I read this story on the front page of today's Metro and wondered if anyone else had seen it. The Story Further Details I actually had to fight from being physically sick. I wondered what everyone else thought of this, and if, in cases such as these, special punishment should be inflicted (what, if yes?).
I get an increasing feeling that there are more and more people growing up in this country for whom a sense of right and wrong is a purely abstract concept. I can't believe that they aren't aware that it exists, but they don't think that it applies to them. It frightens me, because I no longer feel like this kind of horror story is an isolated incident, but rather a symptom (albeit an extreme one) of a fundamental problem.
Not in all cases of kids gone wild but proberly the majority Do you then blame their grandparents as well? I think it's a lot more complicated than that, the society you grow up in can have a huge influence on how you turn out.
True. When you've got kids that age who can't possibly have any concept of right or wrong, who do you blame? The schooling starts at home, it's a parent's duty to impart basic morality on their children. If they don't, they end up being bought up by TV and the media, which is not a good thing. I'd love to say that "in my day this didn't happen" blah etc., but the unfortunate truth is that it did. I remember going to the chippy at lunch time 15 years ago and seeing a bunch of kids from my school kick the crap out of this old guy waiting outside the butchers for absolutely no reason other than for jokes. The difference now is that they film it on their mobiles and whack it on the Internet.
I wonder if part of the problem is that intelligence is no longer an adaptive trait. Since intelligent men and women tend to spend their earlier years concentrating on their career or education and on finding an optimum partner for breeding, as well as on only breeding within their financial means, they produce fewer children in their lifespan and don't pass on their genes to a large generation of offspring. In contrast, scumbags breed like wildfire because they lack the intelligence to use contraception and the common sense to think of the consequences of their sexual encounters. They also breed earlier, giving a longer lifespan of breeding productivity, and do not tend to breed within their personal financial means. Hence, large number of offspring, genetic and memetic success! So... lacking in intelligence and "abstract thought" is an advantage from a Darwinian perspective and, for the moment, we can expect to see it increase until there's a plateau where the need for problem solving and group co-operation starts to give a survival advantage to the more intelligent offspriing again. By that point we'll be living in caves and fighting with clubs again though...
Moosey, having a sense of right and wrong has got nothing to do with intelligence! Plenty of people who are as thick as you-know-what are perfectly kind, decent and well-behaved individuals. And some right evil so-and-so's are highly intelligent.
Of course, we can't attribute things like this to society alone, or parenting alone. I grew up in an area where things like I mentioned in my above post happened alot, the "society" around here can be pretty messed up. Guess what stopped me from getting into serious trouble when I was younger? The fact that my Mum and/or Dad would be disappointed in me. That and the fact I'd get a sound beating.
You're right, but I was thinking in terms of behavioural as well as genetic evolution. Having a clear sense of right and wrong (or a willingness to use it) doesn't seem to confer a breeeding advantage in the current climate. It's just like in The Selfish Gene - societies are constantly in flux because certain behaviours confer advantages only in certain circumstances. So, while criminality may be an evolutionary dead-end in societies where criminality is either punished with execution or is the norm, criminality and successful breeding are not exclusive in our society. So people get to pass on their ideas of morality to their offspring. Plus criminality is tied in with intelligence and socio-economic status, so poor people with low IQs are more likely to be criminals and to breed more.
Yup. Truer words were never spoken. That being said, perhaps that's better than not breeding at all. We are all descended from various primitive societies who didn't know when to stop breeding, either. -Mark
So am I, Yohan. Now, I'm an intelligent person who believes in second chances and such... but I think torturers are a special case. There's nothing I hate more. For once, I'm considering the death penalty to be deserving in this case.
It's not so much the torturing as the fact that they have 40 convictions between them already. No more rehab for those little pukes. Lock em up.
One of these kids acualy lived on the same road as my Grandparents. (A fine example of council planning. Retirement bungalows at one end of the road and the town's handful of Jeremy Kyle families at the other end- which is great for all the pensioners ) Anyway, although he was 'always in trouble', he struck up a friendship with my Grandfather and used to run errands & do odd jobs for him. The boy's parents just let him run wild and had no time for him as they spent their time drinking & smoking. Eventualy, he got more into drugs & my Grandfather died so he had no adult input in his life whatsoever. I suppose, it's just another example of the effects of bad parenting and drug abuse.
There are lots of people (like these) who I would quite happily see executed in a frankly quite brutal and painful manner. But the problem with the death penalty is that you can't always be 100% sure that the person you are sentancing really is guilty of what they've been charged with. Far too many innocent people have been convicted in this country of serious crimes for which they have subsequently been aquitted - and before the abolition of capital punishment, that aquittal was often a posthumous one.
