Ok so if you now agree that unhealthy attitudes are cultivated by society then how are these unhealthy attitudes cultivated.
We are taught; by our parents, by our social circle, by the culture in which we are raised, and so on. We are taught attitudes to violence, to power and control, and so on. We see what our society accepts, and what it rewards, and what it punishes. Just in the same way as we learn all sorts of other attitudes.
Are there certain situations where they are cultivated more than others.
Cultures which reward violence. Cultures which promote hierarchy, control and submission, and which punish the challenging of such structures. And so on.
But you cannot then assume that everyone with priviledge is an abuser.
Nor did I suggest that.
So therefore you cannot know whats in a persons mind as to whether they are the abusive type like my friend. Your also asuming he is priviledged.
Not at all. I'm simply rejecting the idea that poverty and oppression are more likely to be the conditions in which people form the attitudes which underpin abuse.
Or are you saying 'priviledge' is a risk factor.
I am saying privilege may be one aspect of what forms an attitude of being entitled to abuse those around us.
But now your making an arguement for using the risk factors for abuse by saying we can look at people and groups and determine that certain behaviour is consistent with abusers.
Abusive behaviour is what makes someone an abuser.
If we cannot determine why the solder is fighting then we have nothing to say about whether their behaviour is rational or justified or not because we don't know what the circumstances are.
Again, it's all about the values we impose on the behaviour.
Did not Joshua kill many when he attacked the Canaanite cities like Jericho. Didn't God tell him to kill just like governments tell soldiers to kill.
So what? Again, in order for that to mean anything, you'd need to place a value judgement on his aims.
If we take that away then we can never say that child abuse is ever wrong.
Exactly. Because "wrong" is a value judgement.
So if we can say that certain treatment of a child is abuse or not why can't we say that certain killing is murder or not.
You can. Just recognise that in doing that, you're making a value judgement.
Its just that we can more confidently claim that anyone who claims the more obvious abuses like breaking limbs or burning a child are rational and ok is deluded because there is no way for them to rationalise their justification.
Again, steve, "rational" is not the same as "ok." I can say that someone does something completely rational and it is still abhorrently wrong.
I don't, and we can say it.
Would you, then? Would you unequivocally state that any corporal punishment that leaves marks is unambiguously abuse? Just for the record. It'd be very reassuring.
But you were using these examples to claim that people justify that harm as being rational and ok because its less obvious because we recently believed that it was ok.
No.
You were making claims about people recently believing it was okay. My argument all along has been that it is quite possible to be abusive without being irrational, emotionally overwhelmed, cognitively impaired, or the like. That's the whole point of this strand of the argument. Abusers are not dispossessed of the faculty of reason.
And thats really where your logic falls down because I can say yes we can apply it too the grey areas with a bit of work but you cannot say we can apply your logic to the obvious examples because it starts to break down. Its harder to argue that obvious abuses are rational thinking and for the purpose of making my point thats all I have to do is show examples where your logic doesn't apply.
If you want to explore whether those abusers are behaving rationally you'd have to explore the reasons they give for their behaviour. And they often offer quite reasoned justifications.
But when we use obvious ones theres no way anyone can make any rational for it.
And yet they do...
Like the fallacy that my arguement has to apply to the harder to determine examples.
If the explanation you offer for abuse, doesn't actually explain abuse, it's fairly weak, isn't it?
But then this all started by me saying exactly that and you were disputing this saying we can't tell and the abusers think its rational.
What I was pushing back against was the claim that abusers were irrational, their reasoning impaired, emotionally overwhelmed, and so on. Many are not. They are making deliberate choices which are consistent with a logically coherent ideology.
The same science tells them that their cultural beliefs are a load of rubbish so they tend to switch off when it comes to westernised ideas and truth claims. They are more fundemental in their beliefs and thinking.
And here we come to some of the difficulty we have in challenging entrenched beliefs and attitudes; no less difficult within our own society. (Not that I actually believe that science says that anyone's "cultural beliefs are a load of rubbish," but I'm willing to concede that some people may perceive it that way).
Do you think the evdience and science will change a Christians belief in a supernatural God.
I think it might mean that the
way a Christian understands a supernatural God changes. That's certainly been my experience.
If you remember I was talking about the facts about whether the abusers beliefs and thinking were coherent with the facts and not the morality. Or not just the morality. That someone who thought breaking kids limbs was rational and good for a childs wellbeing. So we are using the facts and not morality just as we would say to prove abuse causes trauma.
No, you are using morality. The abuser who breaks a limb will argue about the necessity of discipline, of obedience, of the child needing to learn to obey authority, and so on. They'll (for example) say the short term injury of a broken bone is insignificant compared to the long term benefit of the lessons learned and the character formed. It's the same arguments used for, say, the cane; only the type of injury is different. That's a moral argument, not a factual one.
So to apply this to your scenario it would be the case that the women thought it was rational to murder others to get what she wants. But we can show through the facts and science that this is not rational as it would create chaos and fear and distrust and trauman for many people.
It is rational, in the sense that she has applied the faculty of reason in order to make decisions about her actions. It's not impulsive, emotionally driven, arising from cognitive impairment, or the like.
You might make an argument that the long term outcome will, in fact, be undesirable, but that doesn't change that it was a course of action arrived at rationally, by a process of careful reasoning.
Its not meant to be an explanation for what causes abuse.
Then what on earth is the point of making it so central to a discussion of abuse prevention? Preventing abuse is about removing the cause, is it not?
Its meant to help identify when abuse is more likely to happen so we can prevent it.
You can't prevent it, if you don't actually deal with what's causing it.
Like I said there is no single factor or specific combinations of factors that cause abuse.
Yes, there is. There is one common factor. The beliefs and attitudes held by those who abuse.
Thats usually stems from experience, negative experience where people become angry, resentful, and violent at what they percieve is unfair, a threat or injustice even if they are mistaken.
No, it doesn't. It comes from a culture which normalises, justifies, glorifies violence and control.
