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The (dys)functionality of psychopathy: perspective from the philosophy of science

The debate on the appropriate social response to psychopathy crucially con-centrates on whether psychopaths should be held morally responsible for their actions. The implicit argument has the following structure:1. Proper function of the psychological capacity X is a necessary condition for the ascription of moral responsibility.2. Empirical evidence shows that the capacity X is (dys)functional in psychopaths.3. Therefore, psychopaths are morally (non-)responsible for their actions. (Morse, 2008 ; Sifferd & Hirstein, 2013)There seems to be a consensus that at least incarcerated psychopaths are not morally responsible because they lack the necessary moral capacities (Malatesti & McMillan, 2010).In this paper I argue that the consensus might be premature. Since the debate depends on the empirical evidence we need to be sensitive to prob-lems of interfacing folk-psychological notions (presupposed in moral and le-gal theories) and neuropsychological data on which the evidence depends. Most crucially the gloss is on the notion of function. Currently there is no explicit view on how the ascription of dysfunction is supposed to be grounded.Psychological and neuropsychological data has shown that there are be-havioural and brain differences between psychopaths and non- psychopaths (Blair, 2008). However not every statistical difference amounts to a dysfunc-tion (Boorse, 1977).In the psychopathy-literature there seems to be two salient approaches to this issue. The first is top-down. We start with an a priori (folk-psycholog-ical) account of capacities that are necessary for ascription of responsibility and then the dysfunction is attributed if the evidence shows that a person does not execute the capacity (Vincent, 2008). Here functions are ascribed via folk-psychology. On the bottom-up approach we start with a reduction thesis according to which folk- psychological terms refer rigidly to specificbrain mechanisms (Hirstein & Sifferd, 2010). Then we directly infer dysfunc-tions from neuropsychological data.In this paper I examine the bottom-up approach, which promises a more objective route for determining responsibility. This route includes ascrip-tions of mental disorders. Here the supposition is that functions are ascribed via the selected-effects theory of functions. Therefore the debate on psy-chopaths’ responsibility crucially relates to the question whether psychopa-thy is an evolutionary adaptation. This is problematic in two respects: first, whether psychopathy is an adaptation is far from being resolved (Glenn, Kurzban, & Raine, 2011) ; second, it is not clear why determining responsi-bility should depend on the resolution of this issue.My proposal for advancing the debate is to explore the idea that psy-chopathy represents a developmental mismatch (Garson, 2015, chapter 8). The idea is that although psychopathic traits might have had some adaptive value, they still present a harmful mismatch between the present environ-ment and that in which those traits were adaptive. However, judgments of mismatch, being depraved of the notion of dysfunction, will rely on our value judgments that pertain to the issue of harmfulness of the mismatch. This leads to the insight that the resolution of the responsibility issue will include some elements from the top- down approach.

Psychopathy ; mental disorder ; life strategy ; naturalism ; game theory

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