At a dinner in honor of an invited speaker, the speaker said that he had never understood the concept of moral realism. I took him literally since I had felt the same way as a graduate student. It turns out that he understood it OK, he just does not believe in it. The key moment in our interaction was when he said he feels no real duty to reciprocate. He knows it is a convention but does not believe it is real. It seems there is something wrong with him. He lacks this vital moral intuition.
The following is my attempt to explain moral realism to him. Please leave comments at the Orthosphere (here.)
https://voegelinview.com/a-philosopher-explains-moral-realism/
The Orthosphere 
I suspect psychopathy is spreading because modernity has destroyed the ecology of moral intuition. Atheism may not entail nihilism, but it certainly seems to entail nihilism. Moral intuition seems also to require a sustaining community in which the intuition is very widely shared. In the context of liberal multiculturalism, moral principles necessarily feel like a personal choice. And I think there is something to your suggestion that the effort to rationalize morality (Kant, Utilitarianism) has been pernicious.
I am conscious that this psychopathic nihilism has infected my own mind, encouraging the attitude that kids describe with the word “whatever.” Maybe kids’ slang has moved on from that, but “whatever” captures the moral numbness that I think we all feel. I take the fevered ranting of moral fanatics as evidence of this numbness, since they are whipping up on the surface something that they feel dying deep inside.
If I were Satan, I would persuade humans that right and wrong are just conventions, and then I would flip right and wrong upside down. The temptation of Eve is essentially the argument that it is merely conventional to refrain from eating the forbidden fruit.
I can’t decide if the woman in your airport story is thoughtless or selfish, whether her apology was contrite or a sop to ensure future rides. It seems obvious to me that the moral principle of reciprocity must be bolstered in a settled population where a reputation for welshing has a cost. Some nomads pay their debts before they pack their tents, but there are more incentives to respect reciprocity when people are settled down.
I still count myself as a moral realist, but my grip on that belief is not as secure as it once was. I think the intuitions are real, but that they are healthier when bolstered by popular conventions. This reminds me of a question I’ve been meaning to ask you. Do you find that covid made cheating go mainstream? There was always cheating, but now cheating seems to be the norm. Also dishonest email messages. It used to take uncommon effrontery to lie to a professor’s face; but email opens the kingdom of mendacity to all.
Thanks for reading, JMSmith. I agree about atheism and about the need for community support for moral intuitions to be more secure. I don’t feel morally numb, but I’m certainly dismayed! I personally have not noticed cheating being worse after COVID. Some of my worst cheating anecdotes are pre-COVID. Lying emails have always been a thing since I’ve been working and I’m afraid it does tend to make me view students as utter lying bastards in that context at least. ChatGPT has generated new cheating problems for me with the way my classes are organized and THAT has made cheating worse. I paid 18 bucks out of my own pocket to use Winston AI, the best scholarly AI detector to catch cheaters, which I did. AI is still bad enough that I can frequently detect it and thus check it.
In terms of psychopathy being on the rise, my entire business ethics class certainly expressed views consistent with the derangement, as noted a couple of posts ago.
Perhaps the term “psychopath” (when used accurately) is serving as a materialistic pseudo-medical description of what is actually a spiritual situation: that is, a person with an *innately evil nature*.
That is, someone who, by nature, is incapable of love.
Such people have always been known through history. Psychopathy was at one time called “moral insanity”. At a psychological level, psychopathy shows-up as a lack of empathy, or ‘sympathy’; coldness, insensitivity, hardness of personality – the inability to experience emotions appropriate to social relationships.
But from a spiritual and Christian perspective, such ‘medicalizations’ seem like evasions of a profound spiritual deficit.
Such qualitative/ total psychopaths are probably rare (although probably more common in some places than others, and more common now than in the past).
But it seems there are larger numbers of people whose capacity for love is weak and easily overcome by expedience, or whose capacity for love is only very intermittent.
Such people are natural allies of the powers of evil, and are capable of serving any agenda, and doing anything – so long as it provides them with personal gratification, or enables them to avoid suffering.
If someone was a full psychopath For Sure; then he would certainly be damned, because he would not want and would reject salvation. However, (in absolute spiritual terms) because of the reality of free will/ agency, minds and motivations are not transparent, so this status cannot be known with certainty.
I presume that this is why psychopathic souls – apparently incapable of love, and therefore very probably self-damned – are nonetheless sometimes incarnated. *Maybe* they will, after all, have sufficient capacity for love to choose to follow Jesus?
Why more ‘psychopaths’ nowadays (if that is indeed true) – aside from the biological cause that psychopaths out-reproduce normies under modern social conditions?
Spiritually speaking; I wonder if the ‘supply’ of pre-mortal human souls that are good-by-nature is (at any time, and for whatever reason) in practice *finite*, and is recently becoming depleted? So modern societies are, in effect, scraping the barrel, and incarnating a lot of the dregs…
This particular guy seemed very confused. He rushed to assure me he was actually quite morally judgmental and not a moral nihilist after having effectively confessed that very fact!
I, too, have wondered about the theology of psychopaths. It seems very odd that they exist. Under a reincarnation view, it could be both a punishment and a lesson in the value of love. Maybe someone could volunteer to be so incarnated (without reincarnation) as an object lesson to the rest of us too.
As regards the ‘why’ of the existence of psychopaths: the primary question would be, are they born or made?
I know of one case in particular, a very dysfunctional teen mother with two sons born just over two years apart. When the elder child was between four & five, his behavior became chaotic to the degree that both he and his brother were psychologically evaluated.
It was determined that the mother’s extremely dysfunctional parenting (not outright abusive mind you) caused the elder son psychological damage to a psychopathological degree.
The family were told that it was “too late” for the elder boy, but if they could get the younger one away from the mother, he was still young enough to reverse the ‘course’ of the same psychological damage to himself.
Now, as a mother with a career background in childcare, including child development, I feel certain that there is a likely correlation between the increasing number of psychopaths, and the decrease in parenting time, effort, and skills…
Since the late 1960’s – early 1970’s parents have increasingly abdicated their roles, whether in actuality by resigning their children to 10 to 15 hours of childcare per day, or virtually by leaving them to be ‘raised’ by first television, then video games, and now the internet.
All of the above, is based on a lifetime (at nearly age 60) of experiential observation of and caring for children, starting with my own little brother, whose care I participated in from the time I was six years old.
Hi Carol,
There seems to be a genetic component. Different cultural environments can either bring out the psychopathic tendencies or suppress them. One idea is that duty based cultures suppress them. You look after your disabled siblings regardless of feelings. Our culture is very feelings based so lack of feeling becomes a big problem.
I watched a video recently of a supposed psychopath who claimed that sexual abuse caused her to want to suppress her feelings until this became automatic. She is now a hedonic (one word) – and thus can no longer feel positive feelings. I don’t think most people would react this way or be able to suppress their feelings like that. So it would be a combination of genes and environment.
I think I read that psychopathy as a personality trait means low empathy. I think autistic people are low in empathy. My autistic son is distant but relatively innocent if in his own world.
Richard and Bruce C. – is what we popularly call a psychopath actually a person with all 3 of the dark triad – narcissism, machivellianism and psychopathy? A person high in psychopathy alone (low in empathy) may be an autistic. Note: women are higher in empathy, men higher in systemizing and Simon Baron-Cohen claims autism is an extreme version of the male brain.
Hi cameron232,
I used to wonder about psychopaths vs the autistic also. A psychopath is unable to love. An autistic person can still do that. Psychopaths have no affective empathy but can have high cognitive empathy. They know exactly what you’re feeling. They just don’t care! Unless they want to manipulate you. They like to do this by using your empathy against you by making you feel sorry for them, e.g., to pretend to be suffering from depression or a bad back.
Autistic people are low in cognitive empathy so can’t manipulate in this way. Nor would they normally want to.
Robert Sapolsky points to research that high empathy does not usually entail helping anyone. If you “feel someone’s pain” the usual response is pain avoidance- to get away from the pained person.
Bruce is the medical man so he can correct anything I’ve said. The good news is that your son is quite different from a psychopath.
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