Sociopaths make up roughly 4 percent of the population. Very crudely, these people lack what might be called a ‘conscience’ -- they lack the emotional ability to feel empathy for others, and do not care about how they treat others (except insofar as it affects their own interests). Hence they do not suffer from feelings of ‘guilt’ or ‘shame’ for harming others. When contemplating actions that will hurt others, either psychologically or physically, they do not feel any empathy with, or sympathy for, their potential victims.
Only a small number of sociopaths actually become criminals. Most maintain a façade of ‘normality’. But for them, respecting the moral rules of society means as much emotionally as ‘wearing a suit and tie to work’ does for the rest of us: it’s something that they do for purely instrumental reasons because everyone else does it, and doing otherwise involves certain penalties. Few of us would feel ‘guilty’ if we didn’t wear a suit and a tie to work and got away with it (and people who would feel guilty obviously have a different kind of psychological problem). Likewise, a sociopath would not feel guilty about harming another human being if they knew that they could get away with it.
Strangely, many, perhaps most, sociopaths pull off the façade of being ‘normal human beings’ rather well -- indeed, they are routinely described as 'charming', 'intelligent', 'daring', 'assertive', and 'charismatic'. Their genuine ruthlessness in their pursuit of their own interests, combined with their successful mimicry of concern for and interest in others, can make them seem 'cool' and 'self-confident'. They are also 'irresponsible' and often 'self-destructive', but to the people who interact with sociopaths, these qualities are not generally manifest. They are also exceedingly narcissistic.
Given that four percent of people are sociopaths, you probably know at least one (unless you’re a complete hermit).
I can think of six people whom I’ve known during my adult life who could very well be sociopaths. (Of course, I’m not a psychiatrist, and armchair diagnoses are inherently speculative and dubious. Nonetheless, some people I’ve known fit the profile so well that I cannot help but think it very likely that, of the 4 percent of people I’ve known over the years who are likely to be sociopaths, they -- if anyone -- are the ones.)
Of these six people, four are philosophers. And ironically, three work in normative areas of philosophy (viz. political philosophy or meta-ethics).
When I taught in the ‘Introduction to the Humanities’ programme at Stanford University (2002-2005), I had the rather strange experience of being asked a couple times for ‘moral advice’ by undergraduates. Apparently, they thought that since I knew a fair bit about moral philosophy, I would be a good person to ask for advice when they found themselves confronted with a difficult moral decision. I was always taken aback by these inquiries, and would tell them that the last person they should ask for useful moral advice is a moral philosopher! (Of course, most moral philosophers are not sociopaths -- yours truly included -- but even most non-sociopath moral philosophers are pretty bad when it comes to giving actual moral advice.)
So stay safe, gentle readers. Stay away from sociopaths. Stay away from philosophers who work in meta-ethics.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
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8 comments:
Wow, six?! I've met one, maybe two (the one is a mutual acquaintance of ours; the other is another philosopher I met at another university, but this second philosopher doesn't do ethics).
Maybe one reason moral philosophers are famously worse at being moral than, say, non-moral philosophers is because there are more people who go into moral philosophy out of confusion about how to live than other areas of philosophy. In other words, someone who doesn't get what all the fuss is about with moral living is likely to go into an area where he can work on it. Alternatively, maybe sociopaths are likely to gravitate to ethics because they enjoy telling people what to do and ethics, unlike, say, mereology, has lots of articles about how to live.
Probably, though, we'll never know.
So I guess someone who wrote a 400+ page dissertation on empathy would be pretty much a lock to be one of the six sociopaths?
Bobcat, of the six sociopaths I (think I) know, only four are philosophers. (The other two are people I knew as an undergraduate, though I'm still in semi-regular contact with one.) And of those four, I'm only really confident about two (the other two seem like they might be sociopaths, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if I was wrong about them). You know both of them, so we probably overlap in our judgements about one of those two. I suspect that you don't know the other one well enough to make the same call that I'm making about him/her. (If you'd like more information, shoot me an e-mail. Heh heh.)
Andy, you're no sociopath! Your psychological problems are of an entirely different, and far more amusing, nature.
As usual, I'll stick with Wilfred Sellars' approach.
When asked why he didn't do ethics, he replied "It's too hard."
Those who know Sellars work know why this is funny.
-kurt
I agree with Kurt's judgment about ethics. One of the weirdest things to me is why applied ethics isn't really considered serious. Applied ethics is SO HARD. Just to do one issue--say, abortion--well, you have to know about the status the laws, how hospitals work, the nature of the procedure, psychological ramifications of abortions, the kinds of considerations that move women to have them done, the effect on abortionists, the nature of personal identity, and maybe something about mereology.
Normative ethics, if done right, should, I think, be even harder.
Send me an email, Akrasia, with the, uh, information.
" I agree with Kurt's judgment about ethics."
Nice qualification.
In any case, in the same week, R Gressis has agreed with me about something in public, and my chair wrote the entire department to say I was right about something.
Full moon?
-kurt
ooo... sociopaths! I think I know who one of these is supposed to be. And I have some guesses about who the other suspect might be.
Is there a difference here between sociopaths and autistic folk?
Alex, autism and sociopathy are quite different conditions. Austistic individuals have great difficulty communicating and forming relationships with other people (roughly, they have difficulty understanding the 'mental states' of other persons). In contrast, sociopaths generally have no difficulty communicating with others -- indeed, they are often excellent communicators, and can be quite manipulative. Similarly, sociopaths can maintain relationships with others (they often have 'friends', get married, etc.). They just feel no empathy for others, and thus don't feel bad when they hurt others. Needless to say, being in a relationship with a sociopath is generally a disaster (for the non-sociopath). For sociopaths, there is no difference between 'conventional rules' and 'moral rules'. The thing that makes sociopaths so unnerving is that many of them succeed in 'seeming normal'. In contrast, most autistic persons are pretty clearly 'not normal'.
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