Identifications, Volitions and the Case of Successful Psychopaths Somogy V ARGA † Abstract While many profound philosophical questions arise about psychopaths, I wish to draw attention to two limitations in current debates. First, philosophers mainly deal with offender and forensic populations neglecting so-called ‘successful’ psychopaths. Second, philosophers mainly focus on the issue of empathy and responsibility, while relatively little attention is paid to volitional aspects. I address these two limitations together and argue that ‘successful’ psychopaths are volitionally constrained. In order to grasp and explore this deficiency, I argue in favour of a more refined and fine-grained understanding of identifications. 1. Introduction Psychopathy, particularly as assessed with Robert Hare’ s Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R) (1991; 2003), has established itself as a clinical construct, especially within psychiatric and offender classification. Hare (2003) suggests that four var- iable dimensions represent the construct of psychopathy: interpersonal factors (manipulative, grandiose self-worth, pathological lying, superficial charm), affec- tive factors (lack of remorse, shallow affect, lack of empathy and responsibility), behavioural lifestyle factors (stimulation seeking, impulsivity, parasitic orienta- tion, lack of realistic goals), and antisocial factors (poor behaviour controls, early behavioural problems, juvenile delinquency, criminal versatility). 1 Not only are psychopaths known for lacking empathic concern, but also for treating other human beings as objects rather than as knowing and feeling agents that demand respect and care (McIlwain 2010; Baron-Cohen 2012). Such lack of sensitivity extends to having difficulties distinguishing positive affect from negative affect in faces (Habel et al. 2002), and to failing to exhibit emotions when exposed to pictorial representations of starving children or mutilated bodies (Levenston et al. 2000). Findings from psychology, neuroscience and neurocriminology suggest that while emotion has a crucial role in moral behaviour, cortical areas that are crucial for emotional and moral capacity are impaired in psychopaths (Yang and Raine † Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis, United States; Email: svarga@ memphis.edu 1 Hare’ s work has greatly advanced the understanding of the condition, and the PCL-R is now a standard tool for diagnosing psychopathy. Rich clinical descriptions, particularly by Hervey Cleckley (1976), have provided important impulses for the PCL-R. dialectica Vol. 69, N° 1 (2015), pp. 87–106 DOI: 10.1111/1746-8361.12094 © 2015 The Author dialectica © 2015 Editorial Board of dialectica dialectica