What happens if every serial killer isn't a blight on society?

[LanternWaste]

My friend Alan came over this past weekend. He's always good for a few thought provoking ideas after a glass or two of wine.

This time, it was a doozy. What happens if in a hundred, five hundred, or even a thousand years from now, it becomes known that today's violent offenders-- rapists, serial killers, etc., were simply hard-wired wrong? That Marvin the Murderer could have been Marvin the Machinist if only we knew that all he needed was "XYZ chemical combo" added/subtracted to his brain chemistry.

What happens if every serial killer isn't a blight on society, but simply (and without fiction) ill? It's easy to laugh off the thought-- but that's what we did during the Inquisition.. but many of those "possessed" apostates were simply people with genetic birth defects, or the mentally ill (of course, that's in addition to the agenda's of the various powers that be at the time-- but that's not here nor there for our purposes).

We have a person we claim cannot be rehabilitated and needs to be "put down" because he raped a four year old and then killed him/her (well, not all of us call for his death-- but many do). What happens if it turns out that he was simply suffering from a chemical imbalance that we can not now detect, but will be able to in the future? That he himself was suffering also?

Is our guilt abrogated by our ignorance? Will future historians look on us the way we look on our most reverend Cotton Mather? "Those poor savages-- they had no idea..." Or as we deride the Inquisition, will the future deride us for our Death Penalty?

Possibly the future's version of Monty Python will be lampooning even our most progressive morality as our Monty Python lampooned the past ("She's a witch!").


That's the primary reason I'm against the death penalty-- because the possibility exists. And every hundred years or so, we find out how incredibly stupid and naive those who came before us were in so many instances.

[ananda]

1. What about Bush the Psychotic Idiot?

A few DNA tweaks and he'd become the
new and better Lincoln?

[magellan]

2. It'd take more than a few DNA tweaks just to make him human. n/t

[nomorenomore08]

3. Yeah, I've wondered about Bush, Cheney, and others in this context...

Could they have been serial killers in another life? Perhaps. They certainly seem to have a taste for, or at least indifference toward, mass murder.

[LanternWaste]

5. Was it Charles Valois

Was it Charles Valois who was considered for the longest time a kind of nit-wit and it turns out he suffered from manic-depression? So yeah-- maybe even Shrub's mean-spirited idiocy could be fine tuned into a normal person in a thousand year... :shrug"

[walldude]

16. If you ask his supporters

yes both of them, they'll tell you he's already a new and better Lincoln... :rofl:

[LakeSamish706]

4. I actually think that you hit the nail on the head with your post and our biggest...

problem as a society is we don't know how to fix em. I suspect that it will come to pass that we will learn how to tweak them.

[depakid]

6. There are reasons that the genes for sociopathy and psychopathy have survived

and quite frankly, I'm not sure Cotton Mather wasn't one himself.

We‘‘d like to think that if we met someone who was completely without conscience –– someone who was capable of doing anything at all if it served his or her purposes –– we would recognize it. In popular culture, the image of the psychopath is of someone like Hannibal Lecter or the BTK Killer. But in reality, many psychopaths just want money, or power, or fame, or simply a nice car. Where do these psychopaths go? Often, it‘‘s to the corporate world.

From Snakes in Suits.

http://www.harpercollins.com/book/index.aspx?isbn=9780060837723

[nomorenomore08]

18. Corporate psychopaths? Brett Easton Ellis was SO on-the-money with the Patrick Bateman character.

nt

[suston96]

7. Dexter......

[LanternWaste]

10. I'm afraid your response is lost on me

I'm afraid your response is lost on me-- but I'm the first to admit I'm not too clever by half.

[suston96]

12. Google it.....

Dexter is a serial avenger killing those who get away with murder.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexter_(TV_series)

Reruns on CBS every Sunday evening.

[sandnsea]

8. Nobody chooses to be a molester or murderer

I already make that assumption, whether it's nature or nurture doesn't matter. I'm stunned that other people don't.

[Iris]

11. prepared to be stunned some more

if this thread lasts a bit longer.

[Forkboy]

9. You should read the book A Philosophical Investigation by Philip Kerr.

In a near-future, a British neuroscientist named Professor Burgess Phelan has discovered a portion of the brain, the VMN, that is typically twice the size in men as it is in women. In certain men, however (approximately 1 in 100,000), it is the same size as a woman's, and that abnormality is an exceptionally accurate indicator of violent sociopathy. Professor Phelan developed an imaging device called L.O.M.B.R.O.S.O. (Localisation of Modullar Brain Resonations Obliging Social Orthopraxy)used to help diagnose men with the VMN deficiency.

In the interests of public safety, the Lombroso institute is set up to test all the men in Britain. Males are enticed with ad campaigns to submit for testing; those who are VMN-negative are given confidential treatment, including counselling and drugs, and assigned a code name out of the Penguin book of Great Thinkers (e.g., Shakespeare, Plato, etc.). The police aren't given the names of the VMN-negative, but they are allowed to confirm whether or not a particular person is in the Lombroso Institutes system as VMN-negative.

"Wittgenstein" is the code name of a VMN-negative who, until he was made aware of his status, was living a well-adjusted, if solitary, life, venting his sociopathic tendencies harmlessly through virtual reality entertainment systems. Upon discovering his pathology, though, he undertakes a public service of his own: after hacking into the Lombroso Institute's systems and obtaining a list of all VMN-negative men in Britain, he undertakes to kill them all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Philosophical_Investigation

[baby_mouse]

13. Interesting thought and not inconceivable to me at all, BUT...

the ... "SECRETS... Of....the MIIIIND ooo" cough, sorry, aren't ever going to be as easily unpicked as the secrets of, say the lymphatic system, because cause and effect in cognitive processes aren't easily polarisable. By which I mean this: they still haven't properly figured out whether being happy makes you produce happiness chemicals in your brain or having happiness chemicals in your brain makes you happy. Chicken and egg thing. They've even started worrying that things like Fluoxetine could actually CAUSE suicidal thoughts rather than remove them.

And that's just simple things like happiness. Brains involve lots of feedback mechanisms and vaguely chaotic looking chemical reactions that are very difficult to predict and understand. These are exactly the sort of thing that the currently established laws of physics and chemistry are not very good at all at manipulating, so doing complicated things like fixing serial killers MIGHT be possible chemically one day but I think spotting them beforehand would of course be the most important step, and thats probably going to need a society that audits its citizens' thought processes on numerous levels from birth, if serial killing is hard-wired, and I think that is SURPASSINGLY unlikely, as people are quite likely to say: "No."

[Wizard777]

14. This is an old theory from the 60's. Criminals aren't evil. They're mentally ill.

This is what began the idea of rehabilitating criminals instead of simply punishing them.

[Mike03]

15. Interesting, but this isn't something that is not already being discussed.

We've known for decades now that violent psychopaths do have brain damage. You can see it on an MRI or topological brain scan. Damage to certain lobes, or atrophy of particular parts such as the hippocampus are associated with violence and lack of empathy. And we know that failed function of neurotransmitting receptors and agonists also contribute to these disorders.

The burden here is on the jury to decide whether the mitigating factors such as physical abuse or chronic drug use or genetics qualify to help determine the sentence of the offender.

There have been many cases I know of personally where murderers/rapists have been sentenced to LWPP in spite of having committed egregious crimes, because they had a history of abuse, poverty, and mental illness.

[nomorenomore08]

17. Maybe they're "fixable," and maybe they're not.

Here's another view, from a book called 'The Mask of Sanity' (possibly a bit dated):

"The observer is confronted with a convincing mask of sanity. All the outward features of this mask are intact; it cannot be displaced or penetrated by questions directed toward deeper personality levels.
...
Examination reveals not merely an ordinary two-dimensional mask but what seems to be a solid and substantial structural image of the sane and rational personality.
...
Furthermore, this personality structure in all theoretical situations functions in a manner apparently identical with that of normal, sane functioning.

Logical thought processes may be seen in perfect operation no matter how they are stimulated or treated under experimental conditions.

Furthermore, the observer finds verbal and facial expressions, tones of voice, and all the other signs we have come to regard as implying conviction and emotion and the normal experiencing of life as we know it ourselves and as we assume it to be in others.
...
Only very slowly and by a complex estimation or judgment based on multitudinous small impressions does the conviction come upon us that, despite these intact rational processes, these normal emotional affirmations, and their consistent application in all directions, we are dealing here not with a complete man at all but with something that suggests a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly.
...
So perfect is this reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him in a clinical setting can point out in scientific or objective terms why, or how, he is not real.

And yet we eventually come to know or feel we know that reality, in the sense of full, healthy experiencing of life, is not here."

[mzmolly]

19. TLC just had a show about this. Some scientists feel that this may be a contributing factor in

some cases? I just watched a program on TLC or ??? about this issue.

Though, hard wired or not, we have to deal with these people. I don't feel that capital punishment is the answer in any case, but they can not be allowed to walk among us - free to act again.