Morality for Psychopaths

In discussions of what the basis of morality is or should be, I often hear that a good basis for morality is inborn empathy. While this may be a helpful starting point for the majority of the population, some of the population--according to the best estimates of researchers, approximately 1%--do not experience empathy. Empathy, like every other part of the human experience, is caused by the over-abundance or deficiency of neurochemicals or portions of the brain. Although the exact combination of factors causing psychopathy is unknown, the effects are well known: these include the inability of the individual to feel empathy and an impairment in the feeling of remorse.

It is not simply that the psychopath ignores their natural feelings of empathy while they harm their fellow man. They do not experience the sensation of empathy. That chemical/physical process is missing within their brain. So encouraging them to use their empathy to determine a moral course of action is not helpful; a more objective, universal definition should be sought.

I am not saying that the non-religious psychopath is more likely to commit violent crimes than the psychopath who believes in supernatural punishments or rewards. This is not borne out by the data. Supernatural beliefs seem to be incidental, like video game consumption, rather than causal. The single best predictive criteria for violent crime among male psychopaths seems to be having been abused during childhood.

I believe the problem with defining morality for the psychopath lies in the inability of the non-psychopath to understand the experience, the qualia, of the psychopath. Whereas the violent crimes of the non-psychopath are typically crimes of passion, a reaction to a perceived slight or injustice, the violent crimes of the psychopath are deliberate, often meticulously planned. This gives the non-psychopath the impression that the crimes are "senseless," as they are not readily apparent responses to the situation. While a non-psychopath can readily understand the reasoning of a woman who kills her husband after finding him in bed with her sister, for example, they cannot understand the seemingly random murder of prostitutes all over a city with no apparent motive.

In actual fact, the average crimes of the psychopath are not senseless or random. They follow a logical pattern, although this pattern may not make sense to the non-psychopath. The motives are diverse, but include a desire for fame, power, money, sex, or even a dopamine or adrenaline rush. However, the average psychopath is a master of emotional manipulation (this is the lone evolutionary advantage of the condition), and has noticed that people are more lenient towards crimes of passion. This may lead the psychopath to concoct a motive, such as earlier trauma, which confuses whether the trauma is real or invented.

There is also a common misapprehension that most or all psychopaths are violent or killers. This is not true. The average psychopath is successful in business, using their skills of manipulation to oust others from their positions of power and insert themselves in their stead. They are perceived by approximately half of their friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintances as charismatic, energetic, intelligent, caring and charming, while to the other half, they will seem power hungry, manipulative, deceptive, opportunistic, and arrogant. This paradox of personality traits will allow the psychopath to get ahead in societies that value ingenuity and people skills over intelligence, hard work, self-sacrifice, or empathy.

Because the average psychopath is successful and powerful, it can be hard to determine how to effectively reach them with the message that their behaviors are detrimental, and to encourage them to incorporate a better moral code into their thought process. Cognitive behavioral therapies have consistently proven ineffective; instead of encouraging improved behavior, they encourage improved deception about internal change. This makes effectiveness of treatment difficult to gauge.

However, I believe a solution can be found through comparing the female psychopath to the male psychopath. Female psychopathy is grossly misunderstood, under-studied, and misdiagnosed. I believe the reason for this is simple: female psychopaths retain an older mammalian predisposition for nurture and defense of others, while males of the species do not have or need this trait.

My hypothesis is simple: since the advent of mammalian evolution, females of the species have needed to nurture, defend, and feed their young. Males of most mammalian species do not need this trait; but a female mammal that does not, at minimum, care for her young until they are weaned, will not have offspring that survive to adulthood, effectively ending her genetic viability. Thus, the instinct would have developed quickly and spread rapidly.

However, most mammal species do not live in complex social groups of unrelated individuals once they are fully grown. Thus, they do not need instincts governing social interactions, including empathy. In some species, empathy is even a negative trait. A tiger who feels too much empathy will not eat. Our living in large groups, and needing the proper emotions to regulate living in those groups, occurs much later than our being mammals. Thus, the instinct of a female mammal to suckle and protect her young would likely evolve separately from an instinct to feel empathy.

Although these two processes have a similar function (encouraging nurturing and caring interactions), there is no intuitive reason for them to be biologically or physically identical if they evolved millions of years apart. Therefore, it would make sense that one could malfunction or be absent in the individual without causing the other to malfunction. This would lead to female psychopaths retaining the older nurturing instinct, making them appear to have empathy, while what they are actually feeling is biologically, chemically, and physically distinct, while those women who are violent--especially towards their own children--are not, for the most part, psychopaths; they would be expected to be suffering from some other disease.

This does seem to be borne out by the data. Female psychopaths are rarely violent. Women who are violent, especially towards their children, suffer from other disorders, perhaps most commonly post-partum depression. A paper published several years ago on the psychoneuroimmunology of post-partum depression pointed out that a "biological mechanism that has received little attention to date is the bidirectional innate immune system-HPA [hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal] axis association." (The Psychoneuroimmunology of Post-Partum Depression, Elizabeth J. Corwin and Kathleen Pajer. Journal of Women's Health. November 2008, 17(9): 1529-1534. doi:10.1089/jwh.2007.0725.) Or, in layman's terms, post-partum depression, which leads to the murder of approximately 200 children per year in America alone by their own mothers, is probably due to the immune response's recognition of a foreign object (i.e., the fetus), and its interplay with the brain's hormone-regulation chemicals.

How does this relate to the search for an effective treatment of male psychopathy? Because the brain of the female psychopath is so different, the interaction of her nurturing instinct and her desire to manipulate others for personal gain forms a distinct moral code. This leads to a system where the woman does manipulate others, but often not in a way that causes them direct, visible harm; the harm is more internalized, where they blame themselves for her actions and her self-injurious behaviors. The female psychopath will rarely make it easy for others identify her as the source of the problem; but the damage she does is much less severe.

Additionally, and crucially, the female psychopath is not always the beneficiary of her manipulation. Because she retains the instinct to nurture and defend, she may create situations where she is seen as the victim, not for her own benefit, but for the benefit of others. For example, there was a bowling league, where a young female psychopath felt a deep sense of kinship and tribalism for her other league members. An individual on a competing team slighted an individual on her team. She set up a situation where she enacted revenge on the individual who slighted her friend, and then allowed herself to be punched in the face, seeing that the adults who could not hear what was happening had noticed a brewing situation and that if she was punched, the person who had slighted her friend would be ejected from the league.

This situation provided no perceivable benefit for the psychopath; she got a black eye, while the slight against her friend was comparatively insignificant. However, it did have personal meaning to her, as she valued her tribal identity over temporary pain. Again, the motives of the psychopath may not make much sense to the non-psychopath, but they have deep significance to the psychopath. The female psychopath may be inclined to fight for a cause, even become a martyr for the cause; although this has no perceivable benefit to her herself, it does have a far-reaching benefit, which she cares about.

Another example of this may be controversial figure Anita Sarkeesian. Although many perceive her as a fraud, because she systematically extorts money from the gullible while failing to deliver on her promises, endorses known con-artists and barely legal multi-level marketing schemes, and has formed a career based on professional victimhood, to many, she is a hero. While it is true that she complains about the trope of "damsels in distress", while simultaneously portraying herself as receiving "credible" threats while failing to provide evidence for them and acquiring monetary and social gain for her cancelling of events based on these apparently non-existent threats, she is clearly performing her actions with intention and purpose. She has effectively convinced much of her audience that she is a heroine figure, while she does the things she complains are misogynist tropes. She has set herself up as a moral crusader, although her cause is dubious at best.

So a decent moral principle that the female psychopath can readily internalize is to do the most good and the least harm for the most people. Although they may confuse personal gain and prestige with doing the most good, it is fairly simple to redirect their ambitions towards helping others, because of their innate desire to nurture. This is why many female psychopaths get degrees in mental health and social sciences (shown by the high number of women in the industry having high scores on psychopathy checklists): their desire to learn about and manipulate human emotions has been subverted to encourage them to provide emotional support for others.

If this principle can be extended to male psychopaths, perhaps by encouraging them to follow a more sociologically logical path, seeking the betterment of the species as opposed to personal gain, we may at last be able to effectively treat male psychopathy. Therefore, I encourage the use of "do the most good and least harm for the most people" as a basis for objective morality instead of an attempt to teach empathy, at least for the psychopathic population.