Probably not, although I imagine most of the common negative outcomes of sociopathy would have been screened off by the fact that I'm an adult with established habits and therefore am unlikely to develop (e.g.) a pattern of casual theft. Sympathy's there for a reason; if I didn't have the instinct I'd still be able to solve social coordination problems, but I'd be missing a heuristic that'd allow me to do it much faster in the 80% case. My impression is that that would cause more problems than it's likely to solve, given that I'm not in a field like law or business where sociopathy would give me a direct comparative advantage.

I'd probably take a pill that reduced my sympathetic instincts rather than eliminating them entirely, though, or allowed me to selectively disable them. I've got the feeling that they're more than optimally active in my particular case.

Do psychopaths only fail to sympathisize with painful emotions, or do they fail to sympathize with all emotions?

No. This would ruin most art and make my sex life exceedingly boring.

I'm inclined to say no, but only because seratonin's a hell of a drug.

I have a pill that will make you a psychopath. You will retain all your intellectual abilities and all understanding of moral theory, but your emotional reactions to others suffering will cease. You will still have the empathy to understand that others are suffering, but you won't feel automatic sympathy for it.

Do you want to take it?

If the pill also removes the ability to feel shame I'll take it.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to most people and wouldn't want myself to have taken it while young. But at 30 my ethical principles are rather firmly entrenched in abstract concepts and powered by ego and stubbornness, rather than the sympathy that originally caused the ideals to be formed. These days the emotions just get in the way---they are far too sensitive to be useful to me and tend to be a significant liability.

Do you want to take it?

As an experiment, yes. If somebody else was more willing to take it than I was, and I could observe them, that would also satisfy my want.

I guess this would depend on (1) the extent to which unnecessary sympathy effects my daily life and (2) how the consideration of hypothetical events would effect the evolution of my moral system with respect to this new constraint.

The former is negligible to me, but the latter seems potentially dangerous. I don't know exactly how not being a psychopath effects my reasoning, so I don't think I would be comfortable taking the pill. Maybe if I could backup my mind...

No, what possible reason could I have to take it?

No. I think that would cause value drift, and I'd rather my values not drift in that fashion, because it would cause me to be less likely to steer reality towards world-states which maximize my current values.