Introduction to the emotional grammar of psychopaths

Resumo

This paper proposes a naturalistic theory of moral judgment in psychopathy, grounded in Patricia Churchland’s neurophilosophy and developed through the hypothesis of an emotional grammar—a cognitive-affective structure that organizes the subject’s normative sensitivity. In contrast to explanations that attribute psychopathy to a mere dissociation between judgment and moral action or to a specific emotional deficit, the paper defends the thesis that such dissociation expresses a divergent form of emotional normativity, structured by an affective disposition referred to as indolent sympathy. Characterized by the combination of an intact theory of mind and a form of negative empathy, this disposition enables the psychopath to feign morality, produce normatively acceptable judgments, and act strategically without prosocial affective resonance. By integrating contributions from affective neuroscience, empirical moral psychology, and naturalistic philosophy, the paper advances a pluralistic theory of moral judgment that acknowledges the existence of functional yet morally dissonant normative architectures. By extending Churchland’s framework to include non-empathic moral normativity, the paper challenges prevailing assumptions in moral philosophy and neuroethics. It suggests that agents shaped by indolent sympathy operate within an alternative normative order—functionally adaptive, affectively distinct, and socially intelligible.