Season 2
Episode 6: Prosecution and apologetics
After a while abroad, Nilly comes home. Her parents often try to call her for all sorts of trivial things, but rarely inform her about letters. This is dire, because important letters often have a strict deadline.
This time, she receives a letter from the prosecutor. Suffering from a pathological inability to mentally time-travel, she does not weight the situation properly on an emotional level, although she feels betrayed by her parents.
Rationally, she can understand that she is in danger. However, until the very moment of the appointment, she is unable to process the peril she is in, and the potential threat of yet another incarceration ahead.
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A failure to plan ahead is one of the diagnostic criteria for ASPD. Psychopaths, people with a severe form of ASPD, are notorious for an inability for mental time travel; the ability to put your emotions into a past or future state of mind.
Psychopaths can imagine past and future rationally. They can logically state what has happened and what will happen under sepcific circumstances. However, they usually fail to do so emotionally. As a result, a psychopath may understand that they should not perform certain actions, because they may end up in prison, but cannot process the implications emotionally. Such knowledge becomes a purely semantic knowledge without any mental value. Consequently, their ability to consider the consequences of their actions and planning out their navigations through life work only poorly.
They might be able to focus on a short-term goal, which bring quick immediate rewards, but they fail to integrate their actions into the social context of a realistic future plan. As such, it seems that a lot of their actions eventually turn against their own interest, sabotaging themselves or self-defeat.
Because of their inability to mental time travel, it seems that psychopaths do not understand their actions to the fullest. Because of that reason, some scientists and moral philosophers have argued that the actions of psychopaths do not carry the same severity, when compared to healthy control groups.
This is not to say that psychopaths are proposed to bear no moral or legal responsibility at all. Psychopaths do understand what an action is right or wrong, they can still choose to commit an action. However, it seems they can understand only the immediate action, not the context, consequence, or implications of said action. Due to their impaired understanding – including the consequences for themselves and others – it has been proposed that their punishment should be adjusted to their mental capacities.
Vierra, Andrew. (2016). Psychopathy, Mental Time Travel, and Legal Responsibility. Neuroethics. 9.
Levy N. Psychopaths and blame: The argument from content. Philos Psychol. 2014 351-367.
