Psychopaths and Objective Morality

In “How Psychopaths Threaten Moral Rationalism, or Is it Irrational to Be Amoral?”, Shaun Nichols asserts that “the psychopath is often considered to be the epitome of evil, yet the facts about psychopaths seem to pose serious problems for the most promising avenues for securing moral objectivity. So, the very individuals whose actions elicit our strongest condemnation provide evidence against theories that would allow us to regard moral violations as objectively wrong.” To arrive at this conclusion, he appeals to evidence that the capacity for moral judgment does not resonate with a rational deficit, but rather with a deficit in affective capabilities; “if anything much like these affect-based accounts is right, then it looks like we have a non-rationalist explanation (Nichols advocates sentimentalism) of the psychopath’s deficit in moral judgment” (22).

A question that I have is whether a sentimentalist or other non-rational account of moral capabilities could account for moral objectivity. Even if Nichols is correct, that psychopathy supports a sentimentalist moral account, it appears that psychopaths do support objective morality given our capacity to judge psychopathy as a maladaptive feature of humanity existence. Furthermore, even if moral judgment derives from affective capacities, is it possible to maintain a rationalistic account? Perhaps moral judgment requires both rational and affective capabilities. More later….

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