Hating the idea of sociopaths

From psychologist Barry Schwartz, via Brain Pickings. First regarding the amorality of science:

When a scientist, or anyone else, discovers something, it doesn’t occur to us to ask whether that discovery should exist. In other words, though discoveries often have moral implications, they do not, by themselves, have moral dimensions. If someone were to suggest that the Higgs boson shouldn’t exist, we’d wonder what mind-altering substance he’d ingested. Inventions, in contrast, are a whole other story. Inventions characteristically have moral dimensions. We routinely ask whether they should exist. We wonder what’s good (life improving) about them, and what the drawbacks are. We debate whether their wide distribution should go forward, and if so, with what kind of regulation.
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Social science has created a “technology” of ideas about human nature… In addition to creating things, science creates concepts, ways of understanding the world and our place in it, that have an enormous effect on how we think and act. If we understand birth defects as acts of God, we pray. If we understand them as acts of chance, we grit our teeth and roll the dice. If we understand them as the product of prenatal neglect, we take better care of pregnant women.

I like that. I feel like sometimes people think of the existence of sociopaths as some sort of moral issue that they can take a stance on -- anti-sociopath. But as one recent comment noted, that's a little like saying that you're anti-gravity (back to the future!) or anti-phytoplankton (whoa!). Things that exist primarily just exist. There may be a moral element in how they are created or, I don't know, maybe something else in there too. But too many people think that it's just enough to be anti-sociopaths, as if disliking them would eliminate them. But that's like disliking poverty. Or disliking drought or famine or disease. There are sociopaths in the world. Disliking them or wishing they were all locked up and killed won't prevent there from being more sociopaths. The more rational thought if you wanted to prevent mental disorders would not be to just hate on mental disorders, but to understand how and why they occur and try to figure out some way to prevent or treat them humanely. I don't think anyone (at least not here) is truly "pro-sociopath", as if that were the pinnacle of all humanity has to offer. You don't need to convince anyone that sociopaths sometimes cause problems for themselves and others, but given that's true (as it is true with almost everyone at sometime or another), the only truly helpful question is, what are we going to do about it?

Another interesting thought:

However, there are two things about idea technology that make it different from most “thing technology.” First, because ideas are not objects, to be seen, purchased, and touched, they can suffuse through the culture and have profound effects on people before they are even noticed. Second, ideas, unlike things, can have profound effects on people even if the ideas are false… False ideas can affect how people act, just as long as people believe them… Because idea technology often goes unnoticed, and because it can have profound effects even when it’s false — when it is ideology — it is in some respects more profound in its influence than the thing technology whose effects people are so accustomed to worrying about.