1 - What is a Good Person? The Case of The Psychopath

Across different times and locations, similar observations have been made about a person who repeatedly commits crime and seems unaffected by punishment and by the harm they cause onto others. This kind of person is known as a psychopath. The common clinical understanding is that a psychopath suffers from a personality disorder whose personality traits include callousness, lack of empathy, impulsivity, and irresponsibility. This condition, psychopathy, is also thought to stem from both genetics and the social environment. Psychopathy, however, raises larger issues about how a person should be and why such a way of being matters. But, also, what we owe to each other as interconnected social beings. This talk draws from very preliminary work-in-progress that plans to address these issues by comparatively examining qualities of ‘evil’ and ‘badness’ between independent and interdependent cultures through mainly archival work. The psychopath may represent what we deem as immoral and socially abnormal universally.