Do Psychopaths Have Conscience, Morality? Narcissists?

do psychopaths have a conscience can narcissists be moral can psychopaths do the right thing because they feel guilt or shame or adhere to social mores and conventions like all of us all of you can narcissists act ethically 25 years ago i coined the phrase communal narcissist or pro-social narcissist and i described a narcissist who is invested emotionally in being morally superior but that's not the same thing even psychopaths can be pro-social and communal actually i have a video on this channel which describes communal and pro-social psychopaths psychopaths who work for the greater good are pillars of the community and benefit humanity that's not what i'm talking about i'm asking whether psychopaths can have this internal small voice this overriding introject that tells them what you're doing is wrong don't do it it's not okay it shouldn't be this way you don't have to do this this voice is known as conscience and it's the outcome of a process in childhood known in adolescence known as socialization parents are agents of socialization they bring to the child the values of society and then the child internalizes these values and they become his so can we find psychopaths who have this small flickering voice keeps telling them don't do this it's wrong can we find narcissists or have this introject that inhibits their actions limits activities to socially commendable and condoned to the socially acceptable sublimates their actions are there such things to be pro-social to be communal is to act in society in ways which are beneficial to others but there's no inner conviction the communal and pro-social narcissists and psychopaths don't have anything inside their empty anyhow they don't have anything inside that compels them to act this way they act this way because i don't know of appearances because they want narcissistic supply because they're afraid because these are all ulterior motivations these are all the wrong reasons to act in ways which are altruistic and charitable and loving and caring wrong reasons you can do the right things for the wrong reasons conscience is the right reason conscience is the voice of society inside you your upbringing your childhood environment that had conditioned you or shaped you into someone who doesn't harm others shockingly the answer to the question do psychopaths have conscious is not decided and not clear and today i'm going to take you on a grand tour with the wackening daily dose of philosophy psychology history and i'm doing all this to demonstrate how smart i am not because i care about you conscience what on earth is this okay my name is i'm the author of malignant self-love you guessed it narcissism revisited and end and end i'm a professor of psychology in various universities where suffering students are subjected to my dire tribes in dogmatic indoctrination also known as higher education okay let's get to business and get serious but before i go there service announcement i'm going to be in romania july 1st to july 11th if you want to organize an event questions and answers i will do it free of charge just get in touch with me assemble 20 30 people find a venue and i will be there also i'm available for one-on-one in-person counseling in bucharest i'm going to be in bucharest okay there was a psychologist there is a psychologist his name was eliot turiel and he discovered that young children don't react the same to situations which involve morality so one when one child hits another child uh he reacts one way and when he wears pajamas to school he reacts another way so to real made the distinction between morality that involves harm not harming other people not beating them up not you know morality that involves injustice and violation of right and so conventional morality versus uh regular morality so we have moral transgressions and conventional transgressions conventional transgression transgressions is not behaving according to societal and cultural expectations as i said we're in pajamas to school moral transgression is harming other people violating their rights and causing them injustice now this to ria's work with children unleashed a hillstone of studies analysis arguments debates philosophers entered the fray and they asked questions about the impact of culture on what constitutes a moral transgression in some cultures behaving against moral against society's conventions is a moral transgression richard schweder and jonathan hayt h-a-i-h-a-i-d-t they argued that to realize distinction between conventional transgressions and moral transgressions is not universal because there are cultures especially non-western cultures which regard a much wider range of behaviors as moral they define many behaviors as misbehaviors because they are misbehaviors they are immoral so this sparked a huge debate about moral cognition in various cultures and so at some point people said okay we can debate this till doomsday comes let's do some empirical work let's go to ground let's go to seed let's see what's happening in reality with flesh and blood people is there really a distinction between moral and conventional transgression is there an internalized version of conscious what is the moral responsibility of people and so they decided to study psychopaths when someone judges that an action is morally right or morally required thing to do usually they go and do it like if you tell yourself i ought to do this this is what i should do this is the right thing to do in the majority of cases you would go on you would proceed to do it now that's not always true for example majority of people say that cheating romantic in romantic relationships adultery extramarital affairs are wrong and yet huge portions of a population some at a very least 40 if not 60 go on to cheat but with the exception with this with a few radical or extreme exceptions in daily life normal pedestrian traffic meeting people and so on you are likely to follow the edicts and mores in morality which are embedded in your mind if you say this is morally right this is the morally required thing to do you're likely to follow it but but then why it raises the question why so there are two versions of why the two answers to this question first answer is internalism it's the belief that motivation is internal to moral judgment moral judgment itself motivates all you need to have is moral judgment and then the moral judgment will act it doesn't need to be mediated through will or through desire it's enough just to have moral judgment this is internalism externalism says that moral motivation happens when a moral judgment combines with will and desire and the content of the judgment is related to the content of the desire so we rationalize the action in other words internalism says you have you have morality it's embedded in your mind and it tells you how to act externalism says you want to act in certain ways and you use moral judgment to rationalize your actions to justify them somehow okay eternalism externalism and so rosati uh wrote this she says debates between internalists and externalists often center on the figure of the a moralist the person without morality person who apparently makes moral judgments while remaining wholly unmoved to comply with them can we find such a person someone who is aware of morality knows to tell right from wrong [Music] realizes that he should act in certain ways in order to not harm others and then just doesn't care of course we can it's called a psychopath or a narcissist so internally internalists insist that the a moralist doesn't exist shockingly by the way in my view there are whole groups of very very venerable and respectable philosophers and psychologists who say that there is no such thing as an immoral person the a moralist some um robert hare strangely wrote the following the person who appears to be making a moral judgment while remaining unmoved must really be speaking insincerely she or he judges an act right only in inverted commas so robert says psychopaths and narcissists are faking moral judgment they don't ever they don't really have it they just they're just imitating they're just emulating they're scoping other people they're copycats i beg to differ as i usually beg to differ with robert here i think his experience was so extremely and severely limited he spent all of all of his professional career in prisons and i don't think he has a real grasp of life i'm terribly sorry i would prefer martha stout for example and and her way collectly to robert here anyhow some philosophers believe that psychopaths provide a prima facie challenge to this claim some philosophers say there is there are people who do have moral judgment and then just don't care enough to act on these moral judgments now psychopaths ironically are diagnosed mostly using using a test designed by robert hair in 1991 the pclr test these are individuals psychopaths are individuals who appear to be cognitively totally normal as distinct from this narcissist uh psychopaths don't have many or at all cognitive distortions narcissism is is a fantasy defense so it is based on falsifying reality and falsifying your self-image and self-perception via grandiosity narcissism is a massive cognitive distortion while psychopaths are actually cognitively normal psychopaths don't have impaired reasoning abilities which many narcissists do the narcissist's ability to reason and to analyze cogently and rationally and so is very is damaged he has a problem with this not so psychopaths and psychopaths are aware of and seem able to comprehend moral rules social rules social cues etc they're actually very astute they have the analysis is called empathy without the narcissist impediments to acting on his cold empathy without cognitive biases cognitive distortions lack of reasoning and so narcissists are far inferior to psychopaths in their ability to function actually which causes a lot of confusion especially online among self-styled experts okay but again as distinct from narcissists psychopaths often engage in antisocial behavior fewer narcissists fewer narcissists act anti-socially few narcissists act against other people and for the simple reason that narcissists depend on other people for narcissistic supply the psychopath doesn't so he doesn't care about other people he has no guilt he has no remorse and his behavior is usually morally apparent morally deviate that's the psychopath psychopaths apparently can and often do make moral judgments they're great some of them are moralists like they you know they know moral theory and moral history history of morality and so on but they're not motivated to follow up they don't comply with the moral judgment it's like the moral judgment is a piece of austere sterile knowledge which is not connected to their emotions motivations and so on it remained like you know reading about the composition of the sun or i don't know a history of the 14th century it's like irrelevant they have moral judgment but it's just a text and it's it's uh an over text with no hidden text in the sen in the sense that it doesn't motivate the psychopath to modify to modify his behavior and this presents a massive problem for internalism because internalism says if you have moral judgment you're going to act it's almost robotic almost automatic and here we have psychopaths they have moral judgment and they definitely do not act roskis in 2003 said that psychopaths appear to be walking counter examples to internalism so there was a paper published by the psychologist james blair in 1995 he took the experiments of turial with children the moral conventional distinction the moral conventional task and he applied these tests which were originally designed for children he applied this test to incarcerated psychopathic offenders so he selected psychopaths who were in prison and they had average intelligence and then he selected a control group of same offenses but non-psychopathic offenders all of these were charged by the way with murder or manslaughter so serious offenders so he had two groups one of them psychopaths one of them not and he administered the two real tests of moral conventional tasking to these two groups the non-psychopathic offenders reacted in a way which social domain theories had predicted in other words they reacted like normal adults even though these people were charged with murder and men slaughter and other very nice behaviors when they were confronted with moral dilemmas and with non-conventional behavior they recoiled they said no they put a boundary they put a border they modified their behavior they so they act they reacted totally normally like normal people that's the non-psychopathic offenders the psychopathic offenders were notably different they responded in the same way to moral transgressions and to conventional transgressions they saw no difference for example between killing someone and getting a parking ticket for them both these were wrong but wrong just you know cognitively they just labeled it they say yeah it's wrong but there was no emotional reaction definitely no intention to modify behavior that just labeled the thing wrong and there were similar results where children were compared directly with psychopathic children with contact disorder children with psychopathic tendencies were compared to non-psychopathic children and these non-psychopathic children they had behavioral and emotional problems but they were not they didn't have contact disorder they were not children psychopaths and once again blair in 1997 and he compared these two groups of children and the results were more or less the same so some authors said okay psychopaths do not have normal moral concepts their moral concepts are impaired i refer you to literature articles by prince in 2007 shredder and warskis and nichols in 2010 nichols in 2004 et cetera everyone was saying because psychopaths react differently to to other offenders because psychopathic children react differently to non-psychopathic children it must mean that something is wrong with their morality otherwise they would have reacted the same and say and so can kenneth and fine in 2007 summed it up and said they do not mean what the rest of us mean when we are using moral terms when we're using moral language so when when they say the word wrong when psychopaths and narcissists use the word wrong they actually mean something different they don't use the word word wrong the way normal people do healthy people do socialized people do the way non-psychopaths and non-narcissists do narcissists and psychopaths give different meaning to right and wrong moral immoral should and ought if the this it's a different vocabulary different dictionary if this is right then psychopaths do not really have moral judgment and do not they do not make moral judgment and so there's no problem with internalism as internalism says moral judgment leads to moral action and then if psychopaths have moral judgment and they don't act morally then internalism is defunct is wrong but if psychopaths don't have moral judgment because they misinterpret and mislabel morality they don't understand the word right the same way you do they don't understand the word wrong the same way you do so they don't have moral judgment then internalism is okay because now psychopaths and narcissists don't have moral judgment they don't act morally it's perfectly okay but then in 2016 kumal argued that blair's results were either misinterpreted or over interpreted he said the studies of blair indicate that psychopaths don't have a full grasp of moral concepts that's that much is right but kumau said these studies didn't show that psychopaths completely fail completely fail to grasp moral concepts so what kumar said is it's not that they mislabel or misinterpret moral concepts it's that they have partial moral concepts psychopaths don't make full-fledged moral judgments they do make proper moral judgments primitive basic moral judgments and so kumbaya says that the implications of research on psychopaths is these implications are less straightforward than we had assumed we need to be more subtle more discerning and more discriminated said kumal orskis in 2007 largely agreed he argued that studies of psychopaths do not establish that they lack moral concepts or an adequate understanding of them accordingly or that they are incapable of anything but moral judgments in an inverted comma sense i said no way the blair experiments are not showing this neil levy neil levy argued that psychopaths ought to be unquoting or to be excused moral responsibility for their wrongdoing because their failure to grasp the moral conventional distinction indicates that they do not understand what makes a moral norm moral that was in 2007 as well as you see the debate was raging people didn't know how to interpret the fact that psychopaths were using words like right and wrong should and ought you know on the one hand and on the other hand they were acting not in accordance to what they were saying so there are two possibilities either they don't know what they're saying or they know what they're saying and they don't care psychopaths know that their actions are widely perceived to be wrong they know well you know when you murder someone in most cases you know when you murder someone that you know everyone thinks it's wrong but psychopaths are unable to grasp the distinctive nature the essence the significance of the wrongness of these actions in other words they know that something they're doing something they're acting in some way they're being defined or reckless or they harm someone or they've defraud someone they call someone you know they do they do bad things to people and they know that almost all of humanity would regard this as wrong but then when they try to interpret to themselves first of all why is it wrong what is the distinctive nature of this act that renders it wrong and what is the significance of an act being wrong they come up short they they say when i harm other people it's wrong because it's against the rules in other words harming other people is not wrong because it's wrong to harm other people it's bad you shouldn't do it they say it's bad because you shouldn't do it they don't say it's bad end of story they say it's bad only because you shouldn't do it in other words breaking the rules is what makes an action wrong for example if there were no rule if there were no law that says that you shouldn't murder people then murdering people would not be wrong according to a psychopath according to a psychopath only breaking the rules makes an action and act wrong if there's no rule or law then the act is not inherently wrong so the psychopath doesn't recognize that there are choices decisions actions acts courses of action which are inherently wrong you don't need to be told that they're wrong it doesn't have to be a rule or a law that says that they're wrong it doesn't have to be actionable you don't have to be persecuted in court it's you don't have to you just know that it's wrong you don't do that psychopath doesn't understand it he says wait a minute let me see what society says our society says it's wrong for example there's a law in the books or there's a rule spoken or unspoken society says it wrong then probably is wrong it has to look to others to derive the wrongness of his actions for them from the psychopath to steal from someone to kill someone to hurt someone is not more wrong than double parking or line jumping or going nude in the street and it's more not moral they're all equally wrong why they're all equally wrong because all of them violate the rules of society and even then it's wrong for society because the last the narcissist and the psychopath they are a law unto themselves it's my way or the highway i make my own rules so yes it's wrong but it's wrong for society society says it's wrong the kind and degree of wrongness the blame that attaches to the infringement of rules is very different than the much less significant um kind and degree attaching to moral wrongs in other words the psychopath monitors is there blame is there is there um guilt is there possibility for punishment he monitors this and he doesn't care a fig almost whether what he's doing is morally wrong the psychopaths all offenses are conventional never moral that's that's the two real distinction psychopaths see everything as conventional i repeat the kind and degree of wrongness and therefore blame that attaches to infringement of the rules is very different and usually much less significant than the kind and degree attaching to moral wrongs because there are no moral wrongs only conventional wrongs there's only breaking the rules not whether breaking the rules is wrong breaking the rules is wrong but not what whether the action that broke the rules is wrong the action is neutral whatever the psychopath does is morally neutral only when society frowns upon it criticizes the psychopath and punishes him only then he would admit that in the eyes of society what he had done is wrong nothing at all is serious not even murder the degree's responsibility small is smaller much smaller than for a normal agent if a normal person kills someone and if a psychopath kills someone theoretically we should hold the psychopath less accountable because he is incapable of perceiving moral wrongs he is capable of perceiving only conventional wrongs he is capable of reacting like a domesticated or tamed or broken animal reacting to to reinforcements positive and negative it's very primitive it's a binary machine so if it's not his fault if he's incapable of morality in effect i mean why are we punishing him and there are grounds for excusing psychopaths from morality altogether said levy in 2007 levy vy back to finding kenneth fein and kenneth actually reached a very similar conclusion they said while psychopathic offenders certainly appear to know what acts are prohibited by society or the law and therefore know that their transgressions are legally wrong they do not appear to have the capacity to judge and act to be morally wrong we would argue that psychopathic offenders who fail to understand the distinction between moral wrongs and conventional wrongs cannot be considered to be moral agents now that doesn't mean that psychopaths should not go to prison they should because they know that they had done something illegal they had broken the law but they don't have a corresponding reaction to the violation of a moral obligation that's why they don't feel shame or guilt or remorse since levy fine and kenneth and others they took moral responsibility to be necessary for criminal responsibility they said that psychopaths are not criminally responsible i beg to disagree because the psychopath knows that what he's doing is punishable is actionable society will punish him for this he realizes this in advance so the terms of the social contract are utterly clear and the law is in the books the psychopath chooses to defy society and to break the law and so he should definitely be punishable that he doesn't internalize this that he has no guilt no shame and no remorse has nothing to do with the legal aspect criminal responsibility has nothing to do with how you feel about it so i disagree strongly with these scholars and many others do mabon for example in 2008 vargas and nichols in 2007 they noted that despite the apparent inability to distinguish moral from conventional transgressions psychopaths are sensitive to the fact that their norms prohibiting a wide range of behaviors and that violating these moments can lead to sanctions so why shouldn't they be sanctioned maybe mabon said that this awareness is enough to establish both moral and criminal responsibility valgus and nichols noted that i'm quoting we don't we do think it is appropriate to blame and punish transgressors of conventional rules end of story whether they're psychopaths or not why they ask is this not enough to blame and punish psychopaths in their right 2007. david shoemaker in 2011 was very skeptical generally about drawing any conclusions about the moral and criminal responsibility of psychopaths based on the studies of blair he draw attention to critiques of the work of toriel and his tradition by nissan n-i-s-s-a-n to 1987 haid 1993 kelly and others in 2007 and so on this whole whole debate about the two real world showmakers said that judgments about this seriousness of seriousness of a transgression they play a central role in blair's version of the moral conventional task he challenges shoemaker challenges the assumption that moral transgressions are judged to be more serious than conventional transgressions he said that some conventional transgressions can be actually so serious that they're even more serious than moral transgressions and there are many moral transgressions which are minor he said blair said that all moral transgressions are more serious than conventional transgressions to remind you conventional transgressions mean breaking the expectations and rules and mores of society so blair said that they are inferior they are less serious than moral transgressions and shoemaker notes correctly that it depends schumacher makes reference to a study by elizabeth fitton f-i-t-t-o-n and ann dowker and these two controlled for seriousness they rated the seriousness of the moral transgressions and the conventional transgressions and they found and i'm quoting what the so-called conventional transgressions matched the so-called moral transgressions in perceived seriousness normal children failed to differentiate the domains in terms of rule contingency perceived of obligations and the justifications used these children tended to judge that the conventional behaviors were more obligatory than the moral behaviors which is pretty interesting in other words when seriousness or ranking of seriousness was introduced even normal children reacted as psychopaths do they considered conventional transpirations to be more important than moral ones take into account the children in adolescence value peer pressure and peer input and peer feedback more than parental input more than morality here we see a situation where what their peers have to say what society as represented by the peer group has to say matters to children in adolescence and renders them clinically psychopaths because they are more reactive to conventions than to morality they consider obeying conventions following conventions much more important than following morality and so there was a paper that schumacher presented in 2002 as early as 2002 in the mosaic conference in liverpool of all places titled qualitative and quantitative dimensions of domain differentiation a delightful read with your morning coffee back to shoemaker his skepticism about the philosophical importance of blair's findings was reinforced a year later by work by ahawani and colleagues in israeli they undertook a conceptual replication of blair's prisoner study they used a modified version of the moral conventional task test and they focused on authority independence they also use the forced choice format to minimize strategic responding or manipulative responses so the study was very interesting the construction study was very interesting and his associates they chose they selected 109 incarcerated criminal offenders mind you in blair's original work there were only 10 psychopathic participants and 10 non-psychopaths in only studies there were 109 and to assess the level of psychopathy for each inmate participant they used how else hairs revised pclr revised psychopathy checklist but they also applied two other measures to other tests the crucial finding was that total psychopathy score did not predict performance on the moral conventional task so they have demolished blair in his work uh when he concludes his allies concluded that contrary to earlier claims which is a polite way of saying you know blair was was talking nonsense contrary to earlier claims insufficient data exists to infer that psychopathic individuals cannot know what is morally wrong today we tend to think that psychopaths know them well what is morally wrong know what is conventionally wrong and they just don't care the defined the consumations the hate authority it's my way of the highway i make my own rules as i go along so it seems the psychopaths do have moral judgment and don't act on it that invalidates completely the internalism approach the moral and conventional tool to real stool is not the only one that psychologists have and not the only one that psychologists have used to explore deficits in moral reasoning there was there's a survey of literature by borg and sinat armstrong 2013 and they reviewed the findings of studies with psychopaths using the moral conventional task and five other tools the conclusion is is problematic it's it's not clear the studies support a tentative and qualified conclusion if psychopaths have any deficits or abnormalities in their moral judgments these deficits are very subtle much more subtle than what could be expected or inferred from their blatantly antisocial abnormal behavior in other words if you just observe psychopaths psychopaths in the wild psychopaths in prison if you just observe them they behave as if they have no clue what is morality they kill they still they defraud you name it they don't care it's like they have no moral judgment but when you test them using using blair's own methodologies and tutorials on tests and five other measures when you test them you discover that they're actually pretty nuanced psychopaths are pretty nuanced pretty subtle when it comes to morality they do have moral judgments the deficits or abnormalities in their moral judgment is difficult to discern difficult to find out it suggests that i'm quoting psychopaths might not have any specific deficits in moral cognition despite their differences in moral action moral emotion and empathy so what do we make of all this it seems that the problem is not a lack of moral judgment but a lack of empathy if you have only moral judgment and no empathy you are not motivated to act on your moral judgment the internalists were wrong about this you need will and desire externalism is 100 right internalism is 100 wrong but where internalism perhaps got it right partly is that it's all an internal process moral judgment is mediated to the will and desire it becomes a motivation a moral motivation via empathy the many different versions of morality and of moral tasks it's difficult to compare all of them but we can say that the moral cognition of children and psychopaths to comparable groups into very similar groups is such that as their empathy evolves their moral cognition moral judgment would tend to translate into action and they would wish to act this way they would have a will and desire to act this way and since children do evolve empathy but psychopaths don't we see this breakdown this divorce in the case of psychopaths their moral judgment is intact in my view fully the moral cognition is perfect they but they have no empathy so it cannot be mediated it cannot be transmitted to the outside it doesn't generate a will and desire to act morally so they don't no empathy means they don't regard other people as people but as production units instruments tools the lack of empathy means they cannot develop a theory of mind they cannot conceptualize other people's separate existence and consequently morality is meaningless to them it's just an exercise in futility intellectual futility because if there's nobody out there if everyone around you is just a 2d cardboard cutout or an avatar or a tool or an instrument or an extension then morality loses its meaning because morality is about recognizing the separate existence of the other the similarity of the other to you and the fact that therefore you should not cause harm do no harm is the essence of moral cognition and moral judgment but do no harm to who says the psychopath there's nobody out there

Channel: Prof. Sam Vaknin

Views: 31,108

Keywords: emotions, morality, feelings, mind, brain, body, models, theories, psychology, arousal, body language, judgment, cognition, action, behavior, choices, decisions, society, conventions, mores, values, beliefs, children, narcissists, psychopaths, punishment, wrong, right, criminal, antisocial, misconduct, misbehavior, defiant, contumacious, authority, reckless, harm, others

Id: TOWuHPU6fA0

Length: 44min 20sec (2660 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 10 2022