated in the series Breaking Bad. I’m almost done (two episodes left) watching Breaking Bad, and the moral path Walter White chooses to walk seems to illustrate the how muddy ‘good ethical behaviour’ gets once it hits the real word.
“To be clear, a moral injury is not a psychiatric diagnosis. Rather, it’s an existential disintegration of how the world should or is expected to work—a compromise of the conscience when one is butted against an action (or inaction) that violates an internalized moral code. It’s different from post-traumatic stress disorder, the symptoms of which occur as a result of traumatic events. When a soldier at a checkpoint shoots at a car that doesn’t stop and kills innocents, or when Walter White allows Jesse’s troublesome addict girlfriend to die of an overdose to win him back as a partner, longstanding moral beliefs are disrupted, and an injury on the conscience occurs.”
What quality makes people bounce back from a moral injury, or turn further toward questionable moral choices? We’d all like to think we belong to the class of upstanding, moral citizens – but how long does that last once the unkind vicissitudes of life go into overdrive?
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
6 comments
August 12, 2019 at 8:45 am
Steve Ruis
It seems clear that moral codes are social control mechanisms. If there were no enforcement, however, they would be totally ineffective, so there are always … always … enforcement mechanisms involved: gossip, social approbation, shunning, etc. all the way up to laws and law enforcement. Prior to that there were feuds, retaliatory beatings and killings, etc.
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August 12, 2019 at 1:00 pm
tildeb
I think it’s far more personal than that: and it has everything to do with the empathetic urge… which we can either enhance or suppress. How much or little we engage the mirror neuron network plays out emotionally on how much or little we decide to share the personal interaction. When the neural network is skewed (by both environment as well as genetics) then we enter the realm of psychopathology.
That we can suppress the urge is just as important as how much we engage it… and we use both all the time. But it’s still empathy in both cases. This is how a surgeon can expertly cut into people to improve health and how the same surgeon can be appalled at the same action if done only to cause maximum pain and suffering. The difference is not in the action but in the intention and the accompanying emotional cost or benefit associated with the intention. And this is where we get into ethics… and even social ethics from which we then extract where on some moral compass – from the personal to the public – the intended action falls. The social morals might reflect the mean or it might be an imposed set of rules and regulations. But at the end of the day, we are still our own individuals and will choose to apply our empathetic engagements accordingly.
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August 21, 2019 at 8:30 am
The Arbourist
@tildeb
Agreed, but with a few caveats.
Individuals can only apply the choices that are available to them within the context of broader society. Certain behaviours and modes of thought are simply not available depending on what are currently the societal norms.
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August 21, 2019 at 8:51 am
tildeb
Such as?
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August 21, 2019 at 9:54 am
The Arbourist
Developed Western countries version of rights, versus the rights structure of other cultures for instance. Many middle eastern cultures have a decidedly different view of how society should work and how power is distributed. Inside some of those cultures the choices available to the people are markedly different.
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August 21, 2019 at 10:29 am
tildeb
The OP is about moral codes revealed by the moral deficits of psychopaths, suggesting morality is demonstrated by social behaviour or its lack thereof.
I disagree.
The suggestion from the OP is that society therefore exerts a central influence on morality – aka social behaviour – leading Steve to suggest the social framework for social behaviour is all about control, whereas I suggest moral behaviour – aka social behaviour – is far more personal than that and utilizes our biology… through the mechanism of empathy – extending it outwards as well as withholding it. It’s personal and not social in the sense we choose – not society – how much or little empathy to extend even though there can be social considerations we employ in our responsive behaviour that appear to determine the resulting social behaviours. My point is that such appearances can be misleading because it reverses the actual cause, the actual source, of empathetic behavior and assigns this social behaviour termed ‘morality’ to ‘society’ rather than to the individuals who actually exercise it.
Society is not a thing, not an empathetic agent; it’s simply a construct about certain populations and assumes that some mean reflects an actual thing. This is not true. And so we cannot assign cause to a thing that does not exist, does not have empathy, is not an active agent. Believing otherwise puts the cart before the horse and removes individuals from personal responsibility for their moral behaviour. And I think this is very dangerous a belief to buy into.
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