Evil: free will or insanity?

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In America's legal system, it is extremely difficult to use insanity as a defense. Even if you are schizophrenic it might not work.

In the public eye, generally speaking, delusional psychotic disorders prevent a person from being responsible for a crime on a moral level, but personality disorders do not. However, what really is the difference? Being able to plan something out doesn't mean you're not insane - I would consider the incapacity to feel empathy just as much a mental illness as paranoid delusions.

Personally I think all acts of 'hot' evil, such as murder, are the result of some form of mental illness. We know that serial killers have defects in their brains from studies; the area of the brain that causes inhibition is not there.

'Cold' evil is more complex. Cold evil is things like ecological destruction, pollution, buying products from China that are made by people on slave wages. I think that has more to do with ignorance than with free will or mental illness, and really is just as much or even more of a problem than the occasional acts of 'hot' evil that strike communities.

You need a clear sense of how you are defining evil - relative to ubdesirable, antisocial, criminal, etc.

THEN you need a clear sense of how you want to define insanity.

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By my definitions, insanity and evil are separate categories than can intersect in certain individuals' behavior.

Defining evil in the PPR forum is going to be tricky. A lot of people here think Barack Obama is evil and the embodiment of Satan for his health care plan.

Insanity in a legal sense means your brain is messed up in such a way that you couldn't understand that what you were doing is wrong.

Mental illness in a clinical sense includes a whole lot of other things. It doesn't mean that you are incapable of understanding the consequenses of your actions.

A lot of people? I have not seen anything likew that. Will those who think Barry is Satan please raise their hands?

Barack Obama is far from evil and has not done anything that could legitimately be labelled Satanic. Besides which, we do not need an agreed definition of evil - that would indeed be tricky.

We just need to know a bit more about donnie darko's definitions than the rudiments we find in the initial question.

The problem here is that people have a set of intuitions about responsibility, but this set of intuitions if brought up to the metaphysical level doesn't really intersect with reality well. So.... we have questions like these and all of these other ones. If we were dumber, we could use our simple models, but we do see the connections between neuroscience and actions that are considered to be important in moral issues.

Oh, yes- Mr Obama is not by any normal or reasonable definition insane. His personality health level is a bit low, but that applies to well over two third of the denizens of any fair-size university I have known.

as ancalagon said, there is a large difference between legal insanity and being mentally impaired.


all humans can be pushed to the point where emotion rules completely, if that emotion is hatred (usually because the person has been "fooling" themselves beyond blindness) then bad things happen.

Also - stepping back a bit -

does insanity actually negate free will?

Distort it, yes.

Brainwashing, hypnosis - wew would have think about that a little.

So then, you must believe he lives and serves in humility before the Sovereign Creator of all?!

I think anger could often be more active there than actual hatred, but even then love is still certainly not always being displayed.

Ah, mon ami, today it pleases you to play the finick?

I COULD go finick back at you, and point out that I do indeed believe that so far as in him lies he follows the pattern and lives in accordance with the will of his Higher Power AS HE KNOWS HIM.

Clueless and weak prima donna though he be, I thought at election time and still think that though caught in a briarpatch on quicksand of his own devising he has some principle and sincerity.

But rather than go into that I will just say that I intend "Satanic" not to mean "doing some things led astray by Satan or doing som,e things Satan has also done - and who amongst us has not? - but to mean "emulating Satan, intending evil" - a more common usage.

Nope. We either serve the One or the other.

I will have to ponder that one. Instinctively I doubt it, if only because the enemy of my enemy is NOT necessarily my friend. Nothing to do with the quibble that even those who follow Satan do God's will.

But not every dumb sheep thap breaks away from the dogs is following the wolf.

I shall ponder.

Just listen to the old Bob Dylan song ...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FavBDpg91gA[/youtube]

Oy - "old" Bob Dylan song? Herself is a ;long standing fan, I VERY much not, I remember when that came out and we heard it new on vinyl. And thsat is "old"?

Bad enough that the oldie stations play stuff from the 70s and almost nothing I heard in the 60s.

Anyhow, I am familiar with that point of view and related things like silence implies assent; but I tend not to consider the gentleman an alpha exegete.