Free The Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton Page A

he made decisions, the stochastic settings on his brain’s moral compass—and I had a secret weapon, a fiendish psychological trick up my sleeve, to find out. I posed him the following dilemma:
    A brilliant transplant surgeon has five patients. Each of the patients is in need of a different organ, and each of them will die without that organ. Unfortunately, there are no organs currently available to perform any of the transplants. A healthy young traveler, just passing through, comes into the doctor’s office for a routine checkup. While performing the checkup, the doctor discovers that the young man’s organs are compatible with all five of his dying patients. Suppose, further, that were the young man to disappear, no one would suspect the doctor. Would the doctor be right to kill the young man to save his five patients?
    This moral conundrum was first put forward by Judith Jarvis Thomson, the author of the fat-man-and-trolley experiment we discussed in chapter 1 . Though certainly a talking point, it’s pretty easily resolved by most people. It would be morally reprehensible for the doctor to take the young man’s life—no physician has the right to kill a patient, irrespective of how humane or compassionate the justificationmay seem at the time. It would be murder, plain and simple. But what would someone like Joe’s take on it be?
    “I can see where the problem lies,” he commented matter-of-factly when I put it to him. “If all you’re doing is simply playing the numbers game, it’s a fucking no-brainer, isn’t it? You kill the guy, and save the other five. It’s utilitarianism on crack … The trick’s not to think about it too much … If I was the doctor, I wouldn’t give it a second thought. It’s five for the price of one, isn’t it? Five bits of good news—I mean, what about the families of these guys?—against one piece of bad. That’s got to be a bargain. Hasn’t it?”
    “They do emotions by numbers,” one senior forensic psychiatrist told me as we sat in his office talking about psychopaths. In Joe’s case, it would seem, quite literally.
Identity Crisis
    The psychopath’s powers of persuasion are incomparable; their psychological safecracking abilities, legendary. And Joe, the killer, the rapist, with his arctic blue stare and genius-level IQ, was certainly no exception to the rule. Sometimes, in fact, when you talk to a psychopath in interview, it can be difficult to believe that there’s anything wrong at all—if you don’t know any better. Which is just one of the reasons why coming up with a precise classification of the disorder on which everyone is agreed has proven so tricky down the years.
    It’s been three decades now since psychopathy got its clinical residence permit.In 1980, Robert Hare (whom we met in chapter 1 ) unveiled the Psychopathy Checklist, the inaugural (and to many, still the best) test for detecting the presence of the disorder.The checklist—which, in 1991, underwent a facelift: it’s since been renamed the Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R)—comprises a twenty-item questionnaire carrying a maximum score of 40 (on each item, an individual can score either 0, “doesn’t apply”; 1, “applies somewhat”; or 2, “fully applies”), and was developed by Hare on thebasis of both his own clinical observations, and those previously identified by Hervey Cleckley in Georgia.
    Most of us score around 2. The entry level for psychopaths is 27. 7
    Perhaps not surprisingly, given the way personality theorists like to do things, the 20 items that make up the PCL-R have, on numerous occasions, just like the 240 items that comprise the NEO, been subjected to the statistical card-shuffling game that is factor analysis. The results of the game have varied over the years,but recent activity by a number of clinical psychologists suggests that, in exactly the same way that there exist five main dimensions of personality space in general, there lurk four main