Phronesis and Psychopathy: The Moral Frame Problem
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Emotionism, moral internalism, moral action, phronesis, psychopathy
One important aspect of moral internalism, as Lei Zhong (2013) makes clear, turns on the issue of the role of affect in motivating moral judgment. This is a complicated issue, not only because there are important differences among types of psychopathy with regard to affect, but also because there are important distinctions and connections to be made between affect, cognition, moral judgment, and moral action.
Primary and Secondary Psychopathy
Zhong considers the difference between developmental psychopathy and acquired psychopathy. As he notes, he defines psychopathy in a broad way to include both of these types. Importantly, however, he ignores the distinction between primary, low-anxious psychopathy and secondary, high-anxious psychopathy. Koenigs et al. (2011), whom Zhong cites, defines the difference in the following way:
[I]n some cases psychopathy may reflect an innate affective and inhibitory deficit (the low-anxious or ‘primary’ subtype), whereas in other cases psychopathy may arise as an indirect consequence of other temperament-related traits, most commonly involving excessive emotionality or neurotic anxiety (the high-anxious or ‘secondary’ subtype).
(2011, 709)
This is an important difference because, as we will see, it undermines Zhong’s argument against the emotionist response. The emotionist response contends that psychopaths fail to make genuine moral judgments because they lack moral emotions (Blair 1995; Nichols 2004; Prinz 2008). Zhong lists sympathy, guilt, and indignation as moral emotions, but his argument against emotionism (in contrast with the emotionism itself) places no emphasis on these specific emotions. Rather, his argument operates not only on a broad definition of psychopathy, but also a broad definition of emotion. His claim is that “emotion [unspecified] is not causally responsible for even normal people’s moral judgment (although emotion may titrate the severity of moral judgment)” (Zhong 2013, 330). Specifically, he appeals to emotion deficits in general and to considerations of emotionally salient features in situations of moral dilemmas—the sidetrack (impersonal) and the footbridge (personal) versions of the trolley problem.
In the footbridge case, the idea of pushing a person off the bridge onto the tracks to stop an oncoming trolley that would otherwise kill five other people generates negative emotions because the action involved would be up-close and personal compared with flipping a switch [End Page 345] to divert the trolley to a different track where it would kill only one other person (the sidetrack case). Utilitarian calculation should treat these two cases as equivalent, except that the up-close and personal nature of pushing the other person makes it emotionally repugnant. It is not entirely clear that the emotionality involved in the up-close and personal action is strictly moral in nature. The nature of the emotions that would be experienced in such cases is not usually specified in terms of guilt or sympathy, and Zhong does not specify what emotions might be involved. It could equally be a matter of emotions that pertain to the messy nature of the up-close and personal aspects of the action—actually pushing the person (and possibly receiving resistance and protest), having to listen to the other person’s scream which you just caused by your push, having to witness or at least think about the person’s decent and impact, not to mention the effects of the trolley—all because of your immediate action. Fear, disgust, and possibly empathy could be anticipated and could modulate your moral judgment. It is debatable whether fear, disgust, and empathy are necessarily or intrinsically moral emotions.
On the one hand, the lack of specification in regard to emotion in Zhong’s argument does not necessarily undermine his criticism of the emotionist account; however, the specifics of the case he considers and the possible emotions that this case may generate are relevant to my later considerations, so I will return to this point again. On the other hand, Zhong’s lack of specification with regard to type of psychopathy does undermine his argument. His argument against the emotionist view is based on an appeal to empirical evidence found in several recent studies. Because emotion-ists contend that emotions play a causal...
