![“In my work with the defendants [at the Nuremberg Trials, 1945-1949] I was searching for the nature of evil, and I now think I have come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.” —psychologist Gustave Gilbert](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/32201175-847a-4cab-8cf0-e05945842616.jpeg)
That is true, but where's the motivation?
IF one's missing empathy, no mirror-neuron-function, so others are just meat-marionettes to one..
why care whether they're butchered or not?
They aren't real if one hasn't got mirror-neuron-function: they aren't SOMEONES, they are meat-marionettes, then.
I think it's the most-fundamental "valid/nonvalid" & "my-kind/others" polarization possible in human-category life..
I've read that there are true-psychopaths who simply abstain from harming those around them, even if they can't understand why anybody would deem these others to be valuable, & I have to admire their character.
That'd take work, for no-reward.
it's like the people who can't experience pain: they usually get dead, early, as a consequence of it.
People without any empathy, whatsoever, how could they avoid massively-butchering others' worth, if it isn't even felt by their sentience, to be real?
Thank you for putting it in this discussion that psychopaths aren't inherently-evil: they're deafblind to empathy, totally, but that character is still significant.
That is what I'd read, & needed reminding of it.
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