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sociopaths, empathy, anxiety, fear, conscience

Sam Harris seems to be a master of disinformation when it comes to history, but I trust him when he says that sociopaths, "do not experience a normal range of anxiety and fear, and this may account for their lack of conscience." (p. 97 in Moral Landscape).

My thought:  that dovetails well with the notion that we can, in a manner of speaking, perceive emotions (interestingly, Aquinas says something like that in his commentary on Aristotle's De anima).  For seeing someone else in a different situation than our own, we imagine an emotion-laden situation and somehow in virtue of our own capacity for feeling we -- without inference -- see that situation as painful, pleasant or whatever for the other.  I suppose, then, that if one lacks such emotions, that person will fail to perceive those emotions in others.  Nor shall that person be concerned about the presence of something that he or she can't perceive.

Just a hunch: perhaps sociopaths lack those emotions because they tend to look at their own situation in a detached manner--in a manner akin to a third person perspective.  If so, then for a sociopath, communicating with others would be like playing a chess game.

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