2008-04-21 - Yeah, I'm okay wit dat ...

[Boss Out of Town]

Hmmm . . . is there a way to download all this intellectual ferment so I can read it all at once resting comfortably on the couch while the dog is lying on my arm licking the pillow for no explicable reason?

[Forrest]

Furthermore, to actually get back to discussing the comic, I don't think Ian is mis-motivated. Elves kill Half-Elves. Ian and everyone he's ever loved is a Half-Elf. So, in self defense, he kills Elves.

I'm not decided on that issue yet, but I think that that is a distinct possibility. There is also a third possibility that Ian has actually gone crazy, and would kill all the elves even if it weren't a rationally necessary thing to do; but that, as a matter of contingent fact, it is necessary and a sane, rational person would have done it as well.

I'd argue that a mental disorder is a specific variety of atypical cognition or behavior. Not all atypical behavior or cognition is (or should be) considered a disorder.

Can you explain for me where you would draw the line?

However, I'm not aware of too many mental disorders that are typical.

I think that's because most people would like to consider themselves sane, so patterns which are common do not get called "insane", even if, by objective criteria, they should be.

Still, you say that some disorders shouldn't qualify as disorders, particularly if they don't actually hurt anyone. Then, in your opinion, someone with such a miscategorized disorder "should" understand or behave in that manner-- Such understanding or behavior conforms both to the person's obligations and to your expectations of how people behave and understand. I was referring specifically to people who behave in ways that they "shouldn't".

If you're including the normative criterion in there, I fail to see why you need a typicality criterion as well. So you're saying that insane behaviors are those which are both bad and atypical? So an atypical but harmless behavior is perfectly sane, no matter how atypical, so long as it's harmless; and a typical, common bad behavior is perfectly sane, no matter how bad, so long as it's widespread? If that's what you're saying, then I heartily agree with the former and vehemently disagree with the latter. Typicality is of no importance to anyone but statisticians.

I agree with your conclusion about punishment, but not your choice of terms in voicing your logic at arriving at it. I agree that rehabiiltation and restitution are the two most important purposes of punishment. However, I don't believe that every act that necessitates rehabilitation stems from a form of insanity.

Something seems strange about your notion of either rehabilitation or insanity, then. To my understanding, rehabilitation is the process of correcting some defect in the way a person's mind works, in order to make them a properly functional "normal" person again. (As an aside, "normal" literally means "correct", "proper", or "right"[*], not "common" or "typical", despite common conflation of the two). Insanity, meanwhile, is some sort of improper functioning of the mind. Thus, anyone in need of rehabilitation must, analytically, be insane.

[*](This is very tangential, but I found it very interesting to learn, and thought I'd share with you guys. "Ortho" in Greek means "right", as in "orthogonal", meaning "at right angles"; and also as in "orthodox", meaning "right belief". "Right", in both its normative sense and its geometric sense, derives from a root, the same root as "rect" as in "rectangle", which means "straight", as does "ortho" IIRC. I bring this up because it just dawned on me that "normal" seems to share similar etymology; consider the idea of "surface normals", being those lines at right angles to a surface. Consider also phrases like "think straight", "going straight", "straight edge", etc).

Now that last bit: "If an ethically reasonable person would not have desired that objective given the degree of consideration you gave it". What about people who desire an immoral objective because of an insufficient degree of consideration? That may imply a lack of wisdom or patience, but not necessarily a behavioral disorder.

That was the point of that whole "now that I think about it", to concede that accidental (non-insane) badness may derive not only from ignorance but from inconsideration.

Rather than type a thousand more words, I've decided to draw a picture instead:

http://www.west.net/~forrest/misc/bad.png

Let me know how you would modify that graph, and maybe we can actually get somewhere in this debate. I suspect that we agree with each other more than is apparent from this conversation thus far.

(I should probably clarify a bit more what I mean by the upper-right sector; I don't mean that simply to be "oh, I hadn't considered that if I did this, it would cause that, and so on." That's just misinformation. What I mean is like, say someone was doing something knowing full well that he was doing things over the objections of other people, and he had heard their explanations of why they objected, but he hadn't actually considered those objections, e.g. imagined things from their perspective, internalized their plight. That's what I'm getting at with "inconsideration". If you just hadn't happened to considered thusly, you're not insane, you're just inconsiderate, brash, reckless, etc; and maybe once you're on the other end of those sorts of actions you'll consider that point of view when acting in the future. But if you are incapable of considering thusly, whether temporarily or persistently, whatever the cause, then you've got some kind of psychological problem).

[BloodHenge]

I'd argue that a mental disorder is a specific variety of atypical cognition or behavior. Not all atypical behavior or cognition is (or should be) considered a disorder.

Can you explain for me where you would draw the line?

Probably not, because I doubt I know enough about psychology to make accurate and self-consistent generalizations. But I'm confident that one could identify some examples of atypical but sane behavior.

However, I'm not aware of too many mental disorders that are typical.

I think that's because most people would like to consider themselves sane, so patterns which are common do not get called "insane", even if, by objective criteria, they should be.

And where are you going to get objective criteria regarding what's sane? As far as I can tell, sanity can only be defined within a context.

Still, you say that some disorders shouldn't qualify as disorders, particularly if they don't actually hurt anyone. Then, in your opinion, someone with such a miscategorized disorder "should" understand or behave in that manner-- Such understanding or behavior conforms both to the person's obligations and to your expectations of how people behave and understand. I was referring specifically to people who behave in ways that they "shouldn't".

If you're including the normative criterion in there, I fail to see why you need a typicality criterion as well. So you're saying that insane behaviors are those which are both bad and atypical? So an atypical but harmless behavior is perfectly sane, no matter how atypical, so long as it's harmless; and a typical, common bad behavior is perfectly sane, no matter how bad, so long as it's widespread? If that's what you're saying, then I heartily agree with the former and vehemently disagree with the latter. Typicality is of no importance to anyone but statisticians.

Who said anything about a "normative criterion"? What does "normative criterion" even mean?

And I'm not aware of making any claims in that particular paragraph. I was just asking if I understood what you said (and the implications thereof).

I agree with your conclusion about punishment, but not your choice of terms in voicing your logic at arriving at it. I agree that rehabiiltation and restitution are the two most important purposes of punishment. However, I don't believe that every act that necessitates rehabilitation stems from a form of insanity.

Something seems strange about your notion of either rehabilitation or insanity, then. To my understanding, rehabilitation is the process of correcting some defect in the way a person's mind works, in order to make them a properly functional "normal" person again. (As an aside, "normal" literally means "correct", "proper", or "right"[*], not "common" or "typical", despite common conflation of the two). Insanity, meanwhile, is some sort of improper functioning of the mind. Thus, anyone in need of rehabilitation must, analytically, be insane.

And that's our point of disagreement, right there. As I understand, the purpose of "rehabilitation" is to correct behavior patterns, regardless of whether they stem from "the way the mind works". You keep saying that all bad behavior is the result of "some sort of improper functioning of the mind" (or some variant), and then dodge the question when I ask if criminal behavior is necessary and sufficient evidence to demonstrate insanity (by whatever definition of "criminal" and "insanity" you care to use, because I can't read your mind for the exact word you would use to describe whatever you're talking about).

Now that last bit: "If an ethically reasonable person would not have desired that objective given the degree of consideration you gave it". What about people who desire an immoral objective because of an insufficient degree of consideration? That may imply a lack of wisdom or patience, but not necessarily a behavioral disorder.

That was the point of that whole "now that I think about it", to concede that accidental (non-insane) badness may derive not only from ignorance but from inconsideration.

Rather than type a thousand more words, I've decided to draw a picture instead:

http://www.west.net/~forrest/misc/bad.png

Let me know how you would modify that graph, and maybe we can actually get somewhere in this debate. I suspect that we agree with each other more than is apparent from this conversation thus far.

The block I disagree with is "persistent behavioral insanity from environmental causes". People learn from their experiences, and an "extensive history of circumstance" can demonstrate to a person that something isn't worth caring about. Caring about that thing is irrational because doing so would be useless or even counterproductive, and to care about it after an extensive history without reinforcement wouldn't make any sense. That's what I meant earlier when I said that sanity requires context.

[dubioso]

I'd argue that a mental disorder is a specific variety of atypical cognition or behavior. Not all atypical behavior or cognition is (or should be) considered a disorder.

To bring a slightly different angle into this discussion... has anyone here seen the movie "Secretary"? It's about the difference between atypical behavior and mental disorder.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274812/
The (german) DVD has an interview with director Steven Shainberg, who tells about his fundraising efforts. Everybody he talked to said at some point: "In the end, she has to get over this problem!?", to which his reply was: "But it's not a problem. That's what the movie is about."

I've seen it in the movie theater with two friends (a couple). The theater was reasonably full, maybe 100 people. The three of us genuinely enjoyed the movie, and we stayed to the end of the closing credits talking about it. When we then turned around to leave, the room had emptied except for us and two others. I cannot tell how many left during the movie and how many stayed until the closing credits set in. But they all left in complete silence. On that occasion, I realized just how uptight the people in that city are (I no longer live there )

[Forrest]

And where are you going to get objective criteria regarding what's sane? As far as I can tell, sanity can only be defined within a context.

That was the point of my philosophical caveat at the end of my first post on this subject: we can have this whole conversation talking about people not "properly" processing information and people not "properly" caring about things they should, but there's huge problems with defining "properly". When we call someone insane, we're saying that something about their mind is not functioning properly, but that judgement is relative to our particular notion of what is or is not proper; if our notion of what is proper is correct, then so is our judgement of a person as insane. But how are we to assess whether our judgement of "proper" is correct?

And this is not just an issue for behavior, but also for cognition. We have a fairly broad consensus in the modern west that you should generally believe your senses and not believe contradictions and things like that, and that when you enter altered mental states like when you take hallucinogenic drugs, your cognitive abilities are being impaired, and you are no longer perceiving and processing things properly. But plenty of indigenous religious groups and plain old new-age hippy types believe that the altered state of consciousness you get from hallucinogens is actually enhancing your cognitive abilities, and you are perceiving reality more properly in such a state than in your normal state. Now you'll say that we can prove that the brain is being impaired by hallucinogens with this or that bit of scientific evidence, but that evidence is all based on observations made by people in normal mental states; someone stuck in a constant hallucinogenic high would look at all your so-called "evidence" and probably disagree vehemently with your conclusions.

The point I'm making is similar to the old saying that "beliefs not based in reason cannot be swayed by reason", except that people sometimes disagree about what is or is not reasonable. It would be more accurate to say "beliefs not based on the same notion of rationality as yours cannot be swayed by arguments based on your notion of rationality", but the upshot is the same -- when you're arguing with someone with completely incommensurable premises, where do you go from there? The same thing of course applies to ethical arguments as to epistemological arguments (like that between the hallucinogenic hippy and the sober scientist) but the problem becomes much more apparent there because we don't have the broad consensus on ethical rationality that we do with epistemic rationality.

But despite all that, we can say that given some true, objective standard of propriety, whatever that turns out to be, some standard of what people should believe and what people should desire, then if you are not adhering to that standard, there is something wrong with you, something that needs fixing, something about you is "disordered" as they say in psychology, and how widespread, common, or typical it is doesn't make a lick of difference. Biological health problems don't become "normal healthy functioning" just because they are common. Cardiac problems are and always have been extremely common in the elderly, yet we still consider old people having heart attacks a problem in need of treatment. Why should mental health issues be any different?

Who said anything about a "normative criterion"? What does "normative criterion" even mean?

"Normative" means having to do with right and wrong, good or bad, ought or ought not, should or should not; synonyms include "prescriptive" and "ethical". I assume you know what a criterion is (it's the singular of "criteria"). You said "I was referring specifically to people who behave in ways that they "shouldn't".", and that's a normative criterion; people who do things which are atypical in some particular way, if those things are things which they shouldn't do, are "insane", or so it seems you're saying. And my response was, why do you need the atypicality in there at all? Shouldn't just doing things which they shouldn't do be sufficient?

And that's our point of disagreement, right there. As I understand, the purpose of "rehabilitation" is to correct behavior patterns, regardless of whether they stem from "the way the mind works".

But all behavior stems from something about the way the mind works. The body is controlled by the mind (usually, excluding reflex actions and such). If you're trying to change the way someone behaves, you're trying to change something about how they go about deciding which actions to take or not to take. There's lots of different ways of doing that, just as there's lots of different causes of different sorts of psychological patterns, and figuring out those causes and how to change them if need be is the real meat of psychology - what we're doing here is philosophy of psychology, not actual psychology at all.

I'm curious: would you consider deterrent punishment to be a form of rehabilitation? E.g. "you did this bad thing, and now we're going to do this really unpleasant thing to you, and make it clear that if you do that again we'll do this again, so that you will decide not to do that again"? I would not consider that rehabilitation, as you're not changing anything about the person at all, you're not making them a better person more intrinsically inclined to behave properly, you're just changing the circumstances of the game, or pointing out the existing circumstances, so that the person will pick a different strategy. You haven't changed anything about the way they function, you've just informed them of something they perhaps were unaware of before.

This sub-topic of punishment is actually really useful for fleshing out what I'm talking about. When I say that someone is "insane", I mean basically that they need some sort of rehabilitation. If someone makes a rational, well-justified decision, no matter how tragic or unfortunate it might be, they do not deserve punishment for it. To use the story example here: if all the Elves really did want to wipe out all the half-elves and could not be stopped without being killed, and so Ian calmly and rationally and correctly calculated that, unfortunately, they did all need to be killed, and thus he killed them, then he would not be some horrible genocidal monster but someone placed in the unfortunate position of having to apply lethal force to defend innocents, just on a much larger scale than, say, shooting an armed and deadly murderer to protect his victim.

On the other hand, if someone reasonable and well-intentioned decides to act in a certain way which has unexpected consequences (due to ignorance or inconsideration), then he should be forced to pay restitution, but no rehabilitation is required; it was just an accident, they should be made aware of whatever it was they didn't know or overlooked, but there's nothing broken about them that needs fixing. On the other, other hand (have you met my cousin Zaphod?), if someone does something wrong because they are (cognitively) irrational, out of touch with reality, or they are not well-intentioned (what I would call morally or behaviorally irrational), then there is something wrong with them, internally, which need correcting; they have a disorder of some sort and are in need of rehabilitation.

You keep saying that all bad behavior is the result of "some sort of improper functioning of the mind" (or some variant), and then dodge the question when I ask if criminal behavior is necessary and sufficient evidence to demonstrate insanity (by whatever definition of "criminal" and "insanity" you care to use, because I can't read your mind for the exact word you would use to describe whatever you're talking about).

As I said before, criminality is unrelated to any of this. The law is just words on some paper somewhere, at most worthy of mere pragmatic considerations. It has nothing to do with morality or sanity.

However, I can answer what I think you're really meaning to ask. Intentionally committing a morally wrong act (or "moral crime" to use my confusing ad-hoc term from earlier) is sufficient evidence of a psychological disorder, or "insanity"; though it may be merely temporary, as in cases of drug use or emotional overwhelm. But "moral crime" is not necessary to demonstrate "insanity", because there are other subclasses of "insanity" that do not result in morally wrong acts; they may be merely cognitive problems, although those can sometimes cause morally wrong acts too; or they may be behavioral problems which cause bad, but not morally wrong, behaviors, such as self-harmful behaviors.

Or, as I said earlier in much looser but catchier terms, "evil is a form of insanity".

The block I disagree with is "persistent behavioral insanity from environmental causes". People learn from their experiences, and an "extensive history of circumstance" can demonstrate to a person that something isn't worth caring about. Caring about that thing is irrational because doing so would be useless or even counterproductive, and to care about it after an extensive history without reinforcement wouldn't make any sense. That's what I meant earlier when I said that sanity requires context.

The sort of thing I mean to include in that category is, for example, post-traumatic stress disorders. The archetypal example of post-traumatic stress is an ex-soldier prone to go into paranoid violent fits when in certain trigger situations, but it's actually a much broader sort of disorder than that common image of it. It's basically a more persistent form of emotional overwhelm; people who have post-traumatic stress will freak out in trigger situations and feel that it is necessary or even right to act in this or that way, but then later on, when calm and outside of those situations, look back on themselves and see how that reaction was totally unnecessary and inappropriate. In some sense they have "learned" from experience, on a deep subconscious level, that that type of behavior is necessary and right in those circumstances, but the calmer, more rational part of them holds that that subconscious behavior pattern is incorrect, irrational, wrong, which is why such people seek treatment for these disorders.

But someone else living under constant duress may never have those moments of calm to reflect on themselves; they may just be stuck permanently in an irrational mindset, though of course in that mindset they feel that everything they're doing is perfectly sane and appropriate for the circumstances, but a more objective outside observer - or maybe their future self, if they ever get a chance to escape their circumstances - would look in and see how that person has been traumatized by this or that series of experiences and developed behavioral patterns which are often irrational and wrong.

This relates back to what I was saying before about punishment, and also to the modern literary trope of the sympathetic villain. People can and sometimes do become really, truly "evil", in the sense that they are inclined to routinely do horribly bad, wrong things, while fully informed, in full consideration all the implications of their actions. But those people, while they need to be stopped and they need to pay for the damage they've done (literally, as in restitution), are not evil because they chose to be evil, they're evil because something is wrong with them, and they need help, they need rehabilitation, they need psychological treatment of some sort. Maybe they've got some biological/neurological issue, like sociopaths; maybe they're suffering from some kind of traumatic stress. But one way or another, someone whose mind is not disposed to incline them to behave in proper ways (whatever "proper ways" are), someone who thinks it is right to, say, wipe out an entire people when that's really not a justified course of action, clearly has something going wrong with them and need to be fixed.

[BloodHenge]

But despite all that, we can say that given some true, objective standard of propriety, whatever that turns out to be, some standard of what people should believe and what people should desire, then if you are not adhering to that standard, there is something wrong with you, something that needs fixing, something about you is "disordered" as they say in psychology, and how widespread, common, or typical it is doesn't make a lick of difference. Biological health problems don't become "normal healthy functioning" just because they are common. Cardiac problems are and always have been extremely common in the elderly, yet we still consider old people having heart attacks a problem in need of treatment. Why should mental health issues be any different?

Of course we won't actually be "given" a true, objective standard. We can only pick one of the subjective standards we have and operate within it. And I'm beginning to think that a big part of this disagreement is that the two of us are using subtly different standards.

As for the difference between mental disorders and physical disorders... The purpose of the human heart is pretty clear. Its job is to pump blood through a human body. When it stops doing that, or starts doing it less efficiently, there's clearly a problem. The same line of reasoning applies to pretty much any bodily organ or system. Mental disorders are different. There isn't an obvious, clearly defined purpose for human behavior*, so the range of appropriate behavior can only be defined through consensus.

*From a biological standpoint, the purpose of human behavior is to survive long enough to produce descendants who are capable of breeding. However, homosexuals and bachelors are not considered deranged (in our culture), and the same is not true of some individuals who are capable of producing children (and may have done so). So, if we are confining our discussion to Western culture, the single obvious biological criterion for sanity is obviously not the one being used. Judging by your apparent stance that murder and theft (viable survival strategies) are evidence of insanity, I feel it's safe to assume you agree.

"Normative" means having to do with right and wrong, good or bad, ought or ought not, should or should not; synonyms include "prescriptive" and "ethical". I assume you know what a criterion is (it's the singular of "criteria"). You said "I was referring specifically to people who behave in ways that they "shouldn't".", and that's a normative criterion; people who do things which are atypical in some particular way, if those things are things which they shouldn't do, are "insane", or so it seems you're saying. And my response was, why do you need the atypicality in there at all? Shouldn't just doing things which they shouldn't do be sufficient?

I was attempting to use "should" in whatever manner you've been using it (hence the quotes around it). So, if "should" indicates a "normative criterion" in that context, you're the one who introduced it, and I don't know what it's doing there.

And that's our point of disagreement, right there. As I understand, the purpose of "rehabilitation" is to correct behavior patterns, regardless of whether they stem from "the way the mind works".

But all behavior stems from something about the way the mind works. The body is controlled by the mind (usually, excluding reflex actions and such). If you're trying to change the way someone behaves, you're trying to change something about how they go about deciding which actions to take or not to take. There's lots of different ways of doing that, just as there's lots of different causes of different sorts of psychological patterns, and figuring out those causes and how to change them if need be is the real meat of psychology - what we're doing here is philosophy of psychology, not actual psychology at all.[/quote]
Ah, I see. When you said "the way the mind works", I thought you were referring specifically to the manner in which neurochemical impulses are transmitted. I didn't realize you were also including the amount of available information that the person chose to take into account when making a decision, and the relative weight the person chose to apply to each piece of information under consideration. The mind does more than make decisions, so "the way a person make's decisions" may be a subset of "how the mind works", but I didn't feel the two could be equated.

I'm curious: would you consider deterrent punishment to be a form of rehabilitation? E.g. "you did this bad thing, and now we're going to do this really unpleasant thing to you, and make it clear that if you do that again we'll do this again, so that you will decide not to do that again"? I would not consider that rehabilitation, as you're not changing anything about the person at all, you're not making them a better person more intrinsically inclined to behave properly, you're just changing the circumstances of the game, or pointing out the existing circumstances, so that the person will pick a different strategy. You haven't changed anything about the way they function, you've just informed them of something they perhaps were unaware of before.

I do consider it a form of rehabilitation, although it can be statistically demonstrated to be relatively ineffective. It adds information to be considered in the decision-making process, or alters the weight placed on available information. As I said, in my opinion the goal of rehabilitation is behavior modification; if behavior is modified, then the rehabilitation is successful, regardless of whether the person wants to do good or simply wants to avoid punishment.

This sub-topic of punishment is actually really useful for fleshing out what I'm talking about. When I say that someone is "insane", I mean basically that they need some sort of rehabilitation. If someone makes a rational, well-justified decision, no matter how tragic or unfortunate it might be, they do not deserve punishment for it. To use the story example here: if all the Elves really did want to wipe out all the half-elves and could not be stopped without being killed, and so Ian calmly and rationally and correctly calculated that, unfortunately, they did all need to be killed, and thus he killed them, then he would not be some horrible genocidal monster but someone placed in the unfortunate position of having to apply lethal force to defend innocents, just on a much larger scale than, say, shooting an armed and deadly murderer to protect his victim.

And what if all Elves really did want to wipe out Half-Elves and could not be stopped without being killed, and Ian flew into a rage and wiped them all out? Same information and same behavior, but a different method of arriving at the correct conclusion.

On the other hand, if someone reasonable and well-intentioned decides to act in a certain way which has unexpected consequences (due to ignorance or inconsideration), then he should be forced to pay restitution, but no rehabilitation is required; it was just an accident, they should be made aware of whatever it was they didn't know or overlooked, but there's nothing broken about them that needs fixing.

So this would cover the situation if (as we know) some Elves think that peaceful Half-Elves can be left alone, but Ian-- unaware of them-- calmly and rationally and incorrectly calculated that, unfortunately, they all needed to be killed, and thanks to his methodical efforts of extermination, even the nonviolent Elves attacked him in the mistaken belief that he was too insane to reason with, thus reinforcing his conclusion? Different situation, same behavior, and the same method of reasoning, but an incorrect conclusion.

And what do you do if the offender can't make restitution, either because he lacks the means or because restitution is impossible?

On the other, other hand (have you met my cousin Zaphod?)

On the gripping hand (met any Moties?)

if someone does something wrong because they are (cognitively) irrational, out of touch with reality, or they are not well-intentioned (what I would call morally or behaviorally irrational), then there is something wrong with them, internally, which need correcting; they have a disorder of some sort and are in need of rehabilitation.

Okay, so we agree (approximately, at least) on the appropriate indicators of misbehavior and the appropriate types of action to take in order to resolve unfortunate incidents. It's basically a question of epistemology at this point-- as I had suspected from the beginning. I believe that this category should be split into two, according to broad categores of what is "wrong with them, internally" and, likewise, the general method of correcting it. There are some people who consistently make bad decisions because of bad information or bad learned criteria for evaluating that information-- "criminals", for lack of a better word. Then you have people who innately lack acceptable criteria for evaluating information, and this category actually have behavioral disorders.

You keep saying that all bad behavior is the result of "some sort of improper functioning of the mind" (or some variant), and then dodge the question when I ask if criminal behavior is necessary and sufficient evidence to demonstrate insanity (by whatever definition of "criminal" and "insanity" you care to use, because I can't read your mind for the exact word you would use to describe whatever you're talking about).

As I said before, criminality is unrelated to any of this.

So what do you want me to call it? Just give me a word, and I'll use it.

The law is just words on some paper somewhere, at most worthy of mere pragmatic considerations. It has nothing to do with morality or sanity.

I wasn't referring specifically to crime against the law, but I like to believe that legislation is at least partially informed by both morality and sanity. But I was referring specifically to behaviors that society finds sufficiently unacceptable to prohibit, and legislation is an attempt to prohibit sufficiently unacceptable behavior. Presumably, behavior that's sufficiently unacceptable to prohibit is also sufficiently unacceptable to require rehabilitation. So, I don't really understand your strenuous objection to the use of the word "crime".

However, I can answer what I think you're really meaning to ask. Intentionally committing a morally wrong act (or "moral crime" to use my confusing ad-hoc term from earlier) is sufficient evidence of a psychological disorder, or "insanity"; though it may be merely temporary, as in cases of drug use or emotional overwhelm. But "moral crime" is not necessary to demonstrate "insanity", because there are other subclasses of "insanity" that do not result in morally wrong acts; they may be merely cognitive problems, although those can sometimes cause morally wrong acts too; or they may be behavioral problems which cause bad, but not morally wrong, behaviors, such as self-harmful behaviors.

Or, as I said earlier in much looser but catchier terms, "evil is a form of insanity".

And as I said, I believe it's possible for a sane person to commit morally wrong actions because of learned criteria that society finds unacceptable. If you disagree, then I'm afraid we'll never agree on the definitions of certain terms, but we will at least be able to converse meaningfully on the subject.

The block I disagree with is "persistent behavioral insanity from environmental causes". People learn from their experiences, and an "extensive history of circumstance" can demonstrate to a person that something isn't worth caring about. Caring about that thing is irrational because doing so would be useless or even counterproductive, and to care about it after an extensive history without reinforcement wouldn't make any sense. That's what I meant earlier when I said that sanity requires context.

The sort of thing I mean to include in that category is, for example, post-traumatic stress disorders. The archetypal example of post-traumatic stress is an ex-soldier prone to go into paranoid violent fits when in certain trigger situations, but it's actually a much broader sort of disorder than that common image of it. It's basically a more persistent form of emotional overwhelm; people who have post-traumatic stress will freak out in trigger situations and feel that it is necessary or even right to act in this or that way, but then later on, when calm and outside of those situations, look back on themselves and see how that reaction was totally unnecessary and inappropriate. In some sense they have "learned" from experience, on a deep subconscious level, that that type of behavior is necessary and right in those circumstances, but the calmer, more rational part of them holds that that subconscious behavior pattern is incorrect, irrational, wrong, which is why such people seek treatment for these disorders.

But someone else living under constant duress may never have those moments of calm to reflect on themselves; they may just be stuck permanently in an irrational mindset, though of course in that mindset they feel that everything they're doing is perfectly sane and appropriate for the circumstances, but a more objective outside observer - or maybe their future self, if they ever get a chance to escape their circumstances - would look in and see how that person has been traumatized by this or that series of experiences and developed behavioral patterns which are often irrational and wrong.

I see. So, where would you categorize a so-called "career criminal", like a drug dealer or a member of a criminal organization? Or people who choose, on occasion, to rob convenience stores? How about shoplifters? These are all people who choose (with varying degrees of rationality and frequency) to harm others in circumstances when they believe the potential benefits outweigh the risks.

[Forrest]

Of course we won't actually be "given" a true, objective standard.

I'm not saying we need to be "given" an objective standard, like by God or something like that. I'm using "given" as you do in logical argument, e.g. "given that performing action A is objectively wrong, then...". Our conversation is about the relation of wrong-action to mental health, not about what is or is not a wrong action. Even if we can come to an agreement about whether or not it is sane to intentional perform wrong acts, there's still a huge debate over what acts are wrong. I'm wanting to avoid having that second debate for now and focus just on the first.

About the only point of agreement necessary from that second debate is that what's right and what's wrong is an objective matter, which does not mean that there is universal or even majority agreement on the matter, just that there is some opinion on the matter which is the single correct opinion, even if in fact nobody currently holds that opinion. And that's really what my whole argument here is about - an attack on moral relativism. Sane and insane have normative connotations to them, it's bad to be insane and good to be sane, so if you allow commonality or typicality amongst your criteria for sanity, you're slipping into moral relativism.

As for the difference between mental disorders and physical disorders... The purpose of the human heart is pretty clear. Its job is to pump blood through a human body. When it stops doing that, or starts doing it less efficiently, there's clearly a problem. The same line of reasoning applies to pretty much any bodily organ or system. Mental disorders are different. There isn't an obvious, clearly defined purpose for human behavior*, so the range of appropriate behavior can only be defined through consensus.

It doesn't matter whether the "purpose for human behavior" (or properly functioning human behavior, which need not necessarily be purposeful) is clear or obvious or whether there is any degree of agreement on that or not. That's what I was just saying above about "given a standard...". We (people in general, not just you and I) don't often agree on what is right or wrong, but even if we don't agree on that, we could still agree on whether or not it is sane to intentionally do something wrong - and then push the argument back to whether this or that particular act is wrong or not.

Ah, I see. When you said "the way the mind works", I thought you were referring specifically to the manner in which neurochemical impulses are transmitted. I didn't realize you were also including the amount of available information that the person chose to take into account when making a decision, and the relative weight the person chose to apply to each piece of information under consideration.

Hmm I'm seeing perhaps another philosophical difference lurking under here somewhere. I am (more or less) a determinist, at least, as much a determinist about the mind as I am about the weather or any other complex physical system. I see a person's choices - e.g. how much information to take into account, how much weight to give each piece of information, etc - and how they tend to make those choices as a function of their neurology, which is influenced both by genetics and by experience, and which can always, at least in theory (though we may not presently know how), be changed, or fixed if there's something wrong with it. But it seems to me that you may be thinking of choice and will as something outside of neurology, some kind of dualistic agent-causation or incompatiblist libertarianism, and so seeing a person's tendency to make choices as not a defect in their mind but a defect in their "character" or some such, in a sense where that is independent of the "mind" as studied and worked on by psychologists. If that's the case, then... oy, we've got a lot more talking to do before we'll agree on anything

The mind does more than make decisions, so "the way a person make's decisions" may be a subset of "how the mind works", but I didn't feel the two could be equated.

I didn't mean to equate them, and I don't need to for my argument; that subset relationship will do just fine. If the mammals are a subset of the animals, and X is a blue mammal, then X is a blue animal. Likewise, if the way a person makes decisions is a subset of how his mind works, and there's a problem with the way a person makes decisions, then there's a problem with the way his mind works.

I do consider it a form of rehabilitation, although it can be statistically demonstrated to be relatively ineffective. It adds information to be considered in the decision-making process, or alters the weight placed on available information. As I said, in my opinion the goal of rehabilitation is behavior modification; if behavior is modified, then the rehabilitation is successful, regardless of whether the person wants to do good or simply wants to avoid punishment.

Ok, so we definitely disagree on what counts as rehabilitation then. Not sure where to go from here.

And what if all Elves really did want to wipe out Half-Elves and could not be stopped without being killed, and Ian flew into a rage and wiped them all out? Same information and same behavior, but a different method of arriving at the correct conclusion.

I mentioned that possibility in my last post; someone can be insane and still wind up performing only justified actions. It might be that Ian is nuts and wants to kill all the Elves just because they all deserve it those arrogant fuckers... but, a calmer and more sane Ian would come to the same conclusion on what to do, albeit for different reasons. If that's the case, then what insane Ian did was not wrong, since a reasonable and well-intentioned Ian in the same circumstances with the same information available and considered would have made the same decision. I never said that everyone who is insane intentionally does wrong things, only that people who intentionally do wrong things are insane. Of course, even if Ian didn't do anything wrong, if you can show that he would have done the same thing even if circumstances differed such that it would in fact have been wrong, then you've shown that he's crazy, and in need of rehabilitation anyway.

So this would cover the situation if (as we know) some Elves think that peaceful Half-Elves can be left alone, but Ian-- unaware of them-- calmly and rationally and incorrectly calculated that, unfortunately, they all needed to be killed, and thanks to his methodical efforts of extermination, even the nonviolent Elves attacked him in the mistaken belief that he was too insane to reason with, thus reinforcing his conclusion? Different situation, same behavior, and the same method of reasoning, but an incorrect conclusion.

Right, and in this situation Ian has done the wrong thing because he lacked complete information, so he doesn't need rehabilitation, because there's nothing wrong with him, he's not crazy, he just needs to fix the damage he has done. However...

And what do you do if the offender can't make restitution, either because he lacks the means or because restitution is impossible?

This is one of the big unanswered questions in my philosophy. What should be the penalty for murder? Do you put a value on a human life and force the murderer to pay that? Does it vary by age, or by some other factor of the victim? Can you put a value on a human life at all, when no amount of anything can bring someone back from the dead? If not, should the perpetrator be fined an infinite amount - lose all of his possessions and everything forever until he's given enough to bring the dead person back, which will never happen? Maybe even forfeit his own life? But that still won't bring the person back, and both the permanent loss of all property and the loss of the murderer's life run afoul of another principle in my philosophy of punishment: you should never leave someone in a position where he has nothing left to lose, because you always want it to be in his best interests to stop doing whatever he's doing wrong to avoid further punishment, and if there's ever an infinite punishment to some act, then after committing that act the perpetrator might as well do whatever else he feels like, cause it's not like they can punish him any more, he's got nothing left to lose. Anyway, back to murder: if no amount of restitution will do any good, should you even bother collecting it? But then, if not, there's no punishment for murder, and that seems absurd...

So, yeah, I don't really have an answer for those hypothetical circumstances.

Okay, so we agree (approximately, at least) on the appropriate indicators of misbehavior and the appropriate types of action to take in order to resolve unfortunate incidents. It's basically a question of epistemology at this point-- as I had suspected from the beginning. I believe that this category should be split into two, according to broad categores of what is "wrong with them, internally" and, likewise, the general method of correcting it. There are some people who consistently make bad decisions because of bad information or bad learned criteria for evaluating that information-- "criminals", for lack of a better word. Then you have people who innately lack acceptable criteria for evaluating information, and this category actually have behavioral disorders.

That sounds just like the split I made between environmentally-induced forms of insanity and biologically-induced forms of insanity. (Except, I wouldn't describe it in terms of just information; there are people who are fully well-informed and process that information perfectly, but are simply not after the goals they should be; sociopaths being the old tired example I keep bringing up. People who lack acceptable criteria for evaluating information have merely cognitive disorders; people who lack acceptable criteria for forming motivations are the ones with behavioral disorders).

So it sounds like you're basically denying that it's possible to acquire a psychological disorder from experience (e.g. from trauma); if you have a real disorder, it must be something biologically based. Is that correct?

So what do you want me to call it? Just give me a word, and I'll use it.

Well, there's not a nice, concise, unambiguous term which can be substituted for "crime", "criminal", "criminality", etc, to mean the deontic (rather than legislative) analogues of those terms, which is why I made up the phrase "moral crime" to try to get the idea across. But, for longer and more awkward phrases, "morally wrong act" could sub for "crime", "person who has committed a morally wrong act" could sub for "criminal", and "moral wrongness" could sub for "criminality".

(Though note that these phrases do not include intentionality, and so a "person who has committed a morally wrong act" is not necessarily insane, by my definitions, because he may have done so by accident, rather than intentionally).

I wasn't referring specifically to crime against the law, but I like to believe that legislation is at least partially informed by both morality and sanity.

Well yeah, even I'll agree that people tend to push for laws in accordance with their ideas of morality and sanity, and people aren't always wrong about what's moral and what's sane, so some laws are in accord with morality and sanity. My point was just that "some illegal things are immoral/insane and vice versa" is no grounds for concluding whether something is moral/sane on the basis of it's being legal. You can't rely on the law as a guide to morality (or sanity), even though they may sometimes coincide.

But I was referring specifically to behaviors that society finds sufficiently unacceptable to prohibit, and legislation is an attempt to prohibit sufficiently unacceptable behavior. Presumably, behavior that's sufficiently unacceptable to prohibit is also sufficiently unacceptable to require rehabilitation. So, I don't really understand your strenuous objection to the use of the word "crime".

Because what is or is not criminal is more or less a matter of public opinion, in a democracy, or a matter of some arbitrary people's opinions, in an oligarchy; and something being actually acceptable (permissible) or not is independent of anybody's opinion on the matter. So, my objection to criminality as a basis for anything is the same as my objection to popularity or typicality as the basis for anything - I'm against relativism.

And as I said, I believe it's possible for a sane person to commit morally wrong actions because of learned criteria that society finds unacceptable.

Do you equate "morally wrong" with "socially unacceptable"? If so, then there is the root of our disagreement, as that's the main thing I was arguing about to begin with: that an atypicality criterion for insanity implies moral relativism, and moral relativism is incorrect, thus insanity must not require atypicality. If you disagree about whether moral relativism is correct, then obviously that argument won't sway you, since you disagree with one of it's premises - and we should push our debate back to one about moral relativism instead.

But backing up to your quote there: I wholeheartedly agree that is is possible for a cognitively sane person, someone who processes facts and information just fine, to commit morally wrong actions on the basis of learned criteria; I'm just arguing that can be a form of insanity, if the "learning" part is behavioral conditioning, a change in a person's desires and motivations based on past experiences, rather than intellectual learning, a change in a person's beliefs based on past experiences.

To use our story example again: if Ian is not crazy, and is intending to kill all the elves just because he believes, reasonably based on past experiences, that the elves are all inalterably intent on killing all the half-elves, and that killing them is the only way to prevent that (and let us grant that preventing that would be a morally justified reason for killing the elves, if it were indeed necessary to that end), then you could just give him a new piece of information, show him an elf who is not intent on killing all half-elves, and he will change his mind about whether to kill all the elves.

However, if Ian has "learned" from experience, in the sense of being conditioned, like Pavlov's dog, to just explode Elves on sight, and no amount of plain factual information about whether or not Elves really are a threat would change that reaction, then he's crazy. Not because he's not processing the facts about Elves being a threat, maybe he understands that just fine, but maybe he just wants to kill Elves now, intrinsically, because he's fucking pissed at them, and he doesn't need any instrumental reason for doing so. If that's what's going on, then his desires, objectives, or motives are wrong (let us grant that unnecessarily killing people for its own sake is in fact wrong), and that's what makes him crazy, not any inability to process factual information.

I see. So, where would you categorize a so-called "career criminal", like a drug dealer or a member of a criminal organization? Or people who choose, on occasion, to rob convenience stores? How about shoplifters? These are all people who choose (with varying degrees of rationality and frequency) to harm others in circumstances when they believe the potential benefits outweigh the risks.

Well, the drug dealer I don't see as doing anything intrinsically wrong, inasmuch as he is just dealing drugs. As for the "member of a criminal organization", that depends on the nature of the crime that organization commits, so unless you'd like to flesh that out I can't really comment.

But I can comment on people who occasionally shoplift or rob convenience stores. They might be crazy; I could see a sociopath stealing just because he wants stuff and he can get away with it and other people don't matter to him. But then again, the thief may be merely inconsiderate. They may not feel like they're actually causing anybody much harm at all (e.g. "stores are rich enough that they won't care", or "there's lossage procedures in place already that prevent the store from suffering from missing or damaged goods", or "I am poor and in need and that justifies me taking this stuff", or "property is a lie anyway, this stuff is as much mine as theirs"), in which case they are not crazy, but then they're not intentionally committing a morally wrong act either. They're intentionally committing an act, and the act is morally wrong, but they're simply unaware, or hadn't considered, how and why it is morally wrong; and if they could come to understand why it is morally wrong, and then stop doing that, then they're not crazy. The sociopath, on the other hand, couldn't empathize, no amount of moral argument would change his mind, so he is crazy. And while I'm not aware of any sort of traumatic disorders that incude people to steal, if there was such a thing, that person would be crazy too, though probably more easily cured than the sociopath, whose disorder is biologically rooted.

[mindstalk]

The whole thread is turning into tl;dr for me. But I caught this:

"Anyway, back to murder: if no amount of restitution will do any good, should you even bother collecting it? But then, if not, there's no punishment for murder, and that seems absurd..."

There's more to the judicial system than restitution (which we don't do at all these days, for violent crimes.) There's prevention and its subset deterrence. Locking up the criminal keeps them from repeating, until they've either learned better or aged enough to probably not be a threat. And the threat of being locked up hopefully deters others (included released prisoners) from committing murder in the first place.

Not to mention the desire for revenge, to make someone 'pay' in some nebulous sense that doesn't involve actual transfer of value.

[Forrest]

The whole thread is turning into tl;dr for me.

Me too, ironically, given that I'm pretty much the king of tl;dr.

There's more to the judicial system than restitution (which we don't do at all these days, for violent crimes.) There's prevention and its subset deterrence. Locking up the criminal keeps them from repeating, until they've either learned better or aged enough to probably not be a threat. And the threat of being locked up hopefully deters others (included released prisoners) from committing murder in the first place.

That quote of mine was given the agreed-upon (between Bloodhenge and I) premise that the only valid purpose of punishment was restitution or rehabilitation. Of course, he seems to include deterrence within rehabilitation, whereas I don't, so I guess that's not exactly agreed-upon; and I wouldn't exactly call rehabilitation, in my sense of the word, punishment at all.

Although, to me, one of the purposes of restitutionary punishment is to provide a degree of deterrence proportional to the crime; basically, to internalize all externalities, to make the person who commits an act bear all the costs which that act incurs; and of course, since nobody wants to incur costs if they can avoid it, they will then refrain from committing acts which incur costs to others, since those costs will be passed on to them. If it was possible for a person to give his life to restore the life of another, then that would be appropriate restitution for murder; but as it's not, then taking the life of the murderer seems only to do more harm in response to harm already done. Which is where I got the idea of letting him live, but denying him any rights to own property: so he gets to keep living, he can keep working to support himself, and if he's a good person from then on out, maybe people will let him keep some of what he earns, but anybody can take whatever they want from him and it will not be a crime, so he basically becomes a slave to society.

Not to mention the desire for revenge, to make someone 'pay' in some nebulous sense that doesn't involve actual transfer of value.

That is, in my opinion, the worst justification for punishment, and the primary thing that the argument for restitution as the basis for punishment is arguing against. I guess it's the pragmatist in me - what exactly is revenge accomplishing, practically speaking?

[BloodHenge]

Of course we won't actually be "given" a true, objective standard.

I'm not saying we need to be "given" an objective standard, like by God or something like that. I'm using "given" as you do in logical argument, e.g. "given that performing action A is objectively wrong, then...". Our conversation is about the relation of wrong-action to mental health, not about what is or is not a wrong action. Even if we can come to an agreement about whether or not it is sane to intentional perform wrong acts, there's still a huge debate over what acts are wrong. I'm wanting to avoid having that second debate for now and focus just on the first.

Okay. For the moment, let us assume that we have arrived at some appropriate moral standard, and set aside its definition and our method of devising it.

About the only point of agreement necessary from that second debate is that what's right and what's wrong is an objective matter, which does not mean that there is universal or even majority agreement on the matter, just that there is some opinion on the matter which is the single correct opinion, even if in fact nobody currently holds that opinion. And that's really what my whole argument here is about - an attack on moral relativism. Sane and insane have normative connotations to them, it's bad to be insane and good to be sane, so if you allow commonality or typicality amongst your criteria for sanity, you're slipping into moral relativism.

But then, even if we totally reject moral relativism, I don't see why sanity requires a moral dimension. Furthermore, since certain mental disorders (such as "amok") are culturally specific, it may not even be possible to objectively define sanity. If an objective definition of sanity is impossible, and an objective definition of morality is necessary, then immorality cannot be a sufficient condition to indicate insanity.

[It doesn't matter whether the "purpose for human behavior" (or properly functioning human behavior, which need not necessarily be purposeful) is clear or obvious or whether there is any degree of agreement on that or not. That's what I was just saying above about "given a standard...". We (people in general, not just you and I) don't often agree on what is right or wrong, but even if we don't agree on that, we could still agree on whether or not it is sane to intentionally do something wrong - and then push the argument back to whether this or that particular act is wrong or not.

Apparently, we (meaning you and I) can't agree on whether it's sane to intentionally do something that's wrong, so I don't see what chance we (people in general) have.

Ah, I see. When you said "the way the mind works", I thought you were referring specifically to the manner in which neurochemical impulses are transmitted. I didn't realize you were also including the amount of available information that the person chose to take into account when making a decision, and the relative weight the person chose to apply to each piece of information under consideration.

Hmm I'm seeing perhaps another philosophical difference lurking under here somewhere. I am (more or less) a determinist, at least, as much a determinist about the mind as I am about the weather or any other complex physical system. I see a person's choices - e.g. how much information to take into account, how much weight to give each piece of information, etc - and how they tend to make those choices as a function of their neurology, which is influenced both by genetics and by experience, and which can always, at least in theory (though we may not presently know how), be changed, or fixed if there's something wrong with it. But it seems to me that you may be thinking of choice and will as something outside of neurology, some kind of dualistic agent-causation or incompatiblist libertarianism, and so seeing a person's tendency to make choices as not a defect in their mind but a defect in their "character" or some such, in a sense where that is independent of the "mind" as studied and worked on by psychologists. If that's the case, then... oy, we've got a lot more talking to do before we'll agree on anything

While determinism is fine for the physical sciences, I prefer to believe it doesn't apply as strictly in psychology, largely because psychological determinism would imply predestination, in theological terms, which I don't believe in. For the moment, we don't have the capability to mathematically model a human brain, and the necessary sort of twin study needed to test psychological determination is considered highly unethical, so we can't really prove it one way or another. But yes, I believe that a person is more than the sum of his genetics and his experience, even if the only additional element is random perturbations of his brain-juices.

I do consider it a form of rehabilitation, although it can be statistically demonstrated to be relatively ineffective. It adds information to be considered in the decision-making process, or alters the weight placed on available information. As I said, in my opinion the goal of rehabilitation is behavior modification; if behavior is modified, then the rehabilitation is successful, regardless of whether the person wants to do good or simply wants to avoid punishment.

Ok, so we definitely disagree on what counts as rehabilitation then. Not sure where to go from here.[/quote]
Well, maybe you could tell me what you think the purpose of rehabilitation is? If, I presume, you don't believe that the ultimate goal is behavior modification.

you should never leave someone in a position where he has nothing left to lose, because you always want it to be in his best interests to stop doing whatever he's doing wrong to avoid further punishment, and if there's ever an infinite punishment to some act, then after committing that act the perpetrator might as well do whatever else he feels like, cause it's not like they can punish him any more, he's got nothing left to lose.

And there's statistical data to bear this out. Societies that punish minor crimes more severely generally see a greater frequency of major crimes. Such a period in England actually generated the phrase "in for a penny, in for a pound" because of how severely theft was punished. (On the other hand, if you go far enough, it comes back around and you have almost no crime, like Wallachia under Vlad Tepes III.)

[

So it sounds like you're basically denying that it's possible to acquire a psychological disorder from experience (e.g. from trauma); if you have a real disorder, it must be something biologically based. Is that correct?

Not at all. You provided an excellent example in PTSD.

So what do you want me to call it? Just give me a word, and I'll use it.

Well, there's not a nice, concise, unambiguous term which can be substituted for "crime", "criminal", "criminality", etc, to mean the deontic (rather than legislative) analogues of those terms, which is why I made up the phrase "moral crime" to try to get the idea across. But, for longer and more awkward phrases, "morally wrong act" could sub for "crime", "person who has committed a morally wrong act" could sub for "criminal", and "moral wrongness" could sub for "criminality".

COnsidering the fact that "moral crime" is the only sort of crime you mentioned, and that we didn't have a specific set of laws under consideration, I'm surprised you assumed I was talking about any other sort of crime at all.

Anyway, I'll just use "moral crime" going forward, since we both seem to know what that means.

Do you equate "morally wrong" with "socially unacceptable"? If so, then there is the root of our disagreement, as that's the main thing I was arguing about to begin with: that an atypicality criterion for insanity implies moral relativism, and moral relativism is incorrect, thus insanity must not require atypicality. If you disagree about whether moral relativism is correct, then obviously that argument won't sway you, since you disagree with one of it's premises - and we should push our debate back to one about moral relativism instead.

You keep getting distracted by how I say something, rather than what I say.

You were talking about what was "unacceptable". To me, that implies an agent in a position of authority who evaluates and rejects the entity under consideration, so I introduced an agent. I didn't want to use "God", because I expected that to open up an entirely new can of worms that I wasn't ready to deal with. I couldn't use the person performing the unacceptable activity, because a rational person won't be motivated by unacceptable motivations. So, I fell back on society, since any other authoritative agent would be a representative of society.

So, going forward, I'm prepared to assume that the agent exists without identifying it, if that will make this converastion easier.

As for moral relativism, you're correct that it's absurd when carried to the extreme. When each person defines his own morality, it renders the word "morality" meaningless. On the other hand, a secular system of objective morality hasn't proven especially practical either. The closest I've seen to an attempt is Objectivism, which is not only impossible to practice as stated, but also leads to some ridiculous conclusoins when carried to its logical extreme. So, for the sake of practicality, a form of macro-scale moral relativism is probably most convenient for general use. Maybe I made a mistake trying to bring real-world practicality into a theoretical debate.

You may have noticed that I specified a secular system of objective morality. As a Christian, I do believe in a system of objective morality. However, as an American, I feel it's wrong to coerce people outside my religion to abide by it.

But backing up to your quote there: I wholeheartedly agree that is is possible for a cognitively sane person, someone who processes facts and information just fine, to commit morally wrong actions on the basis of learned criteria; I'm just arguing that can be a form of insanity, if the "learning" part is behavioral conditioning, a change in a person's desires and motivations based on past experiences, rather than intellectual learning, a change in a person's beliefs based on past experiences.

To use our story example again: if Ian is not crazy, and is intending to kill all the elves just because he believes, reasonably based on past experiences, that the elves are all inalterably intent on killing all the half-elves, and that killing them is the only way to prevent that (and let us grant that preventing that would be a morally justified reason for killing the elves, if it were indeed necessary to that end), then you could just give him a new piece of information, show him an elf who is not intent on killing all half-elves, and he will change his mind about whether to kill all the elves.

However, if Ian has "learned" from experience, in the sense of being conditioned, like Pavlov's dog, to just explode Elves on sight, and no amount of plain factual information about whether or not Elves really are a threat would change that reaction, then he's crazy. Not because he's not processing the facts about Elves being a threat, maybe he understands that just fine, but maybe he just wants to kill Elves now, intrinsically, because he's fucking pissed at them, and he doesn't need any instrumental reason for doing so. If that's what's going on, then his desires, objectives, or motives are wrong (let us grant that unnecessarily killing people for its own sake is in fact wrong), and that's what makes him crazy, not any inability to process factual information.

Okay, that makes sense.

I see. So, where would you categorize a so-called "career criminal", like a drug dealer or a member of a criminal organization? Or people who choose, on occasion, to rob convenience stores? How about shoplifters? These are all people who choose (with varying degrees of rationality and frequency) to harm others in circumstances when they believe the potential benefits outweigh the risks.

Well, the drug dealer I don't see as doing anything intrinsically wrong, inasmuch as he is just dealing drugs. As for the "member of a criminal organization", that depends on the nature of the crime that organization commits, so unless you'd like to flesh that out I can't really comment.

In a society where drugs are criminalized, drug dealers do a lot of things that are intrinsically wrong, not the least of which is intentionally bringing harm to their customers.

For the "criminal organization", I'm thinking the typical stuff-- "protection" rackets, smuggling contraband, running numbers, loansharking, bribery of public officials, and enforcement of their own policies and interests by whatever means they deem necessary.

But I can comment on people who occasionally shoplift or rob convenience stores. They might be crazy; I could see a sociopath stealing just because he wants stuff and he can get away with it and other people don't matter to him. But then again, the thief may be merely inconsiderate. They may not feel like they're actually causing anybody much harm at all (e.g. "stores are rich enough that they won't care", or "there's lossage procedures in place already that prevent the store from suffering from missing or damaged goods", or "I am poor and in need and that justifies me taking this stuff", or "property is a lie anyway, this stuff is as much mine as theirs"), in which case they are not crazy, but then they're not intentionally committing a morally wrong act either. They're intentionally committing an act, and the act is morally wrong, but they're simply unaware, or hadn't considered, how and why it is morally wrong; and if they could come to understand why it is morally wrong, and then stop doing that, then they're not crazy. The sociopath, on the other hand, couldn't empathize, no amount of moral argument would change his mind, so he is crazy. And while I'm not aware of any sort of traumatic disorders that incude people to steal, if there was such a thing, that person would be crazy too, though probably more easily cured than the sociopath, whose disorder is biologically rooted.

I see. You've apparently split my middle ground and distributed it into your other categories.