engleski

The kindness of psychopaths

Psychopathy is a personality disorder that has attracted considerable interdisciplinary interest. In fact, the idea of a group of people with abnormal morality and interpersonal relations raises important philosophical, legal, and clinical issues. However, before engaging these issues, we ought to examine whether this category is scientifically grounded, namely whether this way of grouping individuals is explanatory and not merely a byproduct of our tendency to segregate people seemingly different from us. In this paper, we frame the issue in terms of the question whether ‘psychopathy’ designates a natural kind. We argue that currently there is no sufficient evidence for an affirmative answer to this question. Furthermore, we draw some philosophical implications of this result and examine three ways of dealing with the category of psychopathy. These include: We could eliminate the category, revise it, or subscribe to a more encompassing account of kinds, which will be able to capture psychopathy as it is currently conceptualized. We argue that a revision of the category of psychopathy is to be expected with the empirical and theoretical advancements. However, we also emphasize its current role in research, clinical and forensic practices as a scientific category in the making, or as we argue, a pragmatic kind.

Psychopathy ; syndrome ; natural kinds ; Homeostatic property clusters ; Stable property clusters ; pragmatic kinds

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