As a person with two of the four mental health conditions you've listed, and some comorbidities besides, my objection is to the moral categorisations being applied. Sociopathy is a thing, "Proclivity to anti-social behaviour" is a hair's breadth from vintage race science.Uhhh yeah. No.
Human experience and brain chemistry is varied. From ADHD, to depression, to schizophrenia, to bi-polar disorder, and the list goes on and on and on. We don't all have the same brain, just waiting to sponge up whatever experiences and lessons we happen to come across.
Some things you're just born with based on genetics. Pretending like absolutely everything is nurture, and hand waving everything else as phrenology, is the mental health equivalent of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" talk.
My opinion as well. We're not born innately moral (or clever, or determined, etc), but we are born with tendencies and predispositions. nurturing dictates how we evolve and grow from there. If we're lucky, at some point we get autonomous enough to course correct ourselves.Uhhh yeah. No.
Human experience and brain chemistry is varied. From ADHD, to depression, to schizophrenia, to bi-polar disorder, and the list goes on and on and on. We don't all have the same brain, just waiting to sponge up whatever experiences and lessons we happen to come across.
Some things you're just born with based on genetics. Pretending like absolutely everything is nurture, and hand waving everything else as phrenology, is the mental health equivalent of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" talk.
Of course not.
Especially because good/evil isn't that simple. Like I think hunting is evil, but many good people do it as a sport, that's life.
But if they have a brain damage that can't be controlled, they aren't evil.
As a person with two of the four mental health conditions you've listed, and some comorbidities besides, my objection is to the moral categorisations being applied. Sociopathy is a thing, "Proclivity to anti-social behaviour" is a hair's breadth from vintage race science.
Researchers shy away from calling children psychopaths; the term carries too much stigma, and too much determinism. They prefer to describe children like Samantha as having "callous and unemotional traits," shorthand for a cluster of characteristics and behaviors, including a lack of empathy, remorse, or guilt; shallow emotions; aggression and even cruelty; and a seeming indifference to punishment.
Ya, I used to think it was all nurture too until I had kids and witnessed other kids with knowing their parents and I don't believe it's pure nurture anymore. It's a bit of both. People's personalities aren't learned. There's something in their nature that shapes that. How they respond to things certainly is taught to a certain extent, but their personality also impacts their tolerance or willingness to respond to certain behaviors. Seeing kids in the same family be completely different despite the same upbringing environments has shown there has to be some element of nature to it. Plus we talk all the time about kids being on the spectrum now which isn't a binary thing. So knowing that there is that variance which can impact how their behavior is, why are we so quick to completely blame it on nurture these days? I no longer assume it's the parent's fault if a kid does something bad. It could be, but it's not always the case.
Are you making some ham-fisted phrenology reference here? lol
Well it's the capacity for evil that's in question. Most people don't seem to be arguing for OP's initial premise ("babies are born bad"). Obviously, all humans have the capacity for evil, but some, in my earnest opinion, have more than others due to their brain. Does this make them "evil" at birth. Well, no. But that is not a great term here because its ambiguous and subjective. I prefer selfish for evil and compassion for good. Or we can just call it what it is and describe it as "capacity to conform to a social contract based on cultural mores". Society dictates that being selfish is evil and being compassionate is good, we are measuring it by how we treat others versus how we treat ourselves. That capacity is, at least initially, natural, in my opinion.the idea that you can make moral judgement on people by the time they are born is some Nazi shit.
We are shaped into who we are through our environment, our own choices and how we decide to react to the world around us.
As a person with two of the four mental health conditions you've listed, and some comorbidities besides, my objection is to the moral categorisations being applied. Sociopathy is a thing, "Proclivity to anti-social behaviour" is a hair's breadth from vintage race science.
I am against the idea of there being any clearly identifiable biological factors that are present during someone's birth. At the very least it's such a minor factor compared to the goliath that is environmental factors (education, how they are raised, their social background, their experience in society, etc.)Well it's the capacity for evil that's in question. Most people don't seem to be arguing for OP's initial premise ("babies are born bad"). Obviously, all humans have the capacity for evil, but some, in my earnest opinion, have more than others due to their brain. Does this make them "evil" at birth. Well, no. But that is not a great term here because its ambiguous and subjective. I prefer selfish for evil and compassion for good. Or we can just call it what it is and describe it as "capacity to conform to a social contract based on cultural mores". Society dictates that being selfish is evil and being compassionate is good, we are measuring it by how we treat others versus how we treat ourselves. That capacity is, at least initially, natural, in my opinion.
Sociopathy is literally not a thing and hasn't been for decades. Antisocial personality disorder is. Hence using the term "antisocial."
Some big brain armchair psychiatrists in this thread.
Psychopathy and sociopathy are informally real (and kind of are similiar...don't forget the terms existed about 100 years prior to the advent of the field of Psychology) even if the DSM Dx's don't acknowledge it. Otherwise you wouldn't have tools such as the PCL-R, a literal instrument that psychometrically measures psychopathy and often times used in conjunction with the HCR-20 to attempt to assess risk of future criminal offending.
Yeah but being like "Antisocial is a NAZI TERM!!!1!" when that's the actual official terminology is goofy. So is saying that sociopathy is more "real" when it's not an officially recognized diagnosis.
Technically, "sociopathy" never has been an actual diagnosis.
But couldn't it be treated/controlled like other mental health issues?
Although this is true, behavior is learned and can be modified given the right conditions. Does this stop people from being good/evil as far as society views those terms? That right now is actually quite the debate in the philosophical/psychological world right now.
Good and Evil are social constructs. You are not born as either.