You’re sitting under pale, fluorescent lights in a cinder-brick room. Sitting across from you is an old, gaunt Charles Manson. Those little rat eyes dancing around, they finally settle on you, and you begin to read off the question on the pad in front of you.
“Mr. Manson, did you feel that having those people killed was wrong?”
Manson: “What do you mean, Wrong? What does it mean to be wrong? Who’s wrong, what’s wrong? Everyone ask me if I think I did somethin wrong—but nobody tells me what it is. I’m not wrong. I’m just me.”
You: “Everyone knows what wrong is”.
Manson: “I don’t know what wrong is. It’s a ghost. It’s fake. I’m not delusional—you’re delusional. There ain’t no thing called wrong.”
How do you respond?
Could you show him what wrong is? If so, what is it?
If you can’t locate moral qua moral—and not as moral as instinct or as social construction or a feeling—which are pragmatic, behavioral and psychological concerns, not moral considerations—then there seems to be no thing that is moral or immoral, qua moral or immoral, worth talking about because it is not accessible in any meaningful way. Moral is inaccessible to inquiry and immoral seems to fade away into a mistake of action. If this is the case, then should we through moral language and metaphysics to the scrap heap, pluck what we can and simply talk about these things as What-Was-Once Considered-To-Be-Moral or Immoral ? If we do toss out moral as a metaphysical entity, then that means that someone like Manson is not evil, but he is simply broken and dangerous—less like the devil and more like an evolutionary throwback who couldn’t control his instinct and had no reason to.
Besides the consequences to Manson himself, what reason did Manson have to not kill if he wasn’t born with or didn’t develop with empathy?
What could you have told him to keep him from committing those atrocities, before he started their motion, and didn’t have to do with social rejection or empathy?
What could bind the hands and strong, vile instincts of a man with no empathy and no need for social approval or concern for disapproval?
Can Moral or Immoral be reduced to regions of the brain, learning and neurotransmitters?