I was talking to Ann. Clearly, I feel great animosity toward you.

As for “baseless assumptions,” I have built a 23+-year career on the field of behavioral psychology, working as an organizational behavior consultant. I have done a great deal of intensive study on the effect of cognitions on behavior, and have conducted research in the real-world laboratories of some of the world’s largest organizations. I think I can more than adequately back up anything I have said about human behavior.

I doubt you can.

I wasn’t trying to keep the thread about one thing or another, or police it in any way. I was simply trying to point out the context of what I said so that the meaning wouldn’t be obscured, and it seems to me that your quote of my words, and your comments on them, obscured my meaning.

That’s all.

Animus? Didn’t notice any.

I’m sure you recall the original topic correctly; I’m sure you’re also aware that discussions evolve as they progress… and since no one here appears to be deranged, furiously irrational or making personal attacks (yet), perhaps you could let the other participants in this conversation decide their direction for themselves.

I don’t disagree, and please take a moment and reread what I said about the difference between right and wrong and lawful and unlawful.

To the best of my recollection, this thread isn’t about being prosecuted, but about erecting crosses or not erecting crosses. I would maintain that the issue of erecting crosses is not the same as finding guilt or innocence in a court of law, but your mileage may vary. Had Harris lived, he certainly would have been successfully prosecuted for his crimes because he was able to tell the difference between lawful and unlawful. I am not making a legal argument, but a rational one about crosses.

True philosophically, but not judicially. “Psychopaths” are prosecuted successfully every day because they meet the legal standard of sanity. Their understanding of morality is not the issue; their awareness of societal standards is.

Good, because that’s not an applicable concept anywhere in American law… and even the real forms of the inaccurately labeled “insanity defense” are far more rare than television would have you believe. The corollary, of course, is that if everyone diagnosed with a mental illness, including myself, were determined to be incapable of understanding consequences and making rational decisions, they would not be able to marry, buy a car, enter into contracts of any kind.

Mental illness is far more often a mitigating factor than a defense strategy, and even extremely disturbed people can be prosecuted as long as they meet the judicial criteria – which have nothing to do with clinical diagnoses.

That is not what I said. Clearly, you are one of those people who likes to “win” arguments by erecting straw men for your own purposes. I will respond this once, but will not respond to further rhetorically dishonest discourse. If you wish to have an honest discussion, on the other hand, I’m your huckleberry.

Emotions are the precursors to most behavior. Generally, human beings act upon what they feel to be the right or necessary action at a given moment. Those whose emotions work on different criteria from most of the rest of us will act differently from the rest of us.

The concept of “right” and “wrong” are ones that have no meaning other than the emotional responses the terms evoke (yes, symbols — and words are symbols — become directly tied to our emotions as in the term, “knee-jerk liberal” or “knee-jerk reactionary,” as research into semantics has shown). There is certainly “lawful” and “unlawful,” but those are not proxies for “right” and “wrong,” unless you believe the Jewish laws of Nazi Germany, or the Jim Crow laws of the US, were “right” because they were lawful.

Those who cannot attach emotions to the concepts of right and wrong cannot be said to know what right and wrong are. They can know the words and that those words have meaning for other people. They can know lawful and unlawful. They can know “sanctioned by society” and “not sanctioned by society.” But they cannot understand the concept of right and wrong in any meaningful, emotional way that has any effect, whatsoever, on their behavior.

Because of this, there can be no purely intellectual understanding of right and wrong, since the terms are absolutely entwined with an emotional response to the words. “I just didn’t feel it was right” is a very different statement from, “It was against the law.” One demands emotion. The other does not.

In addition, there is no calibration of right and wrong, even if, by some strange, miraculous quirk, a psychopath were to accept the terms as being meaningful. The concepts we think of as being right and wrong are almost always tied to societal norms and the way those norms bolster or erode those societies. So, to a white Southern American in 1960, the concept of “right” usually included segregation and limited economic and voting opportunities for non-whites. Integration, good jobs, and enfranchisement for Southern African Americans would have eroded the structure of Southern society as these whites saw it. Therefore, they felt AA rebellion was “wrong.”

Others felt differently, but it was always a feeling and still is. Without benchmarks, right and wrong are slippery and nebulous concepts tied only to the human emotional responses that cause some of us to adhere to them, whatever we think they may be.

Harris was unable to understand right and wrong on the level at which they must be understood to have an effect on behavior. He was mentally ill.

As JS notes, that answer shades one way with Harris and the other with Klebold, and in any case we’re probably not talking about a perfect either/or. Instead, we’re talking about where each lies on a continuum.

We’ll have to agree to disagree on this one. There can be no intellectual understanding of right and wrong, only intellectual understanding of lawful and unlawful. Right and wrong are felt issues, and cannot be subject to the intellect.

But I see Mike’s point. We don’t put up an extra monument at Auschwitz to recognize the Nazi victims, there.

Since these were kids, though, I make them victims, while understanding entirely those who don’t agree.