I have been reading about the dreadful shootings in an elementary school that has resulted in so many deaths.
I really don’t know what to say that will not be said by many other people. But I wonder about what goes on in the dark recesses of someone’s mind that can cause them to prepare so carefully and methodically to kill so many little children.
Perhaps an MRA victimized by the evil matriarchal complex that elevates women and children above all the poor menz!
there can’t be any rational, sensible explanation for such an act, almost by definition of rationality. it hurts me to say it, but the crime itself is just about all the evidence that should be needed for an insanity defense — nobody sane would even begin such a thing.
which is not to say that the perpetrator (if still alive) should ever be allowed to walk free and unsupervised again, but still.
I disagree that the act itself suffices as evidence for an insanity defense. A person can be free of any aspect psychosis, and completely understand the consequences of their actions and that what they are doing is wrong, and still choose to do it anyway.
I would appear that his mother, who was the teacher of the kindergarten class and who was killed in the assault, was his target.
I would agree, gridironmonger. The Unibomber seems to me to fit the definition of “sane but evil.”
The Unibomber seems to me to fit the definition of “sane but evil.”
How sane? His methods were clearly unsound and it would be obvious to anyone in their right mind that, even if he destroyed his targets, he was not going to roll back technological civilization. Yet, he attempted that path -- which argues to me that he was insane, not evil.
I’d go farther and say that for something to be evil, it has to be plausible enough to attract adherents and lure them into knowingly doing wrong. The quintessential example, of course, would be the nazis, who treated genocide as a practical and realistic response to a socio-political problem. Unabom was neither practical nor realistic.
I wonder if, as more information comes out about this character, that he will turn out to have a string of run-ins with mental problems. It seems that it usually takes a couple days for that kind of thing to surface, and when it does, there’s always lots of “if only we had known!” hand-wringing.
So was this an act of free will?
For my part, I meant no free will/determinism distinction in my comment. For my purposes it was not relevant. My use of “choose” would be inclusive of deterministic causation.