Adam Lanza diagnosed Aspergers, what happens with bad care

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Yeah. I had an early environment that was actually quite a lot like the one they describe for Adam Lanza. I was raised by a single mom with occasional "help" from less-than-kind stepfathers. I switched schools a lot, back and forth to home-schooling. I had very little counseling and no diagnosis until I got out on my own and away from my psychology-hating mom. Heck, my mom's even a paranoid conspiracy theorist. You'd think that would be the perfect storm for a mass shooting if the Lanza case were any indication, but I think I'm probably among the least likely to ever try anything like that. I don't even kill spiders, for heaven's sake. Life is sacred and if I were to get even more traumatized for some reason, I'd just get nightmares and start hiding in my apartment, get depressed, and probably cope by doing more volunteer work just so I'd feel halfway useful. Shooting up a school is about as natural to me as space travel is to a catfish.

Wow. It seems that I was incorrect.

Adam Lanza was never officially diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, his mother and brother merely speculated that he had Asperger syndrome.

People can change. Even someone like Adam Lanza could change. I agree that judging people as bad or good does not make much sense because a person is not a static entity; but judging their deeds as bad or good is definitely possible. It's necessary to have concepts of good and evil for you to judge your own actions properly.

We can't judge people as all good or all bad, but it doesn't follow that the ideas of "good" and "evil" must therefore be subjective. A specific choice in a specific context can be good, evil, or morally neutral, and has to be the same every time that specific situation comes up. (That it's mathematically impossible for the exact same situation to occur twice is true, but not particularly relevant. The important thing is that there is only one "right answer" for that specific situation.) Subjective good and evil do not make sense because if you could make two different judgments about the exact same situation, good and evil would not have any meaning. Either they are objective, defined by logical rules of ethics, or they do not exist at all.

What some people mean by "subjective" is actually not subjectivity at all but situation-dependence. For example, it might be good to give a child a peanut-butter sandwich if you know the child is hungry, but evil if you know the child is allergic to peanuts. If the child were allergic and you didn't know, the harm done would be an accident--your own mental state is part of the situation in question. This sort of situation-dependence is not subjective morality, but an acknowledgment that every decision is unique.

What I don't like is the idea that people who decide to hurt others somehow can't help it. A human being is the sum of all the information in his brain; when that brain makes a decision, the human being is making a decision. It's the human being who is the cause of his own behavior. The brain controls the body, and controls itself through innumerable feedback loops. To the extent that it is meaningful to say that we make decisions, it is also meaningful to say that we make good or evil decisions.

It would be better to say that how you make decisions is affected by who you are, and who you are is affected by your environment and your genetics. But as I've said before, humans are complex systems. There is no way to predict with anywhere near certainty what any particular person will decide just by knowing his genes and environment. There are too many factors to track, and the tiniest disturbances could completely change the outcome, even as huge changes make very little difference. Human behavior is truly unpredictable, because the smallest such disturbances occur on the quantum level--so it's not just a matter of having enough information about the person or enough scientific knowledge, but an actual physical impossibility to predict a human being.

You can say, "If this happens, then that will be more likely," and without that science would be impossible. But the more complex the thing you are studying, the less sense it makes to say, "If this happens, then that will happen with such high probability that we can assume certainty." If you're watching billiard balls, you can simplify by saying, "If I have the information about how this system starts, then I can calculate how it will behave in the future." If you're studying humans, the complexity is too high for that simplification to make sense; all you're left with is various levels of "maybe".