Essay Sample on Impaired Morality: Absence of Change and Moral Law

Empathy is known to play a critical role in moral philosophy as the basis of extending the self to outward persons. Colloquially, it is to do to other agents as one would to the self. Those agents who share psychopathic characteristics- one of which is the impairment of empathy- are argued either to be removed from the domain of moral responsibility as rabid animals or subject to its laws as conscious criminals. In this essay, I will argue that cases of psychopathy reveal the following connections between empathy and morality: that empathy-backed negative emotions are catalysts for moral change, and that empathy plays a primary role in distinguishing between moral law and convention. I will conclude that cases of psychopathy show that defections in empathy produce the inability to acquire deep moral understanding. However, this inability is not conducive to the avoidance of moral punishment. 

Historically, the picture of psychopathy is a developing sketch. It is typical to purport features such as a disregard for the future, impairment of fear in others and oneself, aggression, and externalization of blame. However, it is important to avoid homogenizing as the extent of the impairment is critical for assessing moral capacity. According to Vargas, there are four main features of psychopathy: critically impaired impulse control, lack of shame and lack of response to harm inflicted onto others, difficulty making distinctions between conventions and moral law, and lastly, that there is no treatment. The impaired ability to feel negatively oriented social emotions, primarily shame, guilt, and remorse seems to be the most defining characteristic across cases. In the rare case that a psychopath is able to apply blame upon themselves, it is not accompanied by a feeling of remorse, and thus not conducive to modifying future behavior. 

 By demonstrating what is left of moral choice when negative social emotions are removed, we begin to understand that guilt, blame, and shame function as integral social corrective mechanisms in unimpaired agents. Psychopathy demonstrates that impaired empathy and impaired morality appear alongside each other and are connected. It follows that guilt, blame, and shame require empathy to process, as one must be able to understand the consequences of their actions on others. While a psychopath can understand the wrongdoing that they have inflicted upon another agent, they necessarily must care about that agent’s quality of being to avoid the action. With impaired empathy, the psychopath can identify right and wrong but does not feel any motivation to act in accordance with it. This importantly implies that empathy-backed negative social emotions are motivators for moral change in functioning agents. 

    We also see an intuitive distinction arise between moral law and social convention. Psychopaths are often impaired in understanding this difference, making all moral rules indistinguishable. Convention- such as driving on the right side of the road- has little distinction from moral law, an example of which would be not inflicting suffering onto another “just to see” (Vargas, 4). For unimpaired agents, this lack of distinction in psychopaths implies that empathy plays a role in drawing distinctions between moral law and conventional rule. An unimpaired agent can intuitively sense when a moral rule is binding to all persons on the basis of transgressing human rights. There is some sense of identification with personhood and the personhood of others that allows one to make such a judgment as to what is binding to all persons. A psychopath is missing some aspect of this identification with empathetic social consciousness, demonstrating a connection between a lack of social consciousness, an impairment of empathy, and a following impairment of morality.

One may take issue with either of the following theoretical points in my essay: that negative emotions are motivators for social change, or that intuitively understanding moral law requires empathetic identification with the personhood of others. Such a person might argue that right and wrong may be distinguished from each other without empathy, and that moral functioning is possible without empathy-backed negative emotion. To objectors, I offer up the experiment: what is empirically observable in agents without these things? Psychopaths, deficient in these two attributes and empathy, often view and discuss transgressions like physical harm and parking tickets as equally weighted violations. Additionally, without the obstacle of negative emotion, the psychopathic agent can perform a transgressive act without emotive consequences, and actively does so in empirical cases. I grant my objector that psychopaths are often adept at distinguishing what is right and what is wrong, but hold that distinguishing between wrongs is impaired without empathy. Right and wrong become a series of insignificant, indistinguishable, conventional constructs to an agent when identification with the social consciousness of others is not established. Lastly, the condition is unfixable, meaning that there is no way transgressions can be identified without empathy and no way to motivate morality without negative emotion, and the objector’s claim is absurd. 

It seems that if psychopaths are unable to properly navigate morality, we must raise the question of how responsible agents must morally deal with psychopaths. If psychopaths are outside the social moral domain, are unimpaired agents justified in trying to act morally to a psychopath? If they are not, are they justified in acting cruelly towards them? If psychopaths are morally responsible, how ought a psychopath to act to stay civilized? Regardless, it is highly apparent that defections in empathy produce the inability to acquire deep moral understanding, negative emotions are catalysts for moral alignment, and empathy helps distinguish between convention and moral law.