Department of Developmental, Clinical and Crosscultural Psychology, Tilburg University, P.O. Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2010 Mar;5(1):59-67. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsp051. Epub 2010 Jan 6.
Adult psychopaths have deficits in emotional processing and inhibitory control, engage in morally inappropriate behavior, and generally fail to distinguish moral from conventional violations. These observations, together with a dominant tradition in the discipline which sees emotional processes as causally necessary for moral judgment, have led to the conclusion that psychopaths lack an understanding of moral rights and wrongs. We test an alternative explanation: psychopaths have normal understanding of right and wrong, but abnormal regulation of morally appropriate behavior. We presented psychopaths with moral dilemmas, contrasting their judgments with age- and sex-matched (i) healthy subjects and (ii) non-psychopathic, delinquents. Subjects in each group judged cases of personal harms (i.e. requiring physical contact) as less permissible than impersonal harms, even though both types of harms led to utilitarian gains. Importantly, however, psychopaths' pattern of judgments on different dilemmas was the same as those of the other subjects. These results force a rejection of the strong hypothesis that emotional processes are causally necessary for judgments of moral dilemmas, suggesting instead that psychopaths understand the distinction between right and wrong, but do not care about such knowledge, or the consequences that ensue from their morally inappropriate behavior.
成年精神病患者在情绪处理和抑制控制方面存在缺陷，从事不道德的行为，通常无法区分道德和传统的违规行为。这些观察结果，加上学科中的主导传统，即认为情绪过程是道德判断的因果必要条件，导致了精神病患者缺乏对道德是非的理解的结论。我们测试了另一种解释：精神病患者对是非有正常的理解，但对道德适当行为的调节不正常。我们向精神病患者提出了道德困境，将他们的判断与年龄和性别匹配的（i）健康受试者和（ii）非精神病患者的违法者进行了对比。每个组的受试者都认为个人伤害（即需要身体接触）的案件比非个人伤害的案件更不允许，尽管这两种伤害都导致了功利上的收益。然而，重要的是，精神病患者在不同困境中的判断模式与其他受试者相同。这些结果迫使我们拒绝情绪过程对道德困境判断具有因果必要性的强假设，这表明精神病患者理解是非之间的区别，但不在乎这种知识，也不在乎他们不道德行为所带来的后果。
