Nine ON THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DIVERSITY OF MORAL INSENSITIVITY

When we learn of atrocities committed by psychopaths and by suicide terrorists, we are shocked by the evident lack of normal feeling for their fellow human beings. (By suicide terrorists, I mean to include not just the people who have carried out suicide missions, but also the people who plan and organize such attacks.) How could anyone be so callous to the suffering of others? We recognize two significantly different psychological pathways to such insensitivity. I will maintain that psychopaths and suicide terrorists anive at numbness through different routes. To see the two different paths to numbness, we must speak more broadly about different psychological processing models that can explain the appearance of deviant responses. In the first section, I will distinguish between midstream and upstream effects on psychological processing. Once that issue is settled, I will turn to the task of placing psychopaths into the framework. Psychopaths exhibit both insensitivity to suffering and a deviance in moral judgment. This plausibly derives from midstream deviance in the emotional processing system. We have no reason to think that the insensitiveness of suicide terrorists is similar at the psychological level. Psychopaths and suicide terrorists appear to have quite different moral psychologies. I will then characterize the ways in which suicide terrorists plausibly are insensitive to suffering in others. Suicide terrorists, I will suggest, exhibit numbness because of upstream psychological processes.