Theists: how do you account for psychopaths?

[Edwardo Piet]

I imagine that one could chip away at one's morality over time, or be massively abused or brainwashed, and end up similar to a psychopath. But I expect nothing short of some sort of brain surgery could alter a psychopath.

This is one of the differences between sociopaths and psychopaths. Someone can become a sociopath through an abusive upbringing, brainwashing, conditioning, trauma, etc. Sociopathy is the most extreme and violent of all personality disorders. Psychopathy, on the other hand, is a neuropathological condition. It's more than just a personality disorder. Psychopaths are born psychopaths, sociopaths are not born sociopaths.

Another difference is sociopaths tend to be low functioning whereas psychopaths tend to be high functioning. It's natural for a psychopath to be psychopathic... but sociopaths are people who have had a fucked up life and have had to repress their compassion and morals due to trauma and extreme stress. Whereas psychopaths have always been psychopaths, and they don't know what it's like to not be a psychopath. Many of them may even wonder if everyone else is the same way, and doubt that others really care as much as they claim to. Maybe they think it's all the supposed non-psychopaths who are brainwashed and deluded into thinking they care more than they actually do. Like people have been conditioned to believe that they care, by society, when deep down deep down we're all egoists.

Our conscience is, perhaps, as alien and as hard to believe to the psychopath as their lack of conscience is as alien and hard to believe to us.

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Since I think morality is an objective reality that exists in the world around us, I believe it would still exist independent of what people thought or if they were all psychopaths.

True but God is absurd to expect psychopaths to ever be capable of choosing to do the right thing for the right reasons when he's created them with the very inability to choose any such thing for any such right reasons. It's like he's created a triangle amongst a bunch of squares and told the triangle "Have four sides. But don't change your shape, please."

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There are two ways to look at Divine Law (assuming such a thing exists):

1. Murder is wrong just because God says so.
or
2. Murder is wrong independently of what God says, but he forbids it because he is loving and just.

Your assertion that morality can only be objective in a universe created purposefully by God, seems to indicate that you fall into the first camp. But I don't think you do. I think you accept #2. But as a thought experiment, let's follow conclusion #1 to its logical end. Let's say that God comes before you and tells you that (if you want to) you can murder your neighbor's wife. If you do this, you won't have to ask for forgiveness, there is no threat of eternal damnation--none of that. God has said that it is okay.

The question is: would you kill your neighbor's wife if God allowed it? If God allowed it, would that make it morally right? If the answer is no: why not? 

Maybe it's because killing this woman would deprive her husband of a wife, and her two children of a mother. Maybe it's because it is her life, and you don't have the right to take it from her. Maybe it's because she is a human being with dreams and aspirations, and your desire to kill her is superseded by her right to live. But if God gave you permission, would any of these reasons that murder is wrong change?

Morality can neither hinge solely on the utterances of God, nor is it in any way impacted by God's purposes in creating the universe. Otherwise, murdering someone would be somehow become morally right just because God allows it (even though, by any other metric, it is the exact same deed). And (assuming there is a God overseeing this universe) it would become morally right to commit murder in an exact carbon copy of this universe if said universe were to come about by happenstance.

No, there is a third way to look at this. 

3. Murder is wrong because God forbids it. God forbids it because it runs contrary to his nature ('nature' as in cannot be separated from the whole of God and so definitionally all of God's commands must be consistent with his nature). Not only is God's nature good, it is the paradigm of goodness (as the greatest conceivable being).  Therefore murder is objectively wrong ultimately because God's unchanging nature has determined it to be so. Additionally, you don't have to actually know that God forbids it--he wrote basic morality on the hearts/minds of all normally-functioning people.

This response just makes God redundant. As this nature of goodness can be good for exactly the same reasons, without the "Oh and by the way a supernatural being exists that asserts that this goodness is indeed good" part. Either there are good reasons for the goodness to indeed be goodness or there isn't. If there is, we don't need God. If there isn't, God won't make a difference.

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I just don't see how inherent universal moral laws would exist in the first place without the existence of a law giver.

The same way the laws of physics exist without a law giver.

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I think it's funny when theists say that they can't understand the idea of objective morality being possible without God. Because the reality is that whatever objective morality is it doesn't come down to "because I say so", whether it's an omniscient being saying so or not. If goodness is identical to God's nature then that just makes God redundant as the objective goodness is objectively good for the exact same reasons. God's saying so doesn't magically make something not objectively good become objectively good at all. That makes no sense at all. Either an action is moral or not. Either a motive is moral or not. Either something is wrong or right. God saying so is just a red herring.

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May I answer this question as well?

Of course, Ed!

Murder is objectively wrong because it leads to suffering and it deprives people of happiness.