Psychopaths know right from wrong but don’t care

“The behavior of psychopaths is, without doubt, morally inappropriate, including murder, sexual molestation, fraud, and arson. Further, clinical analyses show that they present abnormal emotional profiles, as well as problems with inhibitory control, often leading to both reactive and instrumental aggression (Blair, 1995, 1997, 2008; Blair and Cipolotti, 2000; Blair et al., 1995; Glenn and Raine, 2008; Kiehl, 2006; Kiehl et al., 2001; Raine and Yang, 2006). What is unclear is the extent to which psychopaths suffer from damage to morally-specific knowledge that, in healthy individuals, guides intuitive judgments of right and wrong independently of their moral actions. On the one hand, studies indicate that psychopaths, both adults and juveniles, show a diminished capacity to distinguish between conventional and moral transgressions (Blair, 1995, 1997, 2008; Smetana, 2005; Turiel, 1998, 2005). For example, unlike healthy adults, adult psychopaths will typically judge as equally forbidden transgressions in which a person wears pyjamas to a restaurant (conventional) and a person who gratuitously hits a waiter in the restaurant (moral). Psychopaths also show diminished inhibitory control, a deficit that may contribute to their impulsive behavior, especially in the context of violence (Blair, 2008; Blair and Cipolotti, 2000; Kiehl, 2006). This research has led to the view that because of their emotional deficits, psychopaths have corresponding deficits in moral knowledge which, coupled with poor inhibitory control, leads to morally inappropriate behavior (Blair, Mitchell, and Blair, 2005; Nichols, 2002; Prinz, 2008).

Further support for the idea that the deficit in moral psychology seen among psychopaths is due to the deficit in emotional processing, comes from the wealth of research showing a significant relationship between emotional experience and moral judgment. For example, dozens of studies now show that you can prime people’s emotional state, and as a result, change their judgment of particular moral scenarios. For instance, putting people in a happy state is associated with a greater tendency to allow someone to be used as a means to some greater good (Valdesolo and DeSteno, 2006); associating a neutral word with disgust under hypnosis is associated with more severe moral condemnation (Wheatley and Haidt, 2006); inducing disgust is associated with more severe moral judgments (Schnall et al., 2008).”