Archive for category Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts

The Personal Philosophy of (i.e. for) Chris Hardwick in Early 2010

Ah, success. Fame. Money. A little of it whets our appetite for more, twists our priorities, and like your clothes in a public dryer that you have to sit there and watch lest they get stolen, it’s a source of stress.

When we started this podcast, it was just a leisure time activity, something primarily for us, the podcasters, but even as the first episode was being prepared, we felt a sense of responsibility to make the thing worth others’ time, resulting in some rigorous editing, whose current bar makes each episode cost us hours and hours of post-production time while we digitally add in “ideas,” “thoughts,” and “guest podcasters” (typically, as with Getty, created via application of choice noise-addition algorithms).

But now, as the donations waft in and a few influential people have said some nice things about us, and the number of total downloads marches incrementally towards the 1 million mark (OK, it’ll be a a while still for that; believe me, we’ll let you know!), we feel the hunger. Can make enough money off of this to actually recompense our time (likely not, but we’ll see)? Can we become the #1 philosophy podcast in terms of popularity (we’re certainly in the top 5 at this point)? Can we annex a small city-state and call it PELyville where we attempt to implement our dark utopian visions? And most importantly, can we get celebrities to come on the show?

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I’m declaring a moratorium on Nazi examples in moral philosophy

Anti Nazi spraylogo from Gamebanana

Anti Nazi spraylogo from Gamebanana by --HunteR--

OK, I was listening to the latest episode of Philosophy Bites, where Nigel “Daddy Warbucks” Warburton is interviewing Sean Kelly about Homer and Philosophy.  I have documented elsewhere my love and admiration of Warburton and the podcast, so this is not in any way to be construed as a criticism.  But a couple of things pushed my buttons.

At the beginning, David Edmunds says that philosophers haven’t regarded the epic poems of Homer as worthy of philosophical investigation.  I think Nietzsche did.  Small quibble.  What really annoyed me was that during the discussion, Kelly and Warburton are talking about group think/mob mentality (listen to the episode if you want to know how they got there from Homer) and Nigel uses the Nuremberg rallies as an example (pejoratively, of course).

Really Nigel?  The Nuremberg rallies?  You couldn’t come up with a more recent, more topical, non-Nazi example?  I get it, I agree:  Nazi = bad.  And if it seems like I’m picking on Nigel, I apologize.  But it’s painful to see, hear and read philosophers using National Socialism and the Holocaust as their ‘go-to’ examples to make points about moral theories.

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Paul Boghossian (via Philosophy Bites) on Moral Relativism


We’ve discussed Paul Boghossian and his book against relativism
a bit in our Nelson Goodman episode. See my blog post on this from last year.

In this interview on the Philosophy Bites podcast, Boghossian talks about moral relativism, giving some shades of the view: e.g. you could be a relativist about manners but not really about the underlying principles girding them (“be polite!”). This accords with Smith’s version, in which the most important moral points–e.g. generosity is good–are going to be universal, but lots of cultural factors are going to go into when and how much generosity is considered appropriate in a given circumstance.

Read Wes’s post from August on the Boghossian/Stanley Fish exchange that the Philosophy Bites page refers to.

-Mark Linsenmayer

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Buddhism Naturalized?

Professor Owen Flanagan from his Duke University Biography page

Sweater vests increase rigor

Given our recent exploration of moral theory, the excitement around our announcement of a Euthyphro episode and my own current interest in Buddhist thought, I guess it was inevitable that I would stumble across and then buy this book.  Or perhaps it was that Mark mentioned it in an email which I had overlooked.  In any case, the author, Owen Flanagan (pictured to the right), is a philosopher at Duke University. Pat Churchland also thinks highly of him and I guess that’s good enough endorsement for me.

As a self-proclaimed analytic philosopher, Flanagan is a fan of science.  And he’s a fan of being a moral person.  He’s just published a book called The Bodhisattva’s Brain:  Buddhism Naturalized in which he argues that all of the major ‘wisdom traditions’ (read:  religions) are incompatible with science.  Since the traditions are where we get ‘being a moral person’ stuff, it’d be great if we could find one (or find a way to make one) that was compatible with science so that people who prioritize the scientific world view could also have a moral system to lean against.  [This is my characterization, I don't think he'd put it that way]

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Poetry Fights Back

Allen Tate from Wikipedia

Allen Tate from Wikipedia

If you’ve listened to our Danto episode, our Republic episode or read any Plato yourself you know that the Big P didn’t have a high regard for poetry.  If you’ve listened to anything we’ve done over the last year, you know Mark doesn’t have a high regard for my blog posting efforts.  I do start posts, but often times find the zeitgeist has passed before I’m done (I think and write really really slowly).  So here’s something to hit on both sore points:  a poem about Plato’s cave!

I am listening to a podcast called Essential American Poets put out by The Poetry Foundation.  I just listened to a past episode on Allen Tate.  I heard there the following of his poems:

More Sonnets At Christmas IV

Gay citizen, myself, and thoughtful friend,
Your ghosts are Plato’s Christians in the cave.
Unfix your necks, turn to the door; the nave
Gives back the cheated and light dividend
So long sequestered; now, new-rich, you’ll spend
Flesh for reality inside a stone
Whose light obstruction, like a gossamer bone,
Dead or still living, will not break or bend.

Thus light, your flesh made pale and sinister
And put off like a dog that’s had his day,
You will be Plato’s kept philosopher,
Albino man bleached from the mortal clay,
Mild-mannered, gifted in your master’s ease
While the sun squats upon the waveless seas.

I won’t pretend to have grasped the meaning but it is cool to hear him read it in his old school southern accent.  Better than reading it on the page for sure.  The same series has a prior episode on Billy Collins, who was Poet Laureate for the United States from 2001-2003, reading his poem Aristotle.  Also very much worth a listen.

–seth

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Rationally Deferring to Bob Price on Empirical Christianity

Bob PriceI’d promised myself I was going to move on to ethics and stop posting about religious issues, but due diligence requires me to relay this follow-up to my discussion of Mike Licona claiming empirical support for the Resurrection.

As I alluded to in my exchange with Ernie P. about empirically grounding Christianity, arguing about historical evidence is, at least when it occurs between non-historians, pretty dodgy. Anyone who rejects the arguments of the religious is typically accused of not sufficiently engaging them, i.e. being ignorant of their positions and arguments, and not having reviewed all the evidence, etc. Categorically writing off claims of miracles as simply superstition that we modern people should have long grown beyond is considered a crass dismissal. And it’s true: to actually engage in religious debates requires more research than I have time and tolerance for. Personally, I can handle the philosophical disputes: the coherence of the concept of God, the classical arguments, the problem of evil. Re. the empirical issues, such as alleged Biblical archaeology, the historical questions about the writing of the Bible and the events it depicts, textual analysis of the Bible itself: for that, all I can promise is to read a few books on the topic at some point, and that’s purely to feel educated about it, much as I want to learn more about the Roman Empire or the current political climate in Japan or any number of other cultural and/or historical issues.

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Does Post-Modern Skepticism Support Religious Belief?

One of our listeners (and contributors! Thanks again!) Ernie P. has posted on our Facebook page:

You all (on the podcast) seem to assume that ‘belief in the irrational’ is a strongly correlated with religious belief; I would argue that (depending on how you define it), it is a factor in all human belief, and the only real irrationality is to think our own beliefs fully rational…

Now, I see that Ernie and another blogger Alan Lund have a whole back-and-forth going about the justification for Christianity, so you can check that out if you want; I’m not going to attempt to inject myself into that (and honestly don’t have time to read it all right now).

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Greg Ganssle (via Pale Blue Dot) on Dawkins’s “Fitness” Argument

Yale Professor Greg Ganssle provides in this Pale Blue Dot episode what is perhaps a more charitable response to the new atheists than we did.

First, he points out something I hadn’t quite considered in this way before: We at PEL complain about how difficult and tedious it is (or would be) to write something fit for a peer reviewed journal. On the one hand, there’s no substitute for a qualified professor to kick your ass and make you revise something 90 times until it’s right. But the sheer amount of second-guessing involved, of making sure you’ve read and incorporated anything anyone ever has written about what you’re trying to express: it makes it nearly impossible to express anything and surely saps the passion out of the endeavor. Ganssle points out that even in the case of the only bona fide philosopher among the group, Dan Dennett, all of these guys are taking the role of “public intellectual,” taking their message directly to the people instead of putting through the academic publishing process (Dennett is a well established philosopher, but does not publish in academic philosophy of religion journals). For some reason this way of phrasing it makes me like them a bit more, maybe because it’s comparable to what we’re trying to do with the podcast.

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Eric Reitan (via Pale Blue Dot) Refereeing the Atheism Debates

I’ve written before about Eric Reitan, a modern follower of Scheleirmacher, and on this episode of Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot, Reitan gives I think a great explanation of the disagreement between the new atheists and humanistic, liberal Christians: they may agree on nearly all of the same principles (being against Biblical inerrancy and other implausible and morally pernicious parts of fundamentalist Christianity) but still have a different overall assessment of religion because they’re “playing different language games.” His explanation of religion as an essentially contested concept (a new term to me, though certainly a familiar concept in outline) is alone sufficient to make the episode worth a listen. The concept “religion” is not just a categorization of various things, but it has, like “work of art,” a normative judgment built into it. It’s just that at this point in history, some folks have a positive evaluation built into the concept, and some have a negative evaluation. So Hitchens and a liberal theologian, according to Reitan, can both agree about nearly everything, but while the theologian holds up some historical fruits of religion and say “see, isn’t religion great,” Hitchens will respond that that isn’t really religion; while Hitchens will point out horrible crimes associated with religion and the theologian (like Scheiermacher) will deny that these are part of the essence of religion. So it’s largely an argument over words at that point, though we’d have to be more specific about the particular points of remaining disagreement to determine whether they’re really worth arguing over.

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Andrei Buckareff’s (Pale Blue Dot) Response to the Problem of Faith

Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot logoI’ve continued barreling double speed through episodes of Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot (I’ve got a new puppy who needs like 8 long walks a day.) and continue to be impressed with how consistently good Luke’s guests are. Unlike many interview shows or lecture series where topics may be disconnected, I’m seeing a steady progression through the various interviews further into various positions and figures in the philosophy of religion. Luke’s done the world a great service getting these talks together, and at such an alarming rate (around 100 episodes since the beginning of 2009, sometimes recording more than one per day)!

To follow up on my post yesterday about Sam Harris on faith, I wanted to post this interview with Andrei Buckareff, who distinguishes between belief (holding a proposition to be true) and acceptance (holding a proposition for some practical purpose). He says faith can and should be the latter of these. As I often insist, you can’t make yourself believe something; faith can’t be actually deciding to believe something when you just plain don’t; that would involve blatant self-deception. However, Buckareff points out that you can certainly willfully accept a proposition to be true for the purposes of action, and action (he thinks) is largely the point of Christianity.

I find this solution much too easy. He uses the analogy of taking a role in a play, which is clearly pretending: on the least pretext (say, if I as an actor felt physically threatened), I’d break character and abandon the “beliefs” I was holding as that character. If the problem with faith (according to Kenny, who we discussed near the end of our new atheists episode) is that the faithful base their actions too firmly (killing or dying for their faith) on these propositions that they have insufficient evidence for, then Buckareff’s solution utterly fails to engage that. Either we have to interpret his analogy such that we’d drop our faith when it became inconvenient (which might be OK with Kenny but doesn’t seem to capture what faith is about) or we get the perverse picture of people doing extreme things on the basis of a admittedly heuristic strategy (which is exactly what Kenny is complaining about). What do you think?

Toward the end of the discussion Buckareff responds sympathetically to my complaint about the Christian hell, and he spends a lot of his time here talking about making religion and metaphysical naturalism (typically considered the presupposition of natural science) compatible and what this has to do with pantheism and panentheism: this serves as a great follow-up to our Spinoza discussion on God.

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More Pale Blue Dot on Epistemology and Christianity

Philosophy for Theologians logoConversations from the Pale Blue Dot presents quite a bit of this ongoing debate in its nearly 100 episodes (and can also set you up with a fairly thorough set of ideas re. contemporary ethics; I’ll post on that after the Hume/Smith ethics episode goes up).

In this interview with Gregory Dawes from the University of Otego in New Zealand, we hear a former minister who converted to atheism precisely because of his historical investigations into the Jesus story. He talks about naturalistic vs. religious explanations and why we might want to pursue the former even in cases where we don’t have enough evidence either way (he mentions Swinburne a couple of times).

In this conversation with Evan Fales from the University of Iowa, you can hear more about Alvin Plantinga as well as another prominent Christian philosopher that we didn’t bring up, William Alston.

As a general note on the podcast for those that haven’t checked this out: this falls into the same category of other podcasts I’ve written about here before like Elucidations and Diet Soap, all of which I like, which are basically interview format: find a guest who has written a paper or book or otherwise has things to say, and pretty much let them say it.

In all three of these cases, the hosts do a good job contributing to the discussion, i.e. they’re very interested in the subject matter and do some preparation. Still, the format is limited in that if the guest sucks, the episode sucks. I’ll admit that my first couple of tries in the past with Pale Blue Dot were thwarted by the fact that the episodes often lead off with a “tell me about your spiritual journey” section, and my patience for that is fairly limited (I’ll cave in and listen to some of the grossly popular “This I Believe” podcast at some point, but I generally don’t like that format; the “man on the street” parts of the otherwise pretty consistently good Philosophy Talk podcast are definitely its weakest part) for that kind of thing. I’m also interested in the relation between these podcasts and academia: some of them will only have “academically respectable” university professors on them. Pale Blue Dot is all about the ideas, meaning you have to do additional research on your own to figure out in some cases whether the guest is a crank or not, or you can deny that that question has any meaning apart from what you the listener takes out of what you hear.

-Mark Linsenmayer

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Fully Engaged Feminism Podcast on Our Feminism Episode

Podcaster Laura graciously commented on our Gilman/Gilligan episode in the first few minutes of her most recent Fully Engaged Feminism podcast.

She thought we were not harsh enough on Gilman for her eugenics views and found our approach to gender, “especially our references to trans individuals,” somewhat frustrating. I don’t actually recall any references at all to trans individuals, but clearly this is a sensitive topic; perhaps she or others can clue us in to which texts or insights we apparently didn’t have sufficiently in mind during the discussion.

She appreciated our discussion of exploitation, which was entirely Azzurra’s insertion into the discussion, as it wasn’t explicitly the subject of the texts we were reading. So, I guess her feminist intuitions are on the mark.

The bulk of the episode is an interview with Internet comic guy Gabby Schulz about a cartoon he did about feminism about Internet blather that generated a lot of Internet blather.

-Mark Linsenmayer

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Mike Licona (via Pale Blue Dot) on Historical Evidence for Resurrection

Mike Licona

Mike Licona

Continuing to chase down threads engendered by the Hume’s argument against miracles thread, I listened to the lengthy episode #2 of Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot, a podcast run by Luke Muehlahuser, proprietor of commonsenseatheism.com. This is an interview with Mike Licona, who describes himself on the podcast as a historian who’s extensively studied the philosophy of history and has made an extremely thorough examination–with an honest attempt to put aside his preconceptions and get at truth–of the historical evidence for Jesus’s resurrection. His titles, however, according to wikipedia, are “Apologetics Coordinator at the North American Mission Board (Southern Baptist Convention) and Research Professor of New Testament at Southern Evangelical Seminary,” and listening to the discussion, I’m struck by the contrast between Licona’s sober and skeptical tone and the stories of the supernatural (along the lines of demons raging in the third world) he seems willing to entertain.

Repeatedly, Licona tells us we need to look at the evidence and use the best hypothesis; he’s very willing to discount numerous Biblical details as being products of legend. The evidence in question for the resurrection seems to boil down to:

Paul of Tarsus “received oral tradition,” only a couple years after Jesus’s death (as he relates in certain letters he wrote reproduced in the Bible) that Jesus was crucified and afterwords appeared bodily multiple times to groups of individuals. Licona is convinced that Paul is passing on this tradition faithfully, and that the tradition itself reflected actual statements of witnesses to these appearances, due to the strong respect for unalterable tradition among the particular Jewish sect that was the source of the tradition and Paul’s distinguishing clearly in his speech between what he’s received and what new ideas he’s putting forward.

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“Philosophy for Theologians” on Aquinas and Other Topics

Philosophy for Theologians logoIn a recent post I recommended the “Philosophy for Theologians” podcast for more information about Hume on miracles.

I’ve now listened to their first several episodes and can give a more comprehensive (both in the sense of covering more of there work and in the sense that I better understand their point) evaluation.

First, this is a good case to counter anyone who equates being Christian with being philosophically sloppy or positively stupid. What attracts me to this mainly is that the guys (there are a few regulars plus guests who are studying some particular figure and want to present him) give nice, in-depth presentations of (short) philosophical texts. The majority of many of the discussions is not about their Christianity (in their case, it’s “reformed,” meaning Protestant descended from Calvinism), and in fact it takes some work and digging into the episodes to figure out what their religious views are.

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Against Hume on Miracles: Ronald Nash and Daniel Schrock

Ron NashNo one (I think) came forward with citations against Hume’s stance on miracles in response to my post, so I did a bit of listening to available options on iTunes about this issue to see if it would do the job:

First, episode 15 of this “Christian Apologetics” course by the late Ronald H. Nash (pictured) of the Reformed Theological Seminary.

His account of Hume starts 22 minutes in, and he gets the problem right: Hume is not saying that miracles are metaphysically impossible, but only that epistemically, we have no justification for believing them. Nash gives Hume’s account of causality, which explains why he can’t be arguing against their metaphysical impossibility: for Hume, causality is a matter of experienced patterns, not metaphysical possibility. We only read patterns into experienced regularities; it’s always possible that something totally unexpected could happen.

Beyond this, however, Nash is totally unconvincing. His response (at 41 min in) to Hume is that statistically improbable things happen on occasion. He gives an example of a tornado that, despite the odds, hit the same place twice.

This is a totally inadequate response to Hume’s claim. Hume would have no problem with probabilistic laws, and statistically improbable things are LIKELY to happen occasionally: if you have a bell curve of probability, the outliers are on the curve too. The tornado hitting in the same place twice would on no reasonable account be deemed a miracle, and is nothing like, say, the parting of the red sea, or a burning bush, or water into wine, or guy coming back from the dead, or the sun halting in the sky, or any of that.

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Are Men Naturally Predisposed to Excel in Life?

Watch on YouTube

A 1999 episode of In Our Time was ostensibly about “feminism,” but in fact addressed a narrower and more pressing issue: Are men “by nature more competitive, ambitious, status-conscious, dedicated, single-minded and persevering than women”? And if so, doesn’t that mean men are biologically better disposed than women to achieve material success? And if that’s true, doesn’t it follow that the comparatively disadvantaged status women hold in modern society results from “natural” psychological differences, rather than “cultural” patriarchy? What would that then mean for feminism’s mission? Should society ensure equal opportunity, or privilege difference? I would have thought such claims would arouse more backlash than it has. But such theories are taken seriously, to some degree, because they are championed by Prof. Helena Cronin, an academic philosopher at the London School of Economics Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science. Lest you think I’ve mischaracterized Cronin’s arguments, you can also read them here:
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Autonomy and Moral Development: Piaget/Kohlberg/Gilligan

PiagetFor a little more detail on how Gilligan’s account of moral development differs from and responds to those of her predecessors, check out this page from the U. of Illinois Office for Studies in Moral Development and Education.

Given that it’s aimed at educators, the emphasis is on how schools can affect moral development. I found this bit in Piaget spoke to the consideration of socialization in our Rousseau discussion:

The relative powerlessness of young children, coupled with childhood egocentrism feeds into a heteronomous moral orientation [meaning it's tied to blind obedience to authority].

However, through interactions with other children in which the group seeks a to play together in a way all find fair, children find this strict heteronomous adherence to rules sometimes problematic. As children consider these situations, they develop towards an “autonomous” stage of moral reasoning, characterized by the ability to consider rules critically, and selectively apply these rules based on a goal of mutual respect and cooperation. The ability to act from a sense of reciprocity and mutual respect is associated with a shift in the child’s cognitive structure from egocentrism to perspective taking… Thus, Piaget viewed moral development as the result of interpersonal interactions through which individuals work out resolutions which all deem fair…

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Mill and Janet Radcliffe Richards re. Women’s Nature on Philosophy Bites

Another option Azzurra put out for us to discuss on the feminism episode was J.S. Mill’s The Subjection of Women.

On reason I didn’t want to have us read that (apart from it being an older text–1896–than I wanted and being written by a man) is that I listened to this “Philosophy Bites” podcast episode featuring British philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards, who wrote The Skeptical Feminist: A Philosophical Enquiry.Richards does a great job on the episode in succinctly giving Mill’s point, which is surprisingly prescient of the issue re. human nature we ran into in our discussion: given the historical subjection of women and what that’s done to our culture, we can’t know know the degree to which measured differences in outlook and behavior (such as those cited by Gilligan) are biological or are a matter of social conditioning. His solution is to remove the legal restrictions (“protections” in the eyes of the men of the time) on women and just let them compete. In other words, be gender-blind. This, too, well captures what’s perhaps a majority male response in the West today.

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What Is Nothing?

My mind was blown today by the fantabulous 1973 short “What Is Nothing?” featuring some stoned grade schoolers wondering about the different types of non-existence. It features Rifftrax commentary to make it tolerable, and can be experienced if you have a buck to spare: More info on the video, including sample clip. Because caterpillars matter to caterpillars, man!

If you are too cheap for that, I see William Lane Craig has an audio clip where he reads a listener’s question about the nothing and then proceeds to not answer it until about 2:40: there is no nothing, because it’s all God. Craig distinguishes (as we do on our episode #43 between two versions of the cosmological argument: a chain of chronological causes and a chain of explanatory causes, but doesn’t seem to make a coherent point about why the former type of argument doesn’t make any sense. Despite a good pile of name dropping (and finding a bit from the Odyssey as hysterical!), I’m not sure I find the dialogue on this bit of podcast much more enlightening than the stoned kids’ quiet contemplation.

-Mark Linsenmayer

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Riding the Zeitgeist – Moral sentiment and pyschopathy

I never said I wasn't crazy on kenn budd blogspot

Nice psycho-graphic from Kenn Budd's blog

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Professor of Ethics at Duke, was recently interview on The Philosopher’s Zone about the moral judgment of psychopaths.  One of the key questions at issue is whether psychopaths understand what is morally wrong, why it is so and just don’t care, or whether they don’t know what is morally wrong.  This ties in with some of our recent posts about moral sentiment in that Sinnott-Armstrong brings in a kind of developmental view of moral understanding to frame the issue with psychopaths.

First it might make sense to clarify what is meant by “psychopathy”.  It’s not just anyone who is antisocial or violent.  In response to Alan Saunders’ mentioning the recent Norway shooter, Sinnott-Armstrong clarifies: (here’s the official checklist on Wikipedia)

First of all it’s not just any antisocial person. There are lots of antisocial people. There are lots of horrible violent people as in Norway who are not psychopaths. It’s a very specific syndrome defined in terms of 20 items that get scored zero, one or two, so the maximum is 40, and you get scored as a psychopath if it’s over 30. The items are things like grandiose self-image, pathological lying, lack of empathy and remorse, parasitic lifestyle and so on, including criminal history. Criminal versatility is a mark. So this person in Norway does one crime, but psychopaths, to get a two on that item, need to do six different violent felonies, then they get scored high on psychopathy. So they do whatever serves their purposes at the moment; they don’t do a single isolated crime.

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