Theists: how do you account for psychopaths?

[Catholic_Lady]

The best way I can describe being a psychopath is to imagine you're playing a video game. It's a game highly centered around you and your achievements, and the other characters in the game are just cardboard cutouts with no significance. You don't care about them, because they don't matter.

You might "help" one of them, but you'd only do so because you expect there to be a reward in it for you or because they'll help you later in the game. If you can steal from them and get away with it, or even kill them when it's advantageous to you, you'll do it. You're just playing a game, after all. This is how I play games. Sometimes I'm even extremely cruel to other characters, even though there's no point to doing so, just because I find it amusing. I randomly kill "innocent" people just for kicks, because I can easily get away with it.

This is the way I imagine the life of a psychopath to be. They literally cannot care about other people. If they happen to do something we would consider moral and "helpful", it will be entirely because they expect it will benefit them in the long run. In this way, I consider them unable to be moral. I also consider them unable to be immoral, because they aren't going against any conscience or internal code they have when they do something "bad". They are again just doing it because it benefits them in some way, or because they enjoy doing it. Therefor I class them as amoral: outside the scope of morality.

Expecting them to "choose to care" about people, and to act morally simply because it's the right thing to do is expecting the impossible. You might as well say a computer program could choose to really care about people. At best they can be conditioned to act pseudo-morally, which is (I think) the best approach when it's discovered a child is a psychopath. Our laws achieve this in a very rough way, simply by supplying deterrents to doing "bad things".

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PS: The weird thing is that I've often heard religious people describe things so that everyone is a psychopath, and the only reason anyone can do anything "good" is because of the incentive God gives to do so (or his orders). This leads some people to think they'll turn into maniacs if they left their religion, which is very unlikely to be the case.

They have the ability to choose to behave morally even if they don't care or have empathy towards others.

I still fail to see how this has anything to do with morality coming from God.

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Morality is more than behaving according to somebody else's idea of what is moral. It means having a conscience. A psychopath who doesn't kill in order to avoid being punished is not being moral. Their acts have the appearance of morality, but not the substance. Just imagine a world where everybody was psychopathic. Where would our morals come from then?

True, but he's not being immoral, either. Though I guess if he were to secretly wish death on people, that would be immoral, but psychopath means you don't have empathy, not that you necessarily like it when people die or suffer.