know it's wrong

[overocea]

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?

Comments

[unwinding.livejournal.com]

or is the real difficulty in confining ourselves to (modernist?) understandings of "wrong"? ie, how can we "know" what is "wrong" if our perceptions of right'n'wrong are only ever the accumulation of our subjective understandings.

or: do we have to interrogate the way in which the fifty million discourses running through our brains operate to construct and maintain identity hierarchies through the reification of natural or pre-inscriptive and embodied practices? and, specifically, does the division of activities into the categories of 'right' and 'wrong' only serve to create a class of deviant practices against which the normal practices of the centre are constructed and legitimated?

and who stole my cigarettes?

[stopworth.livejournal.com]

I don't think the distinction between "right act" and "wrong act" only serves to create a class of deviant practices--it certainly also creates a normative class of acceptable practices which lead to approval, nor is it a binary relationship.

If you take a descriptive approach to morality and ethics, instead of starting with the premise that morality and ethics are necessarily prescribed, things are gauged on a range from most right to most wrong; the most right actions are lauded while the most wrong actions reviled. Also: Actions which are socially acceptable may not be considered "right" even by the society in which they occur (and are subsequently accepted), because an act can be defined in several ways, and the uncertainty in words, again, used to justify wrong acts. Mass cognitive dissonance may interfere to make an act like "genocide" be called "crusade." People think genocide is wrong, but crusade acceptable, and thus, the Minitrue prevails. Similar uncertainties of scale occur. Murders are unallowable, but collateral damage is accepted.

I think of "right" and "wrong" as theoretical certainties (and I don't think that a logical fallacy, but perhaps a redefinition of the words), the asymptote to which limited sentience aspires. In practice, people accept wrong acts and revile right ones due to any number of combinations of flawed reasoning, illness, prejudice, misled sentiments, loyalties, et cetera.

As a result, we can never "know" what is wrong, but have a moral and ethical responsibility to make the best approximation possible. Do you really think discourse is as influential as they say? Doesn't that nullify the whole question of morality?

thanks for thinking so hard and making me do the same. my prophecy: i think some guy named alan has your cigarettes.

[unwinding.livejournal.com]

there is a great difficulty in existing in this theoretical space (the same, maybe, that allows the - great description - theoretical certainties of 'right' and 'wrong) where one can argue against the existence of 'right' and 'wrong' yet still violently hope it exists.

i do agree with much of what you say. most, in fact. but i feel compelled to counter with (randomly) elizabeth grosz who says, "[t]here is no 'natural' norm; there are only cultural forms of bodies, which do or do not conform to social norms." so while i do acknowledge the responsibility of self to regulate behaviour (or, in your words, to make the best approximiation as possible, yes) i think there is difficulty when all bodies, whether socially understood as "normal" or "right" *are* inscriptive surfaces, differently inscribed through the confluence of cultural, historical and social forces. i'm not sure if discourses are as influential as they say, but this is not to suggest there is only pure cultural constructions. rather, maybe we can adopt a paradigm of morality as the (someone said, escapes me who now) "indeterminate constancy", where morality is the lived-in cultural sign; a destabilising force transgressing the boundaries of nature/culture dichotomies. then, within such a quasi post-structuralist context, the choice to "wrong" creates a 'deviant' practice that implicitly challenges modern conceptions of fixity. the impossibility of regarding the deviant "wrong" as natural similarly undermines the naturalism of the normative practices?

i think it was maybe robert young (?) who said that culture is fundamentally an oxymoronic concept, characterised by an antagonism between culture as universal and cultural difference. and yeah, i'm assuming culture = our understanding of right/wrong, which is a leap. but in this, culture is at once both anthropological culture – the customary beliefs and practices of a social group, and imperial culture – the imposition of "universal" cultural values (those of western white supremacist patriarchy).

so then we (imperial culture) conflate "culture" and "civilization" ("right" and "wrong") and position one cultural tradition as inherently more "cultured" or "civilised" than all others in order to legitimate the transformation of localised into globalised values. so, here's my thing, are debates about right and wrong essentially debates about cultural roles? they seem to be marked by tensions between sameness and difference, stasis and flux and the interpolation of shifting spaces between self and other.

blah blah blah. i bore even myself.
but i bought new cigarettes. and this makes me happy.

[basement.livejournal.com]

mmm, I should read all replies before replying to replies to prevent repitition!

not that I can speak objectively (which is precisely why we simply can't interrogate the way in which the fifty million discourses running through our brains operate to construct and maintain identity hierarchies through the reification of natural or pre-inscriptive and embodied practices), but the idea that right and wrong are entirely social constructs for solidarity is just yuckie! I do think context probably has more effect than universality, but I also would like to believe that conscience would exist any way, despite the suspicious convenience of "right" and "wrong."

(if you were the bald guy on the bus 4 years ago, I stole your cigarettes. I apologise.)