Clarity comments on Not By Empathy Alone - Less Wrong

19 Post author: gwern 05 October 2011 12:36AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (108)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Clarity 17 September 2015 12:33:30PM 0 points [-]

Is it just me or is Blair's logic incomplete?

Lack of empathy is a diagnostic criterion for psychopathy (Hare, 1991), and Blair shows that psychopaths also suffer from a profound deficit in moral competence. In particular, they do not draw a distinction between moral rules (e.g., don’t hit people) and conventional rules (e.g., rules about what clothing to wear in school). Blair concludes that psychopaths’ failure to draw this distinction indicates that they do not comprehend the essence of moral rules. When they say that something is “morally wrong,” they don’t really understand what these words mean. Blair speculates that this failure is a direct result of the empathy deficit.

Some gems for behavioural mechanism designers:

Studies using economic games have shown that, when angry, people are even willing to pay significant costs to punish those who fail to cooperate (Fehr and Gächter, 2002)16.

For example, Weyant (1978)14 found that people who are made to feel good by being given an easy test to solve are almost twice as likely, when compared to neutral controls, to volunteer for a charity that requires going door to door collecting donation