On another note, Mr. Speaker, I would like to bring to this House a serious but slightly hypothetical discussion. We know that a significant number of people in the human population are psychopaths. We define psychopathy for the purposes of this debate as the innate inability to empathize with the plight of others. Various theories have been postulated as to the source of this emotional disability, and some of these have traced it to a genetic origin. Indeed, it is sex-linked.

Assuming that a genetic origin is the source of psychopathy or that we have some other external means of detecting psychopathy, what does does this mean for society? Most psychopaths, contrary to popular culture, do not violate the law or do anything wrong that is noticeable to the state. Nevertheless, their inability to empathize with others' plight implies that they would be willing to take advantage of weakness of others, given the opportunity, more easily than non-psychopaths. Consequently, one would expect that they would be more likely to attain positions of power than non-psychopaths. In those positions of power, they thus have the ability and the opportunity to help create a less empathetic social order. In a sense, the recent documentary The Corporation was a discussion of this very point.

So given the above, the presence of psychopaths in society seems likely to be detrimental to the care that the society would take for the weak. Thus, if we are given the tools to detect psychopathy, what should we do with this knowledge?