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know it's wrong
whilst researching my criminology essay I frequently come across:
psychopathy, the term forensic psychology uses to refer to something almost the equivalent to antisocial personality disorder; put simply, someone with no remorse, empathy or conscience.
conscience!
1. The awareness of a moral or ethical aspect to one's conduct together with the urge to prefer right over wrong.
2. A source of moral or ethical judgment or pronouncement.
3. Conformity to one's own sense of right conduct.
definitions of words thoroughly confuse me, because words seem far more than their literal meanings. my dictionary would have at least two pages per word.
conscience. of course it is difficult in a world of a thousand various forms of parent per person to not have grown up to know the difference between right and wrong, the consequences of them both and the collective one's preference between the two. thus when choosing between right and wrong, justifications aside, one almost invariably knows which is which!
the knowledge alone can't be conscience, as psychopaths know what is wrong, they just choose wrong anyway.
are remorse, guilt, shame, pity, empathy, moral outrage! self-disgust/reproach, et cetera part of conscience?
if you know to murder is wrong, yet feel no shame, remorse or empathy and commit it anyway, you've no conscience. obvious.
if you know murder is wrong, yet would feel shame, remorse or empathy and commit it anyway... your conscience is a pussy and your id reigns supreme.
if you know murder is wrong, yet would feel no shame, remorse or empathy, yet do not commit it because you know it's wrong?
psychopathy, the term forensic psychology uses to refer to something almost the equivalent to antisocial personality disorder; put simply, someone with no remorse, empathy or conscience.
conscience!
1. The awareness of a moral or ethical aspect to one's conduct together with the urge to prefer right over wrong.
2. A source of moral or ethical judgment or pronouncement.
3. Conformity to one's own sense of right conduct.
definitions of words thoroughly confuse me, because words seem far more than their literal meanings. my dictionary would have at least two pages per word.
conscience. of course it is difficult in a world of a thousand various forms of parent per person to not have grown up to know the difference between right and wrong, the consequences of them both and the collective one's preference between the two. thus when choosing between right and wrong, justifications aside, one almost invariably knows which is which!
the knowledge alone can't be conscience, as psychopaths know what is wrong, they just choose wrong anyway.
are remorse, guilt, shame, pity, empathy, moral outrage! self-disgust/reproach, et cetera part of conscience?
if you know to murder is wrong, yet feel no shame, remorse or empathy and commit it anyway, you've no conscience. obvious.
if you know murder is wrong, yet would feel shame, remorse or empathy and commit it anyway... your conscience is a pussy and your id reigns supreme.
if you know murder is wrong, yet would feel no shame, remorse or empathy, yet do not commit it because you know it's wrong?
no subject
murder is not murder if it's war. outright murder can be an ethical and moral act if it saves lives.
conscience and consciencelessness are not like opposites. some people blame themselves for a lot of things. others accept almost no blame. the article refereed to below admits the topic is "hotly debated," but psychology is still somewhat pseudo-scientific, and Tim Watkin's definition of psychopathy as "a personality disorder characterised by... ...things of that sort" does not ring of airtight double-blind reproducible fact.
IMHO, Tim Watkin's a nut who thinks he's right and has stopped allowing for the possibility that he's not. One thing's for certain--it's not science. no one can know that murder is wrong, because murder's not wrong. it's only wrong in certain cases. in most cases it is wrong, so we say "it's wrong to murder."
some people truly believe that murder is always wrong, but that requires a logical fallacy at some point, which also demonstrates the fact that right and wrong are not switches flipped. if someone is forced to choose between killing one person or killing two people--if both acts are wrong, which path is chosen? the one which is less wrong, and thus more right.
so etc, etc, right and wrong are contextually defined, people who commit murder remorselessly are just exercising self-lying muscles the way everyone can when necessary. logical fallacies make it possible to survive, but everything's double-edged.
right and wrong certainly exist. the knowledge of right and wrong do not encompass conscience, like you said. instead, the conscience is the voice that says you should act based on your knowledge or right and wrong. the volume of that voice is now as conscientiousness, or scrupulousness. there are other bases for action, such as "how it will affect others," or consideration, "how it will affect me," or self-interest. it's hard to rank them.
that may be incoherent and rambling, but man, it's fun to think hard.
--stop.
no subject
when I say murder, I don't mean war, the common good vs the individual, euthanasia, manslaughter, self defence or anything else that could be given any non-synonymous name other than "murder" (except maybe genocide and dozens of others I haven't thought of) or possibly be adequately justified, because if can be justified it isn't wrong. thus, when I say "murder is wrong," i'm not generalising to all killing, rather am talking about murder that is, in fact, wrong. I apologise for not elaborating on that little facet.
anyone who attempts to divide nature into oversimplified categories is somewhat a nut. rest assured that I believe everything I read, and for everything written there is a contradiction written somewhere else. the very idea that a personality can be disordered is absurd; that it is considered an element of science, whether that sience is "soft" or "social" or not, is !! (words lacking)
I think that someone with a conscience will think (as well as know) that murder is wrong, whereas one without will "know" it's wrong, but not think. how much difference there is between not murdering because you a) think it's wrong, or b) know people will think it's wrong (your knowledge of right and wrong).. but now i'm just talking to myself. i've also realised it's possibly at least partially socially constructed. if you took 20 newborns and kept them in isolation for 22 years, then stuck them in a lab to see how many behaved as if they'd no conscience: how many would possess a voice whispering "it's wrong to murder" (in words lacking or otherwise), whether they based their behaviour on it or not?
and thankyou! my conceptions are expanding at 10million miles a second.