Summary The Pd, K and L scales of the MMPI and four of Kolberg's Moral Judgment Situations were administered to three criterion groups; adolescent delinquents, college students, and individuals belonging to a therapy collective which provides free community service. Greater than 50% of both the delinquent and therapy collective subjects were classified as psychopathic, (Pd + K T score > 70). The three subject groups obtained significantly different moral maturity scores with the therapy collective subjects receiving the highest moral maturity mean score. The results of two stepwise regression analyses found no relationship between Pd scores and moral maturity scores.
The popular idea of survival of the fittest1 is analogous to the notion that there is a best solution to an easily identifiable problem. Unfortunately, because the environment is dynamic, evolutionary fitness is an everchanging virtue. Likewise, there is no best solution to the problem presented by life. The Darwinian answer to the problem of ever-changing problems and uncertain solutions is the overproduction of variants, and their subsequent culling by selection - natural and sexual. Overproduction is necessary, because there is no way of predicting which variant is likely to be successful, given the transformations of the selection process. Culling is inevitable, because some solutions simply do not work. This small set of facts implies that most solutions (variants) are likely to be impractical. Change is necessary, because things change, but changing something that already works is dangerous. Indeed, most noncoding DNA mutations are harmful or, at best, neutral.2 Only a tiny fraction of mutations produce phenotypic variants that are more rather than less adapted to the environment in which they emerge. Human beings have modified the basic laws of evolutionary transformation through the emergent power of abstraction. We can alter our concepts and behaviours faster than animals, limited to change produced by mutation, and we can model some of the consequences of those changes, in the dramatic workplace of our imagination. This means that we can allow our ideas to die, in our stead, as Karl Popper1 recommended. However, the principles of overproduction, error, and culling still apply, in the realm of creative abstraction: many of our ideas are fatal, a larger proportion still are insane, and those that are neither fatal nor insane are generally impractical. New inventions have a mere 7% probability of reaching the marketplace,4 while 70% of new businesses (including those based on the small proportion of marketable inventions) fail within 10 years.5 Perhaps it is for this fundamental reason that creativity and insanity appear linked by eternal intuition: in the hunt for a solution, more ideas are better; but most ideas are still bad. The conservative strategy should therefore be to avoid ideas altogether, and that appears to be the ploy adopted by most people. Katz6 estimates that only 1.5% of workers aspire to self-employment. Many people appear neither intelligent nor open enough to be genuinely creative, and only a small proportion of those few who are also manifest enough discipline and emotional stability to see their ideas realized. The typical best strategy, therefore, is to do whatever everyone else does. This is what animals do, and it generally works. Nonetheless, stasis also presents its dangers. In the kingdom of nature, the Red Queen, it is necessary to run as fast as possible just to stay in the same place, and twice that fast to get anywhere else. Because situations change, creativity is necessary and valued, despite its dangers. Where do new ideas come from? Who generates them, and how? Human beings are constrained and low-capacity processors. Our perceptions are necessarily low-resolution representations of an almost infinitely high-resolution reality. Likewise, our concepts are mere shadows of our perceptions. The informational array that constantly presents itself to us can be simplified, for pragmatic purposes, just as a low-resolution photograph can stand as a substitute for a high-resolution photograph (which can, in turn, stand as a substitute for the thing it represents). Thus the same thing-in-itself can be perceived in many different ways, none of which are necessarily more or less accurate than any other (except insofar as they serve, or fail to serve, some motivated purpose). This means that the real object always contains additional information, available to the imaginative or diligent searcher.7 Our ideas, lacking one-to-one correspondence with the world they represent, instead serve primarily pragmatic purposes: we wish to live, and to gratify our desires while doing so. …
