I’ve seen a lot of people argue that those with Antisocial Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Personality disorder can’t be ethical persons. The argument goes that if you have a mental disorder which impairs empathy, you won’t care about hurting other people. You have no incentive to treat others with kindness and respect.
And while I think this line of reasoning may be true for some children, I would argue that lack of empathy offers no obstacle to ethical reasoning for a fully matured adult. Today I’d like to talk about ethics without empathy, about the people who can’t do it, and about how this helped Donald Trump win the 2024 election.
Psychologist Jean Piaget’s best-known work is his theory of cognitive development, which says children go through four distinct stages on their way to an adult mind. Although cognitive development is less discrete and less linear than Piaget’s theory suggests, it’s still taught in psychology classes for its usefulness.
The first stage, the sensorimotor stage, is all about learning fundamental interaction with the world. What’s safe to eat? What do mum and dad look like? How does walking work? This is where skills like object permanence are picked up. Before that point, peekaboo is a stimulating intellectual challenge.
The second stage, the pre-operational stage, is about trying to make sense of the world. It’s about play, and imagination, and learning. Cut a pre-operational child’s burger in half, and they’ll think they have twice as many burgers, which is more.
The concrete operational stage is about making reasoned judgements about the physical world. It’s the beginning of logic. Concrete operational children can plan ahead and understand complex ideas, as long as those ideas relate to the real world as they experience it.
The formal operational stage is about abstract reasoning. It’s about forming universal philosophical ideas. Formal operational children can engage in hypotheticals and learn something from them. They can think about things outside of their own experience.
The funny thing is, not everyone reaches the formal operational stage. There are plenty of “adults” — which is to say, people older than 18 — who can’t reason abstractly. Give them a thought experiment, and they’ll say it couldn’t possibly matter because it’s imaginary. Ask their favourite ethical philosophy, and they’ll give you a blank stare. If you’ve met someone who doesn’t respect cartoons as art and says they’re just for kids — even after being told about shows like South Park and Castlevania — you’ve probably met a concrete operational “adult”.
I think the people who can’t possibly imagine an ASPD “psychopath”, as the offensive slang goes, having an ethical code, are at the concrete operational stage. See, to a person at that stage, there’s no thinking about right and wrong abstractly. There’s only right and wrong from your direct experience. They can’t imagine reaching moral conclusions without their sense of empathy. if the answer wasn’t right there in the direct view of their feelings, they wouldn’t be able to see it.
Empathy is almost certainly the beginning of ethical reasoning. The understanding that others have feelings too IS essential. But that understanding doesn’t actually need to come from direct experience. You could read it in a book or see it on TV. And if it is from direct experience, you don’t necessarily need it every time. A reminder is nice, but people are capable of getting the picture from one blinding moment of sudden empathy in a lifetime.
Once the understanding is had that others can feel pain, anyone at the formal operational stage can just… figure the rest out. It isn’t exactly complex. You just have to be able to make reasoned judgements outside of your direct ability to observe. Theoretical physicists, computer scientists, and meteorologists do that all the time. They can make predictions, think about the unseeable, develop abstract theories. Any “psychopath” can surely do the same.
But, to a concrete operational who thinks they’ve fully matured into an adult, this may seem far fetched. Because after all, this isn’t how concrete operationals do morality.
What do they do? They just do whatever feels right. They can make predictions, sure, but only about their own feeling of empathy. When their empathy fails, their ethics do too.
Look at climate change!
Everyone knows life on earth is going to end if we don’t stop emitting carbon. The fossil fuel companies know it. The politicians know it. The voters know it. Sure, there are still conspiracy theorists, but 80% of us are all on the same page about the facts.
Alas, feelings don’t care about your facts.
Climate change feels far away. It’s hard to imagine the consequences. Having an actual emotional reaction to the impending extinction of our species is classed as an anxiety disorder and most psychologists will try to “cure” it. Our society is not designed for you to actually care about the climate.
And a concrete operational, if they don’t care about something, struggles to think about it. That’s why people still drive cars. Still want to invest in AI and crypto. Argue against renewables because it’s “expensive”. The economy feels real and immediate in comparison with the climate. That’s a feeling with absolutely no truth, but our society goes to a lot of effort to make it happen anyway.
Over the course of the last year, I noticed something very odd about the conversations I had about Gaza. And if you read the title of the article, you know where this is going. Before I engage in formal operation, however, let’s have some concrete facts:
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Benjamin Netanyahu is a fugitive from international justice who refuses to be tried for war crimes
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Netanyahu allowed money to be funneled into Hamas as part of a plan to increase hostilities between Israel and Gaza
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The median age in Gaza is 18. Children are dying to bombs and bullets and starvation. Children are not valid military targets.
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Joe Biden has historically supported Israel and given money and weapons to Israel for the known purpose of murdering children.
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Kamala Harris ran as Joe Biden’s VP and, while promising an end to the genocide in Gaza, failed to convince many people.
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Donald Trump promised to use even more violence against Gaza than Joe Biden if he was elected.
“Tankie” is a derogatory term for Stalinists who support China and Russia, even in the present when Russia is capitalist. The insult implied in the name is that tankies support the use of military vehicles to suppress civilian dissent. I’ve seen quite a few Stalinists embrace the word as a self-descriptor recently, so sure, let’s go ahead and use it.
In 2024, I saw a lot of members of online tankie communities like “lemmygrad.ml” (bit on the nose, no?) make a peculiar argument against voting for Kamala Harris.
The argument goes that Harris supports genocide because she didn’t go ahead and call her current boss a genocidal murder (which he is). And therefore, voting for Harris is a moral wrong, even if not voting would let Donald Trump win and bomb Gaza into ashes.
You can point out to a tankie that Harris promised to do less genocide and Trump promised to do more. And they’ll nod, and say they understand.
The thing is… I don’t believe them.
Well, I do believe the Russian astroturfers who lead the tankie movement. I believe they’re fully aware of what they’re doing. But the common tankie, the one who actually believes the propaganda… nah.
I think they’re perfectly capable of understanding the facts of the Gazan genocide. But that their judgement and reasoning is entirely unaffected by their abstract knowledge. I think they’re only at the concrete operational stage, and therefore, they can only reason about things that are directly in front of them.
The amount of suffering in Gaza over the past year is unimaginable. The number of dead is unimaginable. Sure, you can count the deaths and recite the number. But I think it has as much emotional resonance as if I tell you the sun weighs 2 x 10³⁰ kilograms. It hits the limit of your understanding of scale. it maxes out the dial. All you really understood was “big number”.
And for a formal operational, “big number” is enough. It may be abstract and meaningless, but fully mature adults can handle abstract and meaningless. We can actually make decisions in that space.
Concrete operationals? Intellectually, they can perceive a difference in two big numbers. But it doesn’t feel real to them. They can’t make judgements based on abstract reasoning. The fact that Trump is worse than Harris? It doesn’t make any sense. Harris is already the worst person they can possibly imagine. Trump is the same, so what’s the difference?
After the dozenth picture like this, it gets harder to keep caring
A concrete operational can make a reasoned decision about how to vote if they’re given a way to care about the difference. For example, if they know a trans American who is scared that Trump will put them in a concentration camp. If they’re able to take their mind off the unimaginably huge suffering in Gaza for a moment and see the scared, hurt person in front of them, they can understand. But it’s hard.
And the concrete operationals who’ve been hoodwinked into following the tankie movement are conditioned to reject any chance to care about the difference.
And adult-bodied children like that are apparently the median US voter.
~~threadiverse enjoyers cannot open new threads.~~ Also after the discussion I decided to allow 
vouching for others, which any supporter at the higher tiers can do twice. Vouching gives voting access, so this means you can specify other people who you personally know are valid members of the instance, and that will allow them to take part in the decision making, even if they're otherwise only lurking. Effectively vouching puts someone at the same level as a threadiverse enjoyer.
