Then explain (A) where the "common elements" come from, including those that we share with other primates, (B) how psychopaths differ from other people if not in the different way in which they experience and process moral issues, and (C) why psychopaths make up a small percentage of the total population yet are over-represented among violent offenders and the very worst offenders.
A. Common moralities arise in the same way any other common behavioral trait arises from genetic variation, but that doesn't tell us anything. Most people have brown eyes; does this mean everyone should have brown eyes?
B. Lack of guilt is one of, what, 15+ different characteristics of a Hare psychopath?
C. Because most Hare psychopaths are crazy? Heh heh. No, really. Obviously, Hare psychopaths, with their lack of impulse control and guilt, are going to be over-represented in the criminal population. But...so?
What the Hare psychopath illustrates is what a person looks like who lacks the internal moral compass to understand moral transgressions (things that just feel wrong) as opposed to conventional transgressions (things that are wrong because those in power say so or because they have bad consequences).
That's, again,
one characteristic of Hare psychopaths. On its own, a lack of guilt doesn't count for much, because long-term fear of repercussions still stops most people from acting. The Hare psychopath also lacks the long-term planning capability necessary to restrain themselves from action. This is an essential component of their antisocial behavior; on its own, lack of conscience will not produce these same results.
What I'm saying is that we shouldn't be ignoring that moral compass because we can see how the people who do behave.
And what I'm saying is that the norms which come built-in are neither common nor universal enough to determine a morality from, or even much more than, "Don't kill things like you." Even if one accepts this as a truly universal behavior, that doesn't make it a moral imperative, any more than "have brown eyes" is a moral imperative.
We know what people who act on detached utilitarian grounds are capable of.
Again, you're equating Hare psychopaths and people who make utilitarian decisions, as if they're an identical group. Hare psychopaths possess many diagnostic traits other than lack of guilt. Many other disorders include lack of guilt as a diagnostic factor. Many people act on utilitarian grounds but do feel guilt. You've got a large, complex, overlapping of many people, and you're treating them all as one, and that's incorrect.
If you still believe that, I don't think you've been paying attention.
No, John, I've been paying attention, but I do not agree with you that there is a single "correct" template for human behavior, and a small set of deviations from that template.
If you know of another disorder that causes people to lack a conscience, I'd be happy to look at it. In other words, you are claiming that there are people who lack a conscience but are not psychopaths. Do you have any examples or a name for their condition?
John, an enormous number of conditions exist which produce this result, most of which are lumped under Antisocial Personality Disorder, including to some degree Hare psychopaths. Dissocial Personality Disorder is a larger umbrella, covering many disorders whose criteria are similar but whose causes are distinct. They are all marked by lack of guilt, amongst six other criteria.
The psychopathy described by Hare possesses a number of characteristics other than lack of conscience. Lack of conscience is present in a large number of sociopathic disorders which are not Hare psychopathy. Many people make utilitarian decisions without recourse to objective morality and are neither Hare psychopaths nor possessed of any other sociopathic disorder. Treating all of these things as a single group is in error.
What the psychopath shares in common with the moral relativist is that both believe that an innate or common morality doesn't exist and that morality is a produce of culture, upbringing, and personal interpretation alone.
Where they differ is in the Hare psychopath's glibness or superficial charm, grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, cunning and manipulation, lack of remorse or guilt, shallowness, callousness and lack of empathy, failure to accept responsibility for own actions, promiscuous sexual behavior, need for stimulation and proneness to boredom, parasitic lifestyle, poor behavioral control, lack of realistic, long-term goals, impulsivity, irresponsibility, juvenile delinquency, early behavior problems, many short-term marital relationships, revocation of conditional release, and criminal versatility.
Are those differences not enough for you to see the two groups as distinct?
...my goal is to discourage moral relativism because I think it encourages malevolent psychopath-like morality and excuses malevolent psychopath-like behavior.
Okay. Let's step aside from the questions of inappropriate equivalences and look directly at this. I agree that there are cases in which psychopaths have convinced non-psychopaths to take antisocial action. But is there any evidence to suggest that widespread moral relativism - which, again,
does not contain many of the elements Hare psychopathy does, including those which lead to antisocial behavior - would lead to widespread psychopath-like morality? After all, moral relativists aren't psychopaths, and have only one characteristic in common with them, vastly fewer than the number of characteristics which they share.
[edit: There is another difficulty with a universal morality based on human biological norms: the near-impossibility of separating purely biological responses from those brought about by living experience. Even today's widely-accepted "don't kill people" is a relatively new idea to make universal, if it can be argued to be such today. If our genetic morality doesn't preclude killing - if our prohibitions against killing out-groups are primarily based on experiences arising from civilization - what
does it preclude? The case has been made that scans of "healthy" brains and scans of Hare psychopaths respond differently to differing stimuli, but we do not know if all such differences are genetic, or even if most such differences are genetic. Another few decades of study will likely expose much of the truth of the tale, but at this point, there is very little concrete evidence for which of our common human behaviors are as a result of our genetic inheritance, and which are memes arising from 10,000 years of civilization.]