Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology

Benn argues that psychopaths may be deficient in their capacity to entertain participant reactive attitudes, and the impact of this on their own self-evaluations explains their callousness and their imprudence. He then goes on to argue that only creatures able to entertain such attitudes can be the proper objects of those attitudes; thus it may be unreasonable for psychopaths to be proper targets for anger or resentment; although this position may have unsettling implications.

Benn raises the question of reason and its relationship to rationality and morality. I know that this is really Strawson’s argument, and is not perhaps the key issue. (In another paper one might want to take apart this issue of rationality a little more.) For example, I am not sure it is true to say that “meaningful dialogue with the severely deluded is beset with grave obstacles.” One may well be able to converse with psychotic patients or with children, but on their terms rather than on our own. Severe mental handicap might be a better example for the purposes of this argument, where there are very real cognitive limitations on what can be thought about or understood. It seems me that Benn’s point about children and the psychotic really begs an enormous question about the nature of rationality and what might be said to impair it.

What is interesting about this argument is the extent to which the psychopath might be considered to be like a child, or like a psychotic patient, or like a person with mental handicap. One of the difficulties is that psychopathy is not defined, and there are probably many different types of psychopath. It is not clear whether the author is arguing that psychopaths have unpleasant/unattractive participant attitudes or are unable to form pleasant ones. I would argue the latter rather than the former, and further, that these characteristics are different. I think it is true to say that many psychopaths are generally not driven by participant reactive attitudes, although some are, and what are we to make of them? Benn’s point about empathy is that it requires some capacity to stand in the other person’s affective shoes, i.e., it is a capacity which is related both to a self-reflective function and an ability to consider others. So there is something here about how recognition of others as being appropriate objects for participant reactive attitudes is linked to the sense of oneself as being both the agent of such attitudes and a proper object.

I have difficulty with the word object, because there is another sense of the word: to treat someone as an object is to treat them as a thing. This is a crucial feature of what psychopaths do, which is to see themselves as being persons, but not to [End Page 41] see others—or have limited capacity to see others—as persons who might be on the receiving end of the participant reactive attitude. Dennis Nilssen, who killed thirteen young men in Cricklewood, appears to have been more attached and emotionally involved with his dog than with his victims, although his biographer has argued that he killed these young men because he did not want them to leave him. That is, he had quite powerful feelings about them, but seemed unable to consider that they might have feelings about being killed.

While reading this paper, I found myself wondering about interpersonal relationships. If one cannot relate to others as a person, and if others do not relate to one as a person, does that lack of mutual relating result in a type of objectification process all around, a kind of dreadful distorting mirror through which two parties see one another? If so, if the psychopath is thought not to be the proper object of such attitudes because he can’t form them, then we end up treating him in exactly the way that he treats us, which we find so objectionable. Here again, there are limitations on the rationality argument. Surely the basis of participant reactive attitudes and their nature is not rationality only; it seems to me that children...