You're assuming that what we call psychopaths have no empathy and no guilt. I realize that this is the stock definition, but I find it unconvincing and dangerou

You're assuming that what we call psychopaths have no empathy and no guilt. I realize that this is the stock definition, but I find it unconvincing and dangerously misleading. Humans are good at rationalization, and bad at self-reporting. "No guilt" and "no empathy" can be explained by bravado and self-delusion. Instead, my model goes something like this: there's a spectrum of selfishness. The people we label psychopaths have certain selfish desires that outweigh (for them, sometimes) your human rights. E.g. in an extreme case, an abuser's desire for sexual gratification is more important to them than your right to not be molested. Dialing it back, consider people who text while driving, or who rush through a yellow light when they could easily stop. In that moment, they aren't seeing the vehicles around them as being occupied by people with all the same rights as themselves. They see vehicles ... nuisances ... obstacles to be routed around. They temporarily lack empathy. If you go looking for it, there's a lot of sociopathic behaviour on display in daily life, from people who we would never label psychopaths, nor completely lacking empathy. So, I think that psychopaths are people who are extremely selfish in some specific ways, but that they are not fundamentally "other".