Abstract
Recently it has been argued that certain neuropsychological findings on the decision-making, instrumental learning, and moral understanding in psychopathic offenders offer reasons to consider them not criminally responsible, due to certain epistemic and volitional impairments. We reply to this family of arguments, that collectively we call the irresponsibility of the psychopath argument (IPA for short). This type of argument has a premise that describes or prescribes the deficiencies that grant or should grant partial or complete criminal exculpation. The other premise contends that neuropsychological evidence shows that psychopaths have incapacitates that are sufficient to ascribe complete or partially exculpatory deficiencies. The focus of our criticism is this latter premise. We argue that it requires that psychopathy should correlate significantly with certain rational incapacities that manifest across contexts. We show that the available neuropsychological data do not support the claim that psychopaths have such general exculpatory incapacities.
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Notes
For a general discussion of the problem of interfacing neurocognitive and legal constructs, see Buckholtz et al. (forthcoming).
While we use such a factorization for illustrative purposes, it is important to mention that specialists are divided on the exact factorization of the construct as diagnosed by PCL-R (see, e.g., Cooke and Michie 2001).
For a recent and comprehensive discussion of these philosophical issues, with a focus on the culpability of psychopathic offenders, see Godman and Jefferson (2017).
Anglo-American legislations tend to apply diminished responsibility defense only to cases of murder to mitigate the offense charges, for instance, from first-degree murder to manslaughter. Legislations of continental Europe apply variants of diminished responsibility defense more broadly, and not just to cases of homicide (see, e.g., Kröber and Lau 2000). In any case, a successful diminished responsibility defense involves establishing partial responsibility for the crime, which deserves lesser punishment. However, it does not imply wholesale acquittal as in the case of the insanity defense.
It is important to stress that generalized incapacities are not necessary for the exculpatory deficiencies (see Yannoulidis 2012, pp. 19–22). A “momentary” incapacity, as opposed to a general one can also be regarded as exculpatory. For instance, killing because of voices in the head might trigger the insanity defense, despite the fact that on numerous occasions in the past the defendant managed to disregard the voices. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for the example.
A reviewer remarked correctly that we sidestep an important issue that underlies bridging psychological incapacities with exculpatory deficiencies in individual cases. In fact, how many times an agent has to manifest incapacity in the past before he commits the crime to grant exculpation? We also bypass the problem of how the law could rely on aggregations of probabilities about classes of individuals (such as their rate of reoffending) to infer something about a class member (see Eastman and Campbell 2006, p. 315; Glannon 2011, p. 77; for a discussion of this issue, see Scurich and John 2012). The authors that we engage with do not address these important practical problems. Their focus, instead, is on the neuropsychological evidence that renders the diagnosis of psychopathy, independently from the specific history of the defendant, a ground for exculpation. We are going to argue that the IPA is flawed in this respect.
This paradigm classifies normative judgments by their permissibility, seriousness, authority-dependence, and justification (Nucci and Turiel 1978). People tend to classify certain violations, such as hitting a child, as more serious, authority independent, and justified by considerations of well-being. Thus, they are called moral. Other violations, such as talking in class without permission, are judged as depended on authority and are deemed less serious. Thus, they are called conventional.
Already Maibom (2008, pp. 169–173) compellingly criticised formulations of the IPA based on classical studies concerning moral understanding in the psychopath. Relying on more recent empirical literature, we further question the replicability or generality of the results of these classical studies.
In these experiments, one needs to decide, for instance, whether it is all right to push a lever and thereby to kill one person, or to push a fat man off a bridge, and thereby kill him, in order to save five people towards which a runaway trolley is heading. A reviewer remarked that performance on the trolley problem task does not really measure moral understanding. First, it was not devised for this purpose. Second, it does not have an intuitively correct answer. We can countenance these points. As in the case of the moral/conventional paradigm, we do not claim that performance on this task differentiates people with real moral understanding from those who lack it. Here we limit ourselves to argue that, even if it is conceded that these tasks measure moral understanding or some capacities associated with normal moral competence, so far, their use in empirical studies does not show unusual patterns in moral judgments of psychopaths.
The notion of “mode of presentation” is widely discussed in contemporary philosophy of language and mind. Our use of the expression is compatible with the general view, shared by many authors, that “modes of presentations” have a role in the psychological explanation of behavior.
According to RMH and variants of it, psychopaths’ tendency to disregard goal-irrelevant cues is not restricted to affect-laden stimuli. This feature of psychopaths’ attention is exhibited on the Stroop task (see, e.g., Koenigs and Newman 2013, pp. 96–97). The task is to report the color of a word while disregarding the color it denotes. For instance, a word says “green” while it is colored in red. Normal subjects show interferences by having a prepotent reaction to report the color that is named. Psychopaths, on the other hand, perform better since their attention is not distracted by the color name which is irrelevant for the task.
Thanks to two anonymous reviewers for urging us to clarify this issue.
These two interpretations could be roughly mapped onto the difference, stated in the English Homicide act from 1957, between the incapacity to make rational judgments and that to exercise self-control. Following Fischer and Ravizza (1998), the difference could also be stated in terms of reasons-receptivity and reasons-reactivity (see, also, Glannon 2011, ch. 2).
Sifferd and Hirstein (2013) propose to account for the discrepancy in terms of the distinction between successful and unsuccessful psychopaths. Unlike successful psychopaths, unsuccessful ones would be those who have poor EF, and thus would be liable to diminished responsibility. In our paper (Jurjako and Malatesti 2016a), we discuss in detail why the distinction in terms of successful and unsuccessful psychopathy constructs does not provide the most plausible explanation of the mixed results of psychopaths’ EF performance. One of the important reasons is that successful and unsuccessful psychopaths seem to be more similar with respect to EF than it was thought by some researchers. For a review, see Maes and Brazil (2013).
Instrumental learning is an umbrella term for tasks tapping different behavioral and neurocognitive aspects of reinforcement learning. Examples involve passive avoidance, response-reversal, and gambling tasks. An overview of these tasks pertaining to the present discussion can be found in Jurjako and Malatesti (2016b).
Which sometimes amounts just to being slower at solving the task (see, e.g., Brazil et al. 2013).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Inti Brazil, Joseph Maes, Matt Matravers, Gwen Adshead, Janko Međedović, Justin Garson, Zdenka Brzović, and Viktor Ivanković for reading and giving comments on previous versions of this article. Special thanks go to four anonymous reviewers for Erkenntnis who gave insightful and helpful comments. Different versions of the article were presented in many places. We thank the audiences in Rijeka (Croatia), Bled (Slovenia), Belgrade (Serbia), and at the Donders Institute (The Netherlands) for valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Work on this article is funded by the Croatian Science Foundation: Project CEASCRO, Grants 8071 and 9522.
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Jurjako, M., Malatesti, L. Neuropsychology and the Criminal Responsibility of Psychopaths: Reconsidering the Evidence. Erkenn 83, 1003–1025 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9924-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9924-0