NEW ESSAY: What’s Wrong with Them?​ When Abnormality Becomes an Explanation

This is the latest essay I published in my project​ Me, Looking for Meaning. 

​In another essay, I wrote about a familiar way of explaining people whose behavior disturbs us. They are mean. Or they are stupid. Moral inferiority and intellectual inferiority provide two convenient answers to the question of why somebody would do something we find cruel, destructive, or incomprehensible.

But there is another answer we reach for surprisingly often: there must be something wrong with them. We call people crazy, insane, psychopaths, narcissists, mentally unstable, not normal. These descriptions are not all equivalent. Some borrow loosely from psychological or psychiatric language; others function mainly as insults. What interests me here is what they can have in common: they place the person somewhere outside what we imagine to be normal human behavior.

The underlying logic can be simple: Someone behaves in a way I find unacceptable. I would never behave like that. Therefore, there must be some fundamental difference between that person and me. Whether we locate that difference in moral character, intellectual ability, or psychological abnormality, the result can be the same: reassuring distance between “people like that” and people like us.

You can continue reading here.
[This essay will be included in Newsletter#26.]​