Quote:
Originally Posted by Sir Huntington
Everyone is capable of changing, it's called neuroplasticity. It's been around for 1000s of years in methods of discipline and brain science is just getting into it.
This is where our brain science is at people, lagging behind by 1000s of years. If you compared it to medical science these cats are still blood leaching people lol.
I've studied moral psychology somewhat extensively, i read most of the papers released from the lab on moral psychology led by fiery cushman at harvard university, have read most textbooks on it, and have an overview of the differing perspectives of various cognitive scientists. It's a very new field as you say.
Compare it to linguistics though, something that is more developed as a cognitive science, someone with aphasia has lesions on their brain that affect language processing, they cannot ever recover from this with current medical science.
There isn't really much reason to think morality is that different, there are neuroscientific studies that show certain area's of the brain (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, ect) are used for moral intuition and moral reasoning. And there are studies on people that have lesions in this area of the brain-that simply have pretty shocking answers to moral dilemna's, like "is it ok to kill your stingy boss?', questions like this.
But yes i think most people can be reformed, but it seems pretty unlikely for those that have brain damage. Not saying charlie carrol does, i definitely do not think he has brain damage. Just a personality that poker regs seem to hate.
There is very little mention of anything to do with neural plasticity in the field of moral psychology. Most of the neuroscientists/philosophers are interested in specific chemicals like oxytocin and how they operate. i don't understand your comment about plasticity though, 'everyone is capalable of changing', what do you even mean by this statement? Does this mean people can grow arms back if they want to because of neural plasticity? How about mental faculties.
The tweet about pedophiles makes sense to me, we should empathize with virtually everyone the best we can. Child abuse is often the result of oppressive socioeconomic conditions, so if we understand better how and why they commit their crimes, the root cause for at least some of their crimes can be understood and we can prevent it. I think people misunderstand empathy with sympathy though. Of course we should still put them in jail. Empathy is putting yourself in their shoes, it doesn't mean you like them. Arguably, a good torturer would have a lot of empathy because they can put themselves in their victims shoes and understand better how to maximize the pain and suffering.
Last edited by Stroggoz; 07-06-2019 at 07:22 PM.