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David_Gerard comments on Open Thread, November 23-30, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Virtue ethics versus consequentialism: The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Psychopath
I had actually been wondering about this recently. People define a psychopath as someone with no empathy, and then jump to "therefore, they have no morals." But it doesn't seem impossible to value something or someone as a terminal value without empathizing with them. I don't see why you couldn't even be a psychopath and an extreme rational altruist, though you might not enjoy it. Is the word "psychopath" being used two different ways (meaning a non-empathic person and meaning a complete monster), or am I missing a connection that makes these the same thing?
You don't notice someone has no empathy until you see them behaving horribly. The word is being used technically to refer to a non-empathic person, but people assume that all non-empaths behave horribly because (with rare exceptions like this neuroscientist) all the visible ones do.
I hadn't realized it before, but the usual take on non-empathic people-- that they will treat other people very badly-- implies that most people think that mistreating people is a very strong temptation and/or reliably useful.
The only acquaintance I've had who was obviously non-empathic appeared to be quite amused by harming people, and he'd talk coldly about how it would be more convenient for him if his parents were dead. If I were a non-empathic person who'd chosen a strategy of following the rules to blend into society, I would find it very inconvenient for people to think I was anything like him, and would therefore attempt to emulate empathy under most conditions. Who would want to cooperate with me in a mutually profitable endeavor if they thought I was the kind of person who would find it funny to pour acetone on their pants and then light it on fire? Having people shudder when they think of me would be a disadvantage in many careers.
This creates a good correlation between visible non-empathy and mistreating people without requiring a belief that mistreating people is generally enjoyable or useful.
Except that it does suggest that mistreating people is fun for at least some people.
Killing people in a computer game is fun for many people.
Without empathy, anything you do with other people is pretty much a game. Finding a way to abuse a person without being punished for it, is like solving a puzzle. One could move to more horrible acts simply as a matter of curiosity; just like a person who completed a puzzle wants to try a more difficult puzzle.
(By the way, this discussion partially assumes that psychopaths are exactly like neurotypical people, just minus the empathy. Which may be wrong. Which may make some of our conclusions wrong.)
One of the principles of interesting computer games is that sometimes a simple action by the player leads to a lot of response from the game. This has an obvious application to why hurting people might be fun.
No it isn't. Why don't you try to crawl out of your typical mind space for a moment?
That's because it usually has good consequences for the player, the violence is cartoony, and NPCs don't really suffer. You could be an incredibly unempathethic person, and still not find hurting real people fun even in the gut level because it has so many other downsides than your mirror neurons firing.
I myself possess very little affective empathy, and find people suggesting that I therefore should be a sadist pretty insulting (and unempathetic). I'm also a doctor, so you people should tremble in fear for my patients :)
It's wrong.
Well yes, it's clearly fun for at least some people. It's just that the observations do not require anyone to think that mistreating people is strongly tempting for many, most, or all people, which is how I read your comment above.
That's exactly how I approach the situation. I find the claim that I can't be moral without empathy just as ridiculous as you would find the claim that you can't be moral without believing in god. I also find moral philosophies that depend on either of them reprehensible. Claiming moral superiority because of thoughs or affects that are easy to feign is just utter status grabbing in my book.
Imagine that you find $1000 on the street. How much would you feel tempted to take it?
Imagine that you meet a person who has $1000 in their pocket. Assuming that you feel absolutely no empathy, how much would you feel tempted to kill the person and take their money? Let's assume that you believe there is almost zero chance someone would connect you with the crime -- either because you are in a highly anonymous situation, or because you are simply too bad at estimating risk.
Not very tempted, actually. In this hypothetical, since I'm not feeling empathy the murder wouldn't make me feel bad and I get money. But who says I have to decide based on how stuff makes me feel?
I might feel absolutely nothing for this stranger and still think "Having the money would be nice, but I guess that would lower net utility. I'll forego the money because utilitarianism says so." That's pretty much exactly what I think when donating to the AMF, and I don't see why a psychopath couldn't have that same thought.
I guess the question I'm getting at is, can you care about someone else and their utility function without feeling empathy for them? I think you can, and saying you can't just boils down to saying that ethics are determined by emotions.
I think that ethics, as it actually happens in human brains, are determined by emotions. What causes you to be an utilitarian?
There's more to it than that. How about upbringing and conditioning? Sure, it made you feel emotions in the past, but it probably has a huge impact on your current behaviour although it might not make you feel emotions now.
Caring about someone else's utility function is practically the definition of empathy.
Nitpick: I've seen a distinction between affective empathy (automatically feeling what other people feel) and cognitive empathy (understanding what other people feel), where the former is what psychopaths are assumed to lack.
In practice, caring without affective empathy isn't intuitive and does take effort, but that's how I view the whole effective altruism/"separating warm fuzzies from utilons" notion. You don't get any warm empathic fuzzy feelings from helping people you can't see, but some of us do it anyway.
That's the way I care and try to care about people.
This is a valid point and it actually makes my statement stronger. Simply understanding what people like/dislike may not be considered 'true empathy', but caring about what they like/dislike certainly is.
If I make chicken soup for my friend when he's sick, and then I feel good because I can see I've made him happy, that's empathy. If I give $100 to a charity that helps someone I will never see, that's not empathy. The reward there isn't "I see someone happy and I feel their joy as my own." It's knowing abstractly that I've done the right thing. I've done both, and the emotional aspects have virtually nothing in common.
Nah, you can care about someones utility function instrumentally. In fact I think that's the way most people care about it most of the time, and have no reliable evidence to suggest otherwise.
I meant 'caring' as in direct influence of their utility on your utility (or, at least, the perception of their utility on your utility), conditionally independent of what their utility results in. If you take 'care' to simply mean 'caring about the outcomes' then yes you're right. Saying that all people are that way seems quite a strong statement, on par with declaring all humans to be psychopaths.
So you meant instrumentally in the first place. I misuderstood you, so retracted both the comment and the downvote.
Definitely not. Psychopaths are far more anomalous than selfish people. Also, I said most people most of the time, not all people all the time.
They could. But if you select a random psychopath from the whole population, what is the probability of choosing an utilitarian?
To be afraid of non-empathic people, you don't have to believe that all of them, without an exception, would harm you for their trivial gain. Just that many of them would.
You would also have to know in what proportion they exist to know that, and you don't have that information precisely because of such presumptions. You wouldn't even know what's normal if displaying certain qualities is useful enough, and detecting whether people really have them isn't reliable enough.
It's possible to steelman that hypothetical to the threshold that yeah, killing someone for their money would be tempting. It wouldn't have much resemblance to real life after that however.
There are several other reasons not to kill someone for their money than empathy, so I'm not sure how your hypothetical illustrates anything relevant.
Conversely, I used to assume that having empathy implied treating others well - that all people who were especially empathetic also wanted to be nice to people.
The nearest term used in contemporary psychiatry is antisocial personality disorder. AFAIK some forensic psychiatrists use the term psychopath, but the criteria are not clear and it's not a recognized diagnosis. Forget about the press the term gets.
Lack of empathy certainly isn't sufficient for either label, and can be caused by other psychiatric conditions.
I don't understand that connection you made. Care to explain?
You can't determine someone is a psychopath via a brain scan yet. You can't even determine someone has Alzheimer's with only a brain scan, even though it's pretty well understood which brain regions are damaged in the disease. Psychopathy is a syndrome, and still quite poorly understood. Note also that there would be significant problems with testing if he went to a psychiatrist after knowing his scan results.
I think that neuroscientist is just trying to make money by claiming he's a psychopath, which of course would be quite a psychopathic thing to do :)
It struck me as relevant to the philosophical question: here's someone who has had to think hard about "what makes a psychopath or sociopath?" He is in his social actions a reasonably normal and productive citizen, but worries about how much of a dick he can be, including potentially.