Moral reasoning in individuals with psychopathy
Aversive conditioning, passive avoidance, and empathic responsiveness are processes that have been assumed to play a role in the moral socialization of the healthy developing child (Eysenck, 1964; Hoffman, 1988; Trasler, 1973). If these processes are dysfunctional in individuals with psychopathy, we might anticipate dysfunction in moral reasoning in individuals with psychopathy.
Typically, two paradigms have been used to assess moral reasoning in individuals with psychopathy: those of Kohlberg (Colby and Kohlberg, 1987; Kohlberg, 1969) and Turiel (1983). In Kohlberg's paradigm, the participant is first presented with a series of vignettes describing moral dilemmas and then asked how the protagonist should act in the dilemma situation and why they would act in this way. An example dilemma is described below:
In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging 10 times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $1,000, which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist his wife was dying, and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it." So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug lor his wife.
Within this paradigm, the participant's judgment of whether Heinz should or should not steal is unimportant. What is important, with regards to determining the individual's level of moral reasoning, is the complexity of the participant's reasons as to why Heinz should or should not steal the drug. Crudely stated, the more complex the participant's reasoning, the higher their level of moral reasoning.
It has been consistently demonstrated that the moral reasoning of delinquents is at a lower level relative to comparison individuals (Blasi, 1980). However, it is much less clear that the moral reasoning of individuals with psychopathy is impaired as indexed by this task. Thus, although there have been some reports of individuals with psychopathy showing lower levels of moral reasoning than comparison non-psychopathic offenders (Campagna and Harter, 1975; Fodor, 1973; Jurkovic and Prentice, 1977), other studies have indicated that while the moral reasoning of delinquent psychopathic and non-psychopathic individuals is lower than that of individuals with no forensic history, there is no difference in level of moral reasoning between psychopathic and non-psychopathic offenders (Lee and Prentice, 1988; Trevethan and Walker, 1989). Also, there are considerable difficulties with the interpretation of performance on Kohlberg's paradigm. As noted above, the participant's level of moral reasoning is determined not by their decision as to how the protagonist should behave, but rather by the complexity of the justifications of their decision . Kohlberg's framework can therefore be considered to assess the individual's moral concepts, which is a reflection of their moral semantic memory. Indeed, according to Kohlberg, these conceptual structures drive moral reasoning and behavior (Colby and Kohlberg, 1987; Kohlberg and Kramer, 1969; Kohlberg et al., 1983). However, it is unclear that this is really the case. In fact, we will argue explicitly that this is not the case. Instead, if Kohlberg's moral judgment interview simply indexes the com¬plexity level of an individual's semantic memory, we might expect performance on the measure to be highly sensitive to 1Q and socioeconomic status (SES). Some measures of IQ specifically index the individual's semantic memory to provide the assessment of intelligence. Given that IQ and SES do indeed predict level of moral reasoning, it could be argued that Kohlberg's measure indexes IQ und the individual's cultural experiences rather than their moral reasoning per se (Shweder et al., 1987).
Turiel's paradigm is referred to as the moral/conventional distinction task (Turiel, 1983; see also Nucci and Nucci, 1982; Smetana, 1993). In this task, the (participant is presented with stories involving moral and conventional transgressions. Moral transgression are actions defined by their consequences for the rights and welfare of other individuals (e.g., hitting another individual, damaging another individual's property) and convenlional transgressions are defined by their consequences for the social order (e.g., talking in class, dressing in opposite-sex clothes). The participant is then asked to make a series of judgments about these transgressions (e.g., "How bad is the transgression?" "Why is the transgression bad to do?" and, crucially, "If there was no rule about people [doing the transgression], would it be OK to [do the transgression]?"). Healthy individuals distinguish between moral and conventional transgressions (Smetana, 1993; Turiel, 1983). The distinction between moral and conventional transgressions is made from the age of 39 months (Smetana and Braeges, 1990) and is found across cultures (Nucci et al, 1983; Song et al, 1987). There are several ways in which people differentiate between moral and conventional transgressions. Thus, first of all, people generally judge moral transgressions to be more serious than conventional transgressions (Nucci, 1981; Smetana and Braeges, 1990; Turiel, 1983). Second, people give different reasons for justifying why moral and conventional transgressions are wrong. Thus, for moral transgressions, people refer to the distress of the victim (i.e., it is wrong to hit someone because it will hurt them), but for conventional transgressions, people refer to the social disorder that may ensue (i.e., it is wrong to talk in class because you are there to learn) (Smetana, 1993; Turiel, 1983). Third, and more importantly, modifying the rule conditions (for example, by an authority figure removing the prohibition against the act) only affects the permissibility of conventional transgressions. Thus, even if there is no rule prohibiting the action, participant generally judge moral transgressions as non-permissible
(i.e., they still think it is wrong to hit another individual even if there is no rule against it). In contrast, if there is no rule prohibiting a conventional transgression, participants generally judge the act as permissible (i.e., they think it is OK to talk in class if there is no rule against it). While participants do not always make the moral/conventional distinction in their seriousness judgments, they do always make the moral conventional distinction in their modifiability judgments.[/b] Thus, children at certain ages have been found to judge some conventional and moral transgression1, as equally serious (Stoddart and Turiel, 1985; Turiel, 1983). However, they still identify the moral transgressions as less rule contingent and less under authority jurisdiction than the conventional transgressions.
Children with psychopathic tendencies and adults with psychopathy have considerable difficulty with the moral/conventional distinction task (Blair, 1995, 1997; Blair et al., 1995a, 2001c). In addition, similar difficulties have been observed with more general populations of children presenting with antisocial behavior [/b] (Arsenio and Fleiss, 1996; Dunn and Hughes, 2001; Hughes and Dunn, 2000; Nucci and Herman, 1982). Children with psychopathic tendencies, adults with psychopathy, and other antisocial populations do generally regard moral transgressions as more serious than conventional transgressions. However, such populations are far less likely than comparison individuals to make reference in the victim of the transgression when justifying why moral transgressions are bad (Arsenio and Fleiss, 1996; Blair, 1995; Blair et al., 2001c; Dunn and Hughes, 2001; Hughes and Dunn, 2000). In addition, when the rules prohibiting the transgressions are removed, such populations are far less likely to make the distinction between moral and conventional transgressions that is seen in healthy individuals (Blair, 1995; Blair et al., 2001c; Nucci and Herman, 1982).
SUMMARY
In short, there are strong indications of impairment in moral reasoning in individuals with psychopathy. There are some indications of this using Kohlberg's moral judgment interview. However,
the impairment is much more clearly evidenced by performance on the moral/conventional distinction test. Individuals with psychopathy, even when they are adult, fail to perform this task successfully even though a healthy developing individual shows successful performance from the age of 3 years.
