Was Ayn Rand a psychopath?

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In both cases, it would be entirely possible for a psychopath to be moral. However, that is of course depended on whether one views the world as having universal morality in a large majority of human beings on which one can base a standard of rigorous morals that the psychopath could be judged to be in violation of, or having a lack of.

*P.S* I love that cartoon, but I always wondered where economists would be placed, since its arguably a mix of psychology and mathematics.

I concur. I am a card carrying Aspie but I have lived long enough to function in the overwhelming predominant NT world. I have learned to adapt my external public behavior in such a manner that I can pass for human 99 times out of 100 undetected. Only a few people I have met can sense that I am not a standard NT model.

Thus, a sociopath "prudent predator" can manage his behavior so he can operate unmolested most of the time.

Fortunately for the world, my inclination is not evil so I am not trying to be the wolf that fools the sheep. The sheep have nothing I want that for which I will misuse my adaptability to obtain.

ruveyn

Back to the late Ayn Rand's (Alicia Rosenbaum's) mental state. She was a pisser and a hard person to be around, but she was not crazy nor was she a sociopath. At worst she was a neurotic who in the name of Man's Heroism and the Invincible Individual became a den mother to a bunch of losers and neurotics. She was ten hairs short of being a serious philosopher, but she did get a lot of people riled up especially against a government which is demonstrably unjust and incompetent. It is easy for even losers to hate a bigger loser. We are governed by the kind of scum found at the bottom of the barrel. I never was an Objectivist, but I resonated and vibrated (for a time anyway) to her disgust and vituperation. So I can see why some of her stuff got a few people worked up.

She was a workaholic and a person who imagined her vision of the world to be so Right and Perfect that no sane person would deny what she said or proposed. There is no way the United States will be brought down by even a few thousand of the top thinkers, experts and doers escaping to some Hidden Village in the Rockies. If ten thousand quit and leave another ten thousand will move in to fill the void. So much for The Strike (which was the original title of Atlas Shrugged). While being smart and indignant is not insanity as such, being too smart sometimes blinds one to his/her own capacity for error.

ruveyn

In all fairness to Ayn Rand, she is as good an author as she was a philosopher.

As good an author ???. Literary taste is not based on any truly objective standard. Atlas Shrugged was cleverly contrived. It involved a lot of threads that had to be put together coherently (and they were). Unfortunately she had the Victor Hugo disease and insisted on overlaying what might have been a good political action alternate time line story with way too much polemic and more than twice as many pages as were needed. If she cut most of the polemic her story might have been a good one. Contrast Atlas Shrugged with Urusla Laguin's -The Dispossessed-. That was a novel about anarchism (in a science fiction context). It was a third as long as Atlas Shrugged (maybe even shorter) but put together a fairly complex action political story.

ruveyn

In essence, it means that I find her books to be fairly painful to read, not due to the philosophy or political bits, but due to being horribly written. I know that it's subjective but I don't really care.

Consider this, if morals and your conscience is just an animal instinct, you would be able to ignore it much like its possible to ignore being hungry or wanting to bash someone's face in with a Texas Instruments BA II Plus Financial Calculator.

There is also the question of, exactly what kind of a moral emotion are we talking about, deontological or consequencialist ethics?

Deontological, I'll agree it becomes somewhat of an issue, however it would entirely depend upon which rules one bases what is a moral or immoral act. According to Kant, and the categorical imperative, in the naturalist formulation "So act as if your maxims should serve at the same time as the universal law (of all rational beings)", meaning that we should so act that we may think of ourselves as "a member in the universal realm of ends" However, let's say that one of my maxims is that stupid people should be chlorinated out of our gene pool, that would indicate that I would want all people who encounter a stupid person to drown them in chlorine. So, I'm moral!

If we are speaking in terms of consequentialism is somewhat solves itself, because its in essence based on the morality of actions being judged based upon their consequences. So, to use the same scenario as above, if I think stupid people will be the cause of the demise of the human race, it follows that killing them off would be a "good" act. There is also a matter of to whom the consequences need to be "good". Vic Mackey from "The Shield" is an amoral consequencialist, views acts as justifiable and "right" based on the consequences they have for the people he cares for.

In both cases, it would be entirely possible for a psychopath to be moral. However, that is of course depended on whether one views the world as having universal morality in a large majority of human beings on which one can base a standard of rigorous morals that the psychopath could be judged to be in violation of, or having a lack of.

*P.S* I love that cartoon, but I always wondered where economists would be placed, since its arguably a mix of psychology and mathematics.

I concur. I am a card carrying Aspie but I have lived long enough to function in the overwhelming predominant NT world. I have learned to adapt my external public behavior in such a manner that I can pass for human 99 times out of 100 undetected. Only a few people I have met can sense that I am not a standard NT model.

Thus, a sociopath "prudent predator" can manage his behavior so he can operate unmolested most of the time.

Fortunately for the world, my inclination is not evil so I am not trying to be the wolf that fools the sheep. The sheep have nothing I want that for which I will misuse my adaptability to obtain.

ruveyn

- Some people with psychopathic traits do not commit crimes, and are capable of being productive citizens (day traders, snipers etc.)

What would compel an individual to ignore an instinct... other than a more powerful instinct?

None of the above. I (and a lot of authors) believe that morality makes no sense at all to a psychopath. Deontology versus consequentialism, a major discussion within moral philosophy, is of no greater interest to a psychopath than the price difference between apples and oranges.

See this site for a brutally honest description of the mind of a psychopath:
http://www.sociopathworld.com/

To quote American Psycho (heavily influenced by "The Mask of Sanity"): There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable... I simply am not there.

Could you please define "moral emotions" before we continue. The whole reason why I went off on that morals tangent was because in my interpretation in order for an emotion to be moral, there would need to be a definition of what exactly constitutes "moral".

If you're merely talking about conscience then we are more or less in agreement.

That sounds more like depersonalization rather than sociopathy. It could allude to a flexible sense of self, which is a trait in psychopaths from what I've gathered.

I don't consider psychology a 'hard' science in the way physics is so I remain skeptical. I think the idea of a psychopath is popular in our culture and even academics are not immune to its influence. Believing a person is pure evil is just as illogical as believing a person is totally good.

Not an easy task. If I succeed, I probably deserve a Nobel prize (yes, a real one, JakobVirgil). I will not succeed.

The German badass game theorist Fritz W. Scharpf proposed a model where an individual could have both individual preferences and preferences for the utility of others. Interestingly, he did not automatically assume that an individual would hold a preference for positive utility in others. A sadist, in other words, has social preferences just like an altruist has.

Bottom line: In my opinion, anyone who includes the utility of others in his/her decisions has a "moral" decision structure. A purely selfish person is neither altruistic nor sadistic.

And the currently available evidence suggests that psychopaths are purely selfish. Unfortunately, they are also impulsive, which make them very dangerous.

That sounds more like depersonalization rather than sociopathy. It could allude to a flexible sense of self, which is a trait in psychopaths from what I've gathered.

You start sweating and almost crying when someone has a nicer business card than you?

It's fairly well accepted that a psychopath will elect him or herself over everyone else, IE gun to the head, the psychopath will not die for anyone. Will pursue gratification of him or herself as a "prime directive" with little and most likely no regard for others.

If we differentiate between "high functioning" psychopaths and "low functioning psychopaths" as some researchers have done, Robert Hare does something of that nature in his book "Snakes in Suits" then a lack of social preference for the utility of others is not implicit in that. It can manifest, but only as a function of combined impulsiveness, utility and being purely selfish.

This is an interesting discussion, but I fear it may be one of those that get lost in definitions as we go along.

You start sweating and almost crying when someone has a nicer business card than you?