Buddy's Comment 6: What benefit was the community's morals on the likes of J. Dahmer, or E. Gein, or A. Hitler? It is because the communities they belonged to could not enforce or convince them of the 'right-ness' or 'wrong-ness' of their actions, that the self-imposed, self-governing moral code failed.
My Response to Comment 6:
It is my firm belief that psychopaths and sociopaths have a biologically inherited, or traumatically induced brain injury or deformity that affects their ability to conform to social norms. Furthermore, I suspect that like other medical maladies, psycho-social issues occur at a regular statistical rate in the human population, regardless of whether absolute or relative moral codes are in place. Your contention implies that christianity can cure psychological illness- I vehemently disagree. It is all too simple to disavow the mentally ill and attribute their behaviors to a failure of their personal piety. I put to you that in the case of the truly deranged, neither absolute or relative moral codes will have any influence on their behaviors. Both approaches would fail.
I don't know whether or not the behaviors of psychopaths, socio-paths or psychotics are all attributable to a physiological cause. Nor do I claim that 'Christianity' can cure that ill. But this extreme scenario, I believe, would be more prevalent if there were no absolutes, no 'right' or 'wrong' concepts hard-wired into man by a creator. If I understood your contention, the code of what is 'right' and 'wrong' is the culmination of how man interacts with man, and improves over subsequent generations; it becomes 'better' with time. it is not hard-wired. My belief is that man cannot 'create' the basic code, definitely not create one so universal, across all cultures in some form or other, without a foundation to build on, without a definition of 'right' and 'wrong' that comes from outside of man's manipulations. My claim, previously, that man's morality is de-volving is more readily seen in our world, than the evolving, better-than-before conclusion you claim is happening. My reference to the heinous horrors of the last century(s) is: that they were committed by people who did not have a god, who denied the 'code'. The generalization about the despots in the last several centuries, who have committed such horrors as did Hitler, (Pol Pot, Mao, Kim Il Jong, et al.), is that these monsters did not have a 'code'. Their cultures did not have an evolved code, either. This is an example of a culture not devising a 'good code'. It also highlights how neighboring cultures, that did have a (good) code could not influence the bad code and make it better. It contradicts the evolution model.
ReplyDeleteSo, the specificity of arguing about the mentally ill, sidesteps the argument that the rest of humanity would be as 'ill' if man were not hard-wired with a code. Those 'ill' members of society don't disprove a hard-wiring; they rather illustrate what would/could be without the wiring. Fortunately, man is hard-wired, so we are better able to define what is wrong, and seek to 'correct' those who don't acknowledge the code.