Born Evil?

[Bathsheba]

Bec I'm not sure you understand... I am not seeking to excuse those who murder, merely understand how it happened. To excuse and to understand are different.

I still stand by my beliefs that people do evil things due to two reasons: mental illness/faulty brain chemistry or due to their upbringing/environmental influences. I really doubt that there is is a third unrelated ingredient: an evil 'gene' or 'possession' etc. I agree that what might trigger an evil act for one person will not do so for another and for that I have no answer.

Imagine if you were a child who somebody was convinced you had an evil gene Imagine how that would affect you. I think labelling someone from birth as evil or capable of evil is very wrong. Children become what they are told.

I agree that yes, it is right to remove the benefits of society from a wilful murderer but not their human rights. No act of another should justify treating humans like animals no matter how heinous their crime. Punish but don't degrade. When you take away another human's dignity you compromise your own.

I think what i'm basically asking is, if something either works well or does no harm to 99.9% of people, do we change it because it *might* cause some terrible reaction in 0.1%? If someone says "i was bullied, that's why i was driven to kill" do we start to use the citation of bullying in the past to mitigate crimes?

I am not suggesting we mitigate or excuse crimes but if it becomes apparent that for example, childhood bullying is contributing to many cases of adult crime then yes, it should lead to measures of crackdown in schools (which is what is happening here in Victorian schools ATM). But if we just threw criminals in the slammer without taking the time to research their histories we would lose this opportunity to see PATTERNS that lead to crime.