Originally posted by Muaddib
No, the actions which we choose are what make people good or bad. Yes, there are people who are born with "evil tendencies" no matter if they lived
in a happy home or not, but these are extreme and unusual cases.
On the overall people decide who they are going to become, and the actions they take throughout their lives. Society, their parents and the world
could have treated them bad or they can try to come up with any other excuses.... but at the end it is the individual who decides what actions
he/she is going to take.
Nope, sorry. I hate to break your bubble, but most people are a product of the society around them or else Iraq wouldn't be in the mess
it's in right now. Phillip Zimbardo showed this quite well with his Stanford prison experiment.
This isn't to say that people aren't responsible for their own actions. Quite the opposite. People who can rise above social pressures and be
better than the flock should be praised (we don't do this enough). The sociopaths should be locked up and psychologically, neurologically, and
genetically examined thoroughly to find out what makes them sociopaths, and everyone else will suffer the appropriate consequences of their actions.
Those that succumb to the criminal elements of society should be locked away to prevent the infection of their psychology to others in society, and
they should be psychologically treated so that they don't get released back into society with those same criminal tendencies or even worse
tendencies, as our prison system tends to produce.
As of right now, many of our prisons don't do any psychological treatment of any kind, and many inmates even become influenced by the more violent
inmates. And then we're surprised by the high recidivism rates of released felons.
Sorry about the tangent.