@FunCartel: So would Oxford Legal.
Criminal insanity is a different standard, enforced differently in different states.
Generally speaking: Is a person able to differentiate right from wrong at the time of their crime?
@Moxytocin Yes, I have recently watched all the posted episodes of The Patient on Hulu! It’s really good so far. (Oh and the other actor is Domhnall Gleeson, son of actor Brendan Gleeson.) 😎
@FunCartel Insane Clown Posse too.
Not sure if this has been said ~ But "insanity" vs "insane" aren't necessarily the same. And from my understanding, when it comes to the law, they are only truely interested in the time when the crime took place.
Serial killers tend to not be classified as insane because they have patterns of behavior that show known deviance in what they're doing (such as covering their tracks). If a defendant knew right from wrong, they don't qualify as insane per our legal system.
On a social level, is it crazy to go around killing people? Perhaps. But most people who do it as a fun hobby are able to fit into society fairly well. I mean consider how often neighbors are like, "I had no idea." or "They always seemed so nice." So also, perhaps not.
Instead of "Are they insane?" I think the question should be something else like, "Can they be rehabilitated and/or How can we tell if they are fit to be unsupervised in society?"
sorry if redundant to anyone else's ~ I'm late to the party
People are called insane when they do things out of the ordinary. Sanity is about thinking and acting like everyone else.
@dave31415: That definition makes autistic people insane. Also people with ADHD. Asexuals. Gay people. Heck, in my town, that makes people who don't like Trump insane.
Surely sanity and insanity relate to one's grasp of reality, not to one's relative normalcy.
That's why everyone thinks people on the other side of the political spectrum are insane. If I say I prayed to God and he told me to make some choice, most people would think that is normal. If I said, there is a tiger that lives in my closet and he tells me the same thing, people would think I was crazy.
Reality is a social construct
@dave31415: ...David Icke, is that you?
More seriously—If reality were a social construct, all we'd need to make Earth's moon vanish is a majority of people who believed it didn't exist.
Personally, I don't think people on the opposite side of the political spectrum to me are insane just because they back policies I never would. It's perfectly possible to have a solid grasp on reality, and yet choose differently from me.
People are different. Different ≠ insane.
@dave31415
Ah, another truth seeker. How many times have you seen The Matrix? I've seen it twelve times. Today.
@NotALizardman ~ 🤣🤣🤣
The Moon vanishing is not a social issue. Insanity has to do with how people interact with each other. If I say the moon is made of cheese, no one will care. They care when you do something considered harmful or inappropriate in human interactions. So conformity to social norms is what defines sanity. Someone can go around killing people if society has decided that they are a soldier and the situation is considered a war. If they do that when others don't believe these things then the person is considered a sociopath. The act is the same. The only difference is whether they are conforming to the beliefs of others. Jeffrey Dahmer was considered a sociopath because he killed and ate people. That is not considered appropriate in the United States. In certain communities of Papua New Guinea, even today, that might be considered normal. Certainly in the past, cannibalism was rather common. I hunt and eat animals. It's perfectly possible that someday, this will be as taboo as eating people. So a person hunting in that society would be considered insane. Again, only difference is whether you are conforming to the arbitrary moral code of the society you find yourself in.
@dave31415: The existence of the moon is a matter of reality. You said reality is a social construct. That would make the existence of the moon a social matter. Q.E.D.
That aside, you seem to be trying to change the legal definition of "insanity."
insanity n. mental illness of such a severe nature that a person cannot distinguish fantasy from reality, cannot conduct her/his affairs due to psychosis, or is subject to uncontrollable impulsive behavior. Insanity is distinguished from low intelligence or mental deficiency due to age or injury.
The beliefs of others are not part of the definition: the issue is reality and the individual's grasp on it, or ability to control their own actions within it.
Right from wrong in the extreme example of a serial killer , which is what the thread is about, is not a social construct. It is not an opinion of it being the wrong thing to do, it is fact in virtually all cultures . It isnt something that can be picked apart and argued for . So if insanity is based on whether they know right from wrong when they are doing it, then that cant really be considered a social construct.
“Cannot distinguish fantasy from reality”. So about 1/3 of the US thinks Trump won the election and the Dems conspired to alter the results . Are they insane? According to this definition they are. Almost the entire population of Europe in medieval times believed that witches existed and could be discovered by dunking them in water. Most primitive societies believed that sacrificing humans would please the gods and alter the weather and harvest. In other times and places, all of these things would be classified as “not being able to distinguish fantasy from reality”. At every age in history we can identify what we now believe to be mass delusions. And so it’s a near certainty that in the future many of the things that are now believed to be true by most people will also be viewed as fantasy.
And so this definition of insanity would argue that everyone is insane or at least would be viewed as insane by some other people. Thus, insanity can only be indicated by conformity.
Even the existence of the moon could be called into question. Everything you observe is filtered through your organs of perception and interpreted by your brain. For all we know, in the future, they will look back and laugh about how we believed that reality constructed in our brains somehow had direct correspondence to some external world independent of our consciousness.
They will say, “How could people be so deluded into thinking that?” And perhaps somewhere today there is someone in an insane asylum mumbling about how Platonism is a delusion and there is nothing but our minds and everyone simply ignores them.
Insanity is just conformity of thinking.
Dude! 🙄
@pmvines Really? So Vikings thought that cutting someone’s back open and pulling their lungs out to make them look like a bird was just jolly good fun. A Roman aristocrat entertained his guests by throwing a slave into a pool filled with lampreys and watching them be devoured. The Comanche would torture prisoners for days and let their kids take part. All are examples of what our current culture believes to be abhorrent, sociopathic behavior yet these cultures thought they were acceptable. The only way to believe that there is some objective standard of human morality is to ignore all of history and a large part of current human culture, which is to say that you define it by conformity to current social norms which is my point.
As you can see, it’s a pretty unassailable argument. Just about any example you can give about something being “obviously insane”, I can find some culture at some time where that activity would have been considered normal or acceptable. So that forces you to conclude either that entire cultures can be insane or that insanity can only be defined relative to a culture.
Okay. Yep. Sure. Sure. Let's go with all that. Can we now go back to what the premise of the thread was?? Cause that'd be pretty neato...👍
It’s completely relevant to the topic because the answer would then be that it’s completely arbitrary what we call him. What matters is what we do with him. What’s does it matter whether we call him insane versus just a very evil guy? Either way, we aren’t going to let him near society anymore. (Of course he is dead now).
Yep.
@dave31415: I guess it's difficult for some people to extrapolate from basic principles.
A specific example, then.
If a man thinks he's wearing an army uniform and fighting alongside other people wearing the same uniform to kill people wearing a different uniform, but in reality is stalking and killing college students—he's insane.
If a man thinks he's stalking and killing college students, and in reality he actually is stalking and killing college students, he's sane.
Some serial killers are legally sane. The insane ones get their mental illness treated. The sane ones have no disconnection from reality to treat. Whether a killer is sane or insane affects how they're handled once caught.
@dave31415 Interesting points, but not really relevant to the OP's question of "Are Serial Killers legally Insane?". Legal insanity is different from what you're describing.
Legal insanity is the criminal's inability to understand that the crimes he committed were wrong or illegal. Most intelligent, rational adults are capable of understanding that murder is wrong, even if they choose to do it (lampreys and Comanche notwithstanding). The guy who truly doesn't understand why it was wrong for him to murder someone falls into 'legal insanity' territory.
I've never heard of the Roman lamprey thing ... ugh, what a horrible way to die.
Evil yes but insanity can be really difficult to define.The obvious is a total loss of reality and then varying degrees of what reality is.
@DaringSprinter Right, so what you are doing these is saying that if a jury of his peers believes that his beliefs are in fact a delusion then they can declare him to be insane. That’s perfectly in line with what I’m saying. Our culture will almost always call that person insane. And, as I have said, you can always find an example of cultures who wouldn’t. For example Vikings and Celts both believed that when they fought in battles they were aided by spirits.
And then your discussion of insanity and medical treatment. This is also obviously specific to modern culture. That is, we can identify some factors which cause or correlate with violence and in some cases even provide medical treatment to cure them. But if we use that as a definition of insanity, we are defining it based on our knowledge of medicine and how the brain works. So again, comes back to what the culture believes. This includes their understanding on the concept of free (and let’s not go into that). You could say that we can separate violent people into two groups based on whether we think we can change their behavior (say through medicine, surgery, therapy etc). That’s a useful distinction but not a good distinction to use to define insanity and it’s obviously a statement about the knowledge and beliefs of the culture bringing us back to conformity of beliefs.
@dave31415 I agree with most of what you've said. However, I think your critique is more applicable to people who say, of course, Jeffrey Dahmer is crazy, because he killed people and ate them, than to people who say he isn't crazy, because he wasn't delusional and was aware of modern standards of right and wrong.
To me there is a qualitative, PHYSIOLOGICAL, difference between someone who adheres to the wacky norms of their time or tribe, and someone who has absolutely no idea what they're doing when they're doing it. l realize that one society's delusional mental case is another society's shaman, but that doesn't erase the physiological difference that separates these two from most other people in their societies. And as I'm not a relativist about science, I think the society that calls such a person a shaman is getting it wrong.
With respect to serial killers, the question of sanity matters, so long as there are two different state options for what to do with them.
I appreciate @dave31415 contribution and I'm glad @DaringSprinter took it up. The thread had already reached the point where people were showing up, not reading what had already been posted, and offering some variation on what others had already said several times. While I think it's entirely relevant to the OP's original query, I truly don't gaf. This is conversation, not debate club. It's intelligent and interesting and that's enough for me.
@Jubal “Legal insanity is the criminal's inability to understand that the crimes he committed were wrong or illegal.”
Replace “understand” with “agree with most of society”. That’s all one can do practically. There is not external oracle that we can rely on to tell us what is right and wrong. It’s what most of the people in our culture decide on. So conformity.
“ Most intelligent, rational adults are capable of understanding that murder is wrong, even if they choose to do it”.
Again replace “understand”, same as above. Obviously any functioning society must have some agreement that some murders are not acceptable. But different societies believe different things.
In the Bible, Abraham is about to sacrifice his son to please God, which apparently was an admirable thing to do in that culture. This was because he heard God’s voice tell him to do it. Then he stopped because he saw an angel which told him God had changed his mind. This kind of things still happens and we call these people schizophrenics. In those days, there were called holy men and so greatly revered that they founded religions. About half Americans still follow that religion.
Currently, there is an active debate in our country whether abortion is murder or just a form of birth control; to give an example of how a culture cannot always decide on what murders are acceptable. Same with capital punishment and apparently self-defense.
Serial killers have a range of different origins. Some are paranoid schizophrenics or suffer from other severe psychotic disorders and literally do not understand the concepts of morality or right and wrong. Others are sociopaths who lack empathy and see other people as objects, or extreme narcissists who regard others as having little to no importance compared to them; or solipsists who cannot perceive other people as "real" in the same way they are. Still others are the product of horrific upbringings, subjected to extreme violence or emotional abuse, sexual depravity, or other nightmarish origins. A surprising number of killers suffered severe head trauma at some point in their lives. Many fit multiple categories. And a few are inexplicable: defying any rational explanation to their actions, almost as if they had simply been born evil.