Internalism, Emotionism, and the Psychopathy Challenge

The phenomenon of psychopathy has been regarded as a putative challenge to motivational internalism, which asserts a necessary connection between moral judgment and motivation. An increasingly popular internalist response to the psychopathy challenge is to argue that psychopaths do not make genuine moral judgments because they lack moral emotions (e.g., sympathy and guilt), which are alleged to be causally constitutive of moral judgments. In this paper, I attempt to reject the emotion-based internalist response by appeal to most recent empirical research on psychopathy, moral cognition, and moral dilemmas. I argue that emotion is not causally responsible for even normal people’s moral judgment (although emotion may titrate the severity of moral judgment).