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The Disorder Status of Psychopathy

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Psychopathy

Part of the book series: History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences ((HPTL,volume 27))

Abstract

In this chapter, we investigate whether psychopathy is a mental disorder. We argue that addressing this question requires engaging, at least, with three principal issues that have conceptual, empirical, and normative dimensions. First, it must be established whether current measures of psychopathy individuate a unitary class of individuals. By this we mean that persons classified as psychopaths should share some relevant similarities that support explanation, prediction, and treatment. Second, it must be proven that psychopathy harms the person who has it. Third, it must be established that the harm associated with psychopathy is relevant for the ascription of disorder status. Regarding this latter issue, we argue that psychopathy should be considered a disorder if its harmfulness derives from certain incapacities or limited capacities. These incapacities should affect basic competences that are justifiably required for conducting a preferable type of life. Within this framework, we tentatively advance the hypothesis that some normatively justified conclusions and empirical evidence about psychopathy, that needs nonetheless to be further investigated, might support the claim that people with psychopathy have a mental disorder.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Another requirement of internality is explanatory; it is usually formulated by requiring the presence in the subject of a disordered cause, dysfunction, impairment, or incapacity. We consider this issue in Sect. 16.5.

  2. 2.

    Rawls has endorsed the Kantian frame in his political philosophy. In later work, however, he explicitly reshaped it and disburdened it from its metaphysical weight (Rawls, 2005).

  3. 3.

    Graham (2013) justifies his selection of basic capacities by relying as well on Rawls’s work. But his justification is substantially different from ours, because he uses and adaptation of Rawls’s celebrated “original position” thought experiment (Rawls, 1971). Grahams argues, thus, that the basic capacities are those that would be selected by an idealised rational person who does not know her psychological capacities and other characteristics. We, instead, select the basic capacities with a justification that would be acceptable, with a free use of reason, also by the individuals who lack or might lack them. Space limitations do not allow to explain why we think that our justification is preferable to Graham’s. We have done so in talks at conferences (Baccarini & Malatesti, 2019), we hope to publish soon our discussion.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the interdisciplinary international “coalition” formed by Cristina Amoretti, Inti A. Brazil, Marko Jurjako, John McMillan, and Elisabetta Lalumera for extremely useful comments on previous versions of this chapter. This work has been supported in part by the University of Rijeka under the project number uniri-human-18-151. LM’s preliminary work on this chapter was an outcome of the project Classification and explanations of antisocial personality disorder and moral and legal responsibility in the context of the Croatian mental health and care law (CEASCRO) (2014–2018, Croatian Science Foundation, HRZZ-IP-2013-11-8071). LM and EB’s further work on the chapter is an outcome of the project Responding to antisocial personalities in a democratic society (RAD) (Croatian Science Foundation, HRZZ-IP-2018-01-3518).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia

    Luca Malatesti & Elvio Baccarini

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  1. Luca Malatesti
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  2. Elvio Baccarini
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Correspondence to Luca Malatesti .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia

    Luca Malatesti

  2. Bioethics Centre, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    John McMillan

  3. Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia

    Predrag Šustar

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Malatesti, L., Baccarini, E. (2022). The Disorder Status of Psychopathy. In: Malatesti, L., McMillan, J., Šustar, P. (eds) Psychopathy. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 27. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82454-9_16

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