Saturday, March 17, 2018

Sociopathy Does Not Necessitate Cruelty

It is better to be a sociopath who has accurate moral knowledge and acts accordingly than to have and act on a strong conscience that is misdirected.  No, someone is not cruel or selfish just because he or she is a sociopath (see here [1] for the difference between psychopathy and sociopathy when I use the terms).  It is not sinful to have no conscience (Deuteronomy 4:2).  It is only sinful to commit certain acts or to harbor evil motivations and desires.

Just as lack of conscience does not mean that one is cruel, having a conscience does not mean that one is kind, just, or selfless--in fact, conscience can never even tell anyone what is just or what is right.  The dangers of a faulty conscience are numerous.  It astonishes me how rarely people will actually proclaim the dangers of conscience, a tool that is purely subjective and without the ability to verify its own accuracy!

Conscience is useful only for convincing an individual to act in a certain way, and for nothing more; it is entirely without significance when it comes to moral epistemology or theology, proving absolutely nothing at all about the existence or nature of morality [2].  A conscience only proves to the one who has it that he or she has a sense of morality, not that morality exists, not that one's sense of morality is correct.

Someone with sociopathy does not necessarily not believe in morality.  Having sociopathy doesn't mean that one, by happenstance or by calculated effort, does not do the right thing (I know that moral truths cannot be known with absolute certainty, I am making a separate point).  In itself, sociopathy is not even dangerous.  How someone with sociopathy handles the condition, however, can be dangerous, yet much danger is also present in the case of someone who acts on a misdirected conscience--like if someone commits an act of illicit killing or torture because that person feels like he or she is doing the right thing.

If the death of conscience means one can pursue right moral epistemology without emotional hindrances, then, if this death occurs, it is a loss that can yield vital results.  Sociopathy can be helpful in that it sheds conscience-based concern for preferences, feelings, and social norms, which are all entirely incapable of illuminating moral truths.  It is better to have no conscience and yet to have right moral knowledge and behave rightly than it is to have a conscience and be misled by it.  And since conscience is nothing but a subjective, malleable, emotion-based sense of moral feelings, if one's conscience was accurate, one would never know through conscience if that was the case.

If you have a strong conscience that is oriented around actual moral truths that are actually known through the right means, then that is wonderful!  But the absence of conscience does not mean that one is wicked and a strong conscience does not mean that one is upright.  A sociopath can be a very ethical person and a person with a strong conscience can be far from the right path.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/08/psychopathy-and-sociopathy.html

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-nature-of-conscience.html

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