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Jun 16, 2011, 03:55 PM
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Evil, he notes, has heretofore been defined in religious terms (with the concept differing in the major world religions), as a psychiatric condition (psychopathology) or, as he puts it, in “frustratingly circular” terms: “He did x because he is truly evil”). ~Simon Baron-Cohen
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/sc...ibks.html?_r=1
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For reasons that we cannot understand, however, all of these people abused their free will, and left the union with God. In doing so, they lost their preternatural powers, and so were subject to disease, to aging, to destructive natural events, and to death. But separation from God also meant that they were subject to tendencies present in their inherited genes, so that they now suffered from “an inborn tendency to do evil against which all human efforts are in vain.”
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http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/#The
Dr. Somov does not talk about evil in a religious sense - where good and evil confront each other. Rather, for him, the "concept of evil offers no explanatory value and runs a great risk of toxic moralizing." Somov, instead, views the perception of evil as an impediment to rehabilitation opportunities. http://blogs.psychcentral.com/mindfu...l/#comment-863
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No Socially Unacceptable Motives, Just Socially Unacceptable Behaviors
At the risk of over-summarizing, allow me to reiterate the key point of the rehabilitation-compatible operating model of human behavior. When stripped of situational specifics, all human behavior is motivated by a desire to self-regulate by avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure (in its various permutations). Consequently, all human behavior, including crime (that is anti-social only in its means not goals), rests on a moral foundation which, if acknowledged, becomes also a foundation for rehabilitation. Crime is behavior. Robbing, hurting, deceiving, manipulating is behavior. All behavior is motivated. Therefore, crime, like all behavior, is instrumental and as it is in the service of a motive: a mind needs, desires, wants a particular state, and directs the machinery of the body to behave in a way that would yield a target state of mind. Seeing crime as self-regulatory, as a means to one and the same universal end of well-being, as opposed to being an end in and of itself, is essential for understanding rehabilitation opportunities. Such instrumental view of crime allows a rehabilitation clinician to see crime as but one of the many possible strategies for meeting one’s needs and, therefore, allows a clinician an opportunity for exploration of psychologically and physically healthier, legally safer and socially sanctioned alternatives to meeting one’s needs.
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http://www.eatingthemoment.com/360-d...cceptable.html
Empathy is the key for Dr. Somov.
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Empathy is most often defined by the metaphors of 'standing in someone else's shoes' or 'seeing through someone else's eyes'. Scholars who study empathy have come up with at least 8 ways that the word is used.
8 Definitions of Empathy
(from The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, These Things Called Empathy, Daniel Batson)
"The term empathy is currently applied to more than a half-dozen phenomena."
1. Knowing another persons internal state, Including thoughts and feelings
2. Adopting the posture or matching the neural responses of an observed other
3. Coming to feel as another person feels
4. Intuiting or projecting oneself into another's situation
5. Imagining how another is thinking and feeling
6. Imagining how one would think and feel in the other's place
7. Feeling distress at witnessing another person's suffering
8. Feeling for another person who is suffering (empathic concern) An other-oriented emotional response elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone in need. Includes feeling sympathy, compassion, tenderness and the like (i.e. feeling for the other, and not feeling as the other)
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http://cultureofempathy.com/References/Definitions.htm
Dr. Somov informs us "empathy training is an established clinical modality." Dr. Baron-Cohen states: Genetic predisposition is contained within what Baron-Cohen calls the “empathy circuit,” or the detailed route the brain takes to liken one object to another (for example, another person’s feelings to your own). While someone’s ability to empathize does have a genetic component, Baron-Cohen warns, “I hope this book will not be misunderstood as arguing that empathy is wholly genetic.” http://www.suite101.com/content/curing-evil-a375780
Dr. Somov also does not understand his thesis to be a form of moral relativism: The term ‘moral relativism’ is understood in a variety of ways. Most often it is associated with an empirical thesis that there are deep and widespread moral disagreements and a metaethical thesis that the truth or justification of moral judgments is not absolute, but relative to some group of persons. Sometimes ‘moral relativism’ is connected with a normative position about how we ought to think about or act towards those with whom we morally disagree, most commonly that we should tolerate them. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/
I do not understand Dr. Somov to advocate tolerance of those without empathy: So, we are motivationally innocent. And effort-wise we are all doing the best we can (even if it sucks and hurts someone in the process). No evil here either, just the reality of modern-day jungle. Does this mean that we have to open up the jails and let everyone out? Of course, not. As a society, we have to stay safe from those who are unsafe. As a society, we have to protect ourselves against those who – for reasons of nature, nurture, or both – are unable to pursue their wellbeing within the cultural-legal parameters. But as a civilization, we don’t have to demonize the less empathic of us as “evil.”http://blogs.psychcentral.com/mindfu...l/#comment-863
Are we are better served by fostering empathy, compassion and even forgiveness? Will not doing so reduce opportunities to rehabilitate those who make the world unsafe? What do we lose by giving empathy a chance?
How do we stack up in the empathy department: http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/...rdo-evil_N.htm
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