Whereas you don’t think mental illness exists. I guess we all have our burdens to bear.
I think that presupposes an idealised [sic] state of human development that can be deducted from.
If you don’t think that mental illness exists, then there’s no point having this conversation.
Plus, some people really do think embryos are people!
Yes, and some are flat-earthers (truly) and Trump supporters, and some compulsively eat dirt. That’s kind of the point. Insanity is strange and we want to understand it better.
I shouldn't think a psychopath would care much either way, beyond which course of action might benefit them at the time.
I agree, but the fact that they don’t care is the problem. Abortion might be a means to an end, a way to immiserate a target demographic. Without compunctions and moral impulses, anti-abortion laws, witch-hunting, and racism become viable vehicles for collective punishment and self-gratification.
The Sociopath Next Door is full of case studies from a Harvard psychiatrist specializing in sociopathy. The extremes of the disorder are obviously disturbing, but what happens when the neuropathology is sub-diagnostic?
My interest is in how psychopathy connects to people’s epistemic hygiene. That is, the ability, habits, and motivation to correctly construe reality. Think about it. Moral facts are just like any other kinds of fact. Someone with ASPD would be unresponsive or insensitive to moral facts (as you said). But epistemic facts have the same flavor, and pathological lying is symptomatic of psychopathy.
What has to go wrong in a brain for a person to lose concern about misconstruing or misrepresenting reality?
Psychopathy is detectable on an MRI and involves morphological abnormalities in some specific regions. Like all neuropathologies, psychopathy falls on a spectrum.
A Systematic Literature Review of Neuroimaging of Psychopathic Traits.
Your implication about religiosity is that it can influence moral attitudes. But notice that many religious persons are immune to indoctrination regarding abortion, child genital mutilation, and the like, recognizing these issues as morally obvious. Why? Probably because they have the mental means to do so.
Yes, actually, I do.
There’s an academic survey that goes out every few years, and there’s more consensus among philosophers that abortion is permissible than about literally anything else. There’s less agreement that the external world exists.
Being against abortion requires one or more of these assumptions:
- That zygotes are actual people.
- That these zygote people have rights over your body overriding any of your own needs.
- That sex is blameworthy and constitutes some sort of implied consent regarding pregnancy.
Any one of these assumptions is, frankly, insane.
A conservative estimate is 30% of the population.