{"id":1463,"date":"2010-10-30T23:40:03","date_gmt":"2010-10-31T03:40:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=1463"},"modified":"2012-03-09T23:04:15","modified_gmt":"2012-03-10T04:04:15","slug":"the-psychopaths-challenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=1463","title":{"rendered":"The Psychopath’s Challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Psychopath\u2019s Challenge<\/h2>\n

Published in the Maryland Daily Record November 1, 2010<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Many parts of the law, especially criminal and tort law, have their roots in our communal values.\u00a0 It goes without saying that most of us believe that people should not harm each other, that we should respect each other\u2019s lives, property and feelings.\u00a0 And that shared belief is expressed in legislation and common law.\u00a0 Even were the laws to vanish, most of us would have something inside us \u2013 call it empathy, call it conscience \u2013 that would prevent most of us, most of the time, from committing most crimes and most torts.<\/p>\n

I keep using the word \u201cmost.\u201d\u00a0 Partly that\u2019s because there are bound to be disagreements about any rule \u2013 we lawyers know that better than anyone.\u00a0 But also it\u2019s because there are those among us who lack any care for the rights or feelings of others.\u00a0 The psychiatrists have a name for these folks: psychopaths.\u00a0 (Well, these days the label for the condition is Antisocial Personality Disorder<\/a>, but everyone still uses \u201cpsychopath.\u201d)\u00a0 It is estimated that 1% of us are psychopaths.<\/a>\u00a0 What distinguishes that 1% is not necessarily what most of us would call evil; rather it is a fundamental lack of interest, however well disguised, in anyone else\u2019s well-being.\u00a0 Psychopaths may act like your best friends whenever you can be useful to them.\u00a0 But if it works out better for them to lie to you, steal from you, or humiliate you, they\u2019ll do that.\u00a0 Because to them, their own goals matter and yours don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

And incidentally, psychopaths can\u2019t be cured.\u00a0 (Think of Dr. Melfa trying to fix Tony Soprano.)[1]<\/p>\n

It can be seen, then, that there is a clash between the empathic world view, the conscience, that informs our laws, grounded in a respect for others, and the psychopath\u2019s.\u00a0 So who is right?\u00a0 Mother Teresa, or your generic murderous totalitarian dictator?<\/p>\n

In what would facially seem like a completely unrelated development, the atheists seem to be gaining ground.\u00a0 Not only is church attendance down, but hostility to the notion of a divinity seems to be everywhere in our culture.\u00a0 Books by Richard Dawkins<\/a> and Christopher Hitchens<\/a>, not to mention the latest bestseller by physicist Stephen Hawking<\/a>,[2] all tell us that the universe, properly understood, is barren of any sign of a Creator or a caring Providence.\u00a0 Now it is not an argument for God\u2019s existence that if we stopped believing in Him\/Her\/It, we\u2019d be lending credence to the totalitarian dictator\u2019s view.\u00a0 But I would submit that a Godless universe is one in which it may well be philosophically meaningless to say that the dictator is wrong and Mother Teresa is right.\u00a0 As Al Sharpton, of all people, cogently put it recently: “There is nothing immoral if there’s nothing in charge.”<\/a><\/p>\n

In the past, it was a standard proof that a God existed that most of us heard that still, small voice of conscience in what we called our souls.\u00a0 We believed in the validity of those promptings, and recognized that for that validity to exist, there had to be a source behind conscience, that it could not be some mere socially or evolutionarily-conditioned prompting.\u00a0 It had to come from beyond us.\u00a0 Because we felt those promptings valid, we inferred a source religions had always named God.<\/p>\n

Today, though, many humanistic philosophers and evolutionary biologists tell us that conscience, biologically hard-wired into most of us and reinforced socially by mechanisms like the law, is nothing more than a kind of distillation of the principles that assure the greatest good for the greatest number, and designed best to assure the success and survival of the species.\u00a0 None of that gives conscience any objective validity, though.<\/p>\n

What?<\/em> you say: Isn\u2019t the survival of the species the most important thing? <\/em>\u00a0The psychopath would beg to differ; nothing matters to him so much as he himself does.\u00a0 And in a God-less universe, he cannot be refuted.\u00a0 We cannot look to a divine nature that is the source and pattern of values to make the survival of the species more valuable than the satisfaction of the psychopath\u2019s goals.\u00a0 In fact, even in the universe that believers and unbelievers both think they occupy, it would appear impossible for the species to survive indefinitely, however any of us behave.<\/p>\n

As a species, we are in a series of death traps.\u00a0 Assuming we don\u2019t kill ourselves off with global warming or war, physicists tell us that eventually the sun will boil the oceans, rendering life on earth unlivable.\u00a0 And even assuming we escape the planet, it\u2019s only a matter of time before the Second Law of Thermodynamics assures that the entire universe cools down to temperatures that will make human life impossible.\u00a0 A lot of time, to be sure, perhaps 1032<\/sup> years.[3]\u00a0 Still, there\u2019s no happily ever after for the species.\u00a0 For many believers, there\u2019s a happily ever here<\/em>after, but that\u2019s quite different.\u00a0 The fact must therefore be confronted: there is no way to save the species forever, but there may well be a way on any given day to give your local psychopath precisely what he wants.\u00a0 Now, explain again why he\u2019s wrong.<\/p>\n

My father, a man of philosophical bent, might have been assaying that explanation when he wrote in his last book of the inevitable eventual passing of humanity that \u201ca tragedy long deferred is, to an extent, a tragedy minimized.\u201d[4]\u00a0 In his view, it was not necessary to promise that the eternal survival of the species would result from one\u2019s conduct to make the conduct worthwhile; it would be sufficient to foster humanity for as long as possible.\u00a0 But that still begs the question of whether humanity itself has value, as he admitted.<\/p>\n

The Existentialists struggled with the psychopath\u2019s challenge, and came up with the answer that without a God each of us must serve as his or her own source of values.[5]\u00a0 That\u2019s not a problem for the psychopath, though: that\u2019s what he already does.\u00a0 And in theory it shouldn\u2019t be a problem for the Existentialist with a conscience: he or she might well choose the path of altruism and the law that expresses it while acknowledging it to be a matter of personal preference only.\u00a0 But the Existentialist would have to agree that, given that all is personal preference, there\u2019s no way to prove<\/em> that his particular choice is\u00a0right and the psychopath\u2019s is wrong.<\/p>\n

At most, therefore, we can say that the consensus of the 99% of us who feel a sense of duty to each other often will prevail as a working convention.\u00a0 We can make that consensus into a body of law.\u00a0 But no fair pretending, without positing a God who ultimately sets the moral laws, that there\u2019s any objectiveness to our views.\u00a0 Given a God-less hypothesis, we just prefer, whether as a result of evolutionary conditioning or arbitrary taste, to treat each other with respect.\u00a0 And the laws we pass can have no greater dignity than that.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not much, but for the unbelievers, it\u2019s what there is.<\/p>\n

And the psychopath stands unrefuted \u2013 though hopefully alone.<\/p>\n

\n

[1] \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To be fair, not everyone thinks Tony Soprano was actually a psychopath.\u00a0 Most viewers would regard Tony as living by some kind of code.\u00a0 That would be inconsistent with true psychopathy.\u00a0 See this comment<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[2] \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As of October 2010, I have a review of Hawking\u2019s book, in which I address his logical and philosophical shortcomings, coming up in the National Catholic Reporter.\u00a0 When it comes out, I\u2019ll hyperlink it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[3] \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 My summary of facts here owes a great deal to Michio Kaku\u2019s informative and entertaining book Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension (1994)<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 The 1032<\/sup> years figure comes from Page 305 of the Anchor Books paperback edition.<\/p>\n

[4] \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Emile Benoit, Progress and Survival: An Essay on the Future of Mankind<\/em> (1980)<\/a> at Page 6.\u00a0 (Despite the difference in last names, he was indeed my father \u2013 and I was the posthumous editor of this book.)<\/p>\n

[5] \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A fine quick discussion of this notion can be found in the Wikipedia entry on Existentialism<\/a>, under the subhead \u201cFreedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn<\/p>\n

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It can be seen, then, that there is a clash between the empathic world view, the conscience, that informs our laws, grounded in a respect for others, and the psychopath\u2019s. So who is right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[493,1587,1594,1582,1583,1596,1580,1589,1603,1584,1592,1604,1605,1600,1599,1601,1598,1608,1607,1591,1606,1609,1610,1416,1585,1586,1593,1602,1595,1597,1588,1590,1581],"class_list":["post-1463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-al-sharpton","tag-antisocial-personality-disorder","tag-christopher-hitchens","tag-communal-values","tag-conscience","tag-creator","tag-criminal-law","tag-dr-jennifer-melfa","tag-emile-benoit","tag-empathy","tag-existence-of-god","tag-existentialism","tag-existentialists","tag-fate-of-the-earth","tag-fate-of-the-planet","tag-fate-of-the-universe","tag-global-warming","tag-hyperspace","tag-michio-kaku","tag-mother-teresa","tag-national-catholic-reporter","tag-parallel-universes","tag-progress-and-survival","tag-providence","tag-psychopaths","tag-psychopathy","tag-richard-dawkins","tag-second-law-of-thermodynamics","tag-stephen-hawking","tag-survival-of-the-species","tag-the-sopranos","tag-tony-soprano","tag-tort-law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1463"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1476,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1463\/revisions\/1476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}