this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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Psychopathy is a spectrum. It undermines your values, makes you indifferent to normative and empirical reality, and robs you of all compunction, until the only salient feature of life is your own ego.
Many of those you find confusing fall somewhere on that spectrum. It’s a grim diagnosis, but you can use morally obvious cases to determine how bad things are. Opinions on abortion are a litmus test, as are attitudes towards obviously cruel and unvirtuous people, such as Donald Trump and various other celebrities.
That is not how this works at all. There isn't an actual medical diagnosis called psychopath. The closest we have is ASPD. I am fairly sure people with ASPD don't have as much difficulty with empirical reality as you are talking about. Delusions are more of a psychosis thing.
I also don't think it's fair to judge someone on an issue like abortion when entire religions shove the idea that abortion is wrong down your throat even when being a child. The indoctrination is strong. Stop blaming the victims here.
Psychopathy is detectable on an MRI and involves morphological abnormalities in some specific regions. Like all neuropathologies, psychopathy falls on a spectrum.
A Systematic Literature Review of Neuroimaging of Psychopathic Traits.
Your implication about religiosity is that it can influence moral attitudes. But notice that many religious persons are immune to indoctrination regarding abortion, child genital mutilation, and the like, recognizing these issues as morally obvious. Why? Probably because they have the mental means to do so.
Do you really think opinions on abortion are a litmus test? You can spin either camp as the psychopathic one, after all. I'm on Team Babykill but I don't think everybody against abortion is a psychopath, it's closer to a philosophical issue.
Yes, actually, I do.
There’s an academic survey that goes out every few years, and there’s more consensus among philosophers that abortion is permissible than about literally anything else. There’s less agreement that the external world exists.
Being against abortion requires one or more of these assumptions:
Any one of these assumptions is, frankly, insane.
People are irrational, that's hardly news. I appreciate this issue is important to you but that doesn't make them psychopaths. I shouldn't think a psychopath would care much either way, beyond which course of action might benefit them at the time. Again, this is coming from someone who flushed an aborted foetus down the toilet, so I'm really not precious about it.
I agree, but the fact that they don’t care is the problem. Abortion might be a means to an end, a way to immiserate a target demographic. Without compunctions and moral impulses, anti-abortion laws, witch-hunting, and racism become viable vehicles for collective punishment and self-gratification.
The Sociopath Next Door is full of case studies from a Harvard psychiatrist specializing in sociopathy. The extremes of the disorder are obviously disturbing, but what happens when the neuropathology is sub-diagnostic?
My interest is in how psychopathy connects to people’s epistemic hygiene. That is, the ability, habits, and motivation to correctly construe reality. Think about it. Moral facts are just like any other kinds of fact. Someone with ASPD would be unresponsive or insensitive to moral facts (as you said). But epistemic facts have the same flavor, and pathological lying is symptomatic of psychopathy.
What has to go wrong in a brain for a person to lose concern about misconstruing or misrepresenting reality?
What has to go "right", though? I think that presupposes an idealised state of human development that can be deducted from. I'm not sure what the neutral form is for a human, but those kind of beliefs are so common I wonder if the pathology is baked-in, so to speak.
Plus, some people really do think embryos are people! They get triggered by abortion as if you killed their dog in front of them. I happen to think they're wrong, but the urge to anthropomorphise things is very strong, and there's at least some logic behind their belief.
If you don’t think that mental illness exists, then there’s no point having this conversation.
Yes, and some are flat-earthers (truly) and Trump supporters, and some compulsively eat dirt. That’s kind of the point. Insanity is strange and we want to understand it better.
I'm English, that's how I spell it. You've outed yourself as a bit of a twat, so I'm going to leave it there.
Whereas you don’t think mental illness exists. I guess we all have our burdens to bear.
Of course I do! You must have misunderstood me. Not to worry, though.
Really interesting view here, thank you.
Looking at the groups of people that are so hard for me to understand (MAGA, KKK, flat-earthers, etc.) because of how ridiculous their worldviews are, as some sort of psychopathic mental illness on a scale from sort of psychopathic, to full-blown psychopath makes alot of weird sense. Kind of disturbing and comforting to me at the same time.
it really does not (specifically putting flat-earthers together with the other two groups). maybe don't take psychiatry lessons from two paragraph lessons by author with unknown qualification on the internet 😆