…in other words, the only “failing” is the steadfast belief in your own moral goodness, and the idea that it renders you incapable of doing anything truly “bad.” Or that something else about your own nature, besides intrinsic goodness, makes you incapable of certain things. We’ve been in several groups, including but not limited to the autistic community, in which various people insisted they were constitutionally incapable of prejudice, bullying others, attempting to assert dominance over others, deliberately taking pleasure in others’ pain, etc. And almost predictably, those who were the loudest about asserting it were often those who displayed those traits most obviously, though they’d deny it could actually be the same thing.

here is her link. is there anything that can be done about such a thing? i am hoping someone here can help her.

http://motherofshrek.blogspot.com/

It seems a most illogical statement. There are many things which I don’t understand but still need. There have been many good comments here to digest. I need to think on this one some more. I guess my gut reaction is to say that everyone’s rights should be protected whether they understand them or not. This statement seems to give an allowance for abuse of one sort or another.

Your comment makes me think of a book I recently heard about (though I have not yet had the chance to read it). It’s called “The Lucifer Effect” by Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo, the man who ran the Stanford prison experiment in which ordinary college boys were randomly assigned to be either “prison guards” or “prisoners” and then put into a mocked-up prison to act out their roles. The experiment was supposed to continue for two weeks but had to be shut down after six days because the “guards” became so involved in their roles that they quickly indulged in some of the kinds of abuses we heard about decades later at Abu Gahrib. And the “prisoners” were starting to break down because of it.

From the little bit I know of his book, Zimbardo apparently likes to talk of what he calls the “bad barrel” effect. His point is, there aren’t simply “a few bad apples in the barrel.” Instead, there are certain “bad barrels” — in other words, corrupt systems — that are so bad that you can put “good apples” into these barrels and the good apples will go bad. He argues (or at least so I understand–as I said, I haven’t actually read the book yet) that this happens because even good people, ALL of us, have within us the capacity to do evil things.

I haven’t bought the book yet because I don’t have time for it right now (I’m about to start a new class next week, in addition to my full time job). But I did find it in a book store and took a glance at the chapter headings. A lot of his book explores the Stanford Prison experiment in depth. I know there is more information about this experiment on the web — Amanda has linked to it at least once from one of her blog posts, probably one of the posts on abuses in institutions. I don’t remember where now. The book explores more what the experiment implies about the capacity all good people have for doing evil things when put into a “bad barrel,” so to speak, and the implications this has for prisons (and also psychiatric institutions, though unfortunately he doesn’t seem to really explore that angle too much. Which I can’t help but feel is a badly missed opportunity.)

Zimbardo also talks some about other experiments (I think also run by him) that explore people’s reaction to authority when authority pressures them to do things they know is ethically wrong. And maybe some other relevant experiments that I don’t remember now.

The next part is kind of a digression from where I started (i.e., responding to R.N.^Amorpha on corrupt systems corrupting), but: I looked at the book in part because the review I saw about it says it talks about how people can sort of mentally train themselves to be “heros,” with mental “exercises” to make themselves more resistant to the kinds of pressures that might otherwise make them give in when they find themselves in a “bad barrel” and more likely to stand up for what’s right. The book does have one chapter on this topic (the very last one). And, I don’t know, I suppose possibly there is more on this topic throughout the book that I didn’t spot in my cursory glance throughout it. But I was kind of disappointed because I felt like I already know that good people can do bad things, a corrupt system can corrupt even “good” people, yada yada (Amanda’s blog here, of course, has helped me crystalize some of my thinking on these topics, though I already knew a good part of it before I discovered her). And I also felt I already had a handle on some of the basics (at least in the abstract; not sure how well I do yet in the application) of how to prepare yourself to stand up for what’s right. So I was hoping to see a book that would explore these things in further depth so I could develop more confidence in my ability to do this if and when needed. A single chapter doesn’t seem quite enough in my opinion: at best you can maybe lay down the foundations.

I guess Zimbardo wrote his book the way he did because, unfortunately, MOST people are still stuck on the idea of, “But I’m a good person! I would NEVER do anything bad! Because I’m a good person!” and may NEED pretty much an entire book to break down this idea before they can begin to accept the idea that they actually do need to guard themselves against doing bad things–that simply being “a good person” just isn’t guard enough. But I hope someday he (or someone else) will write a companion book that will focus primarily on the pragmatic “How NOT To Be Corrupted By The Bad Barrel” side of things. I think it could be a useful resource for social workers, doctors, counselors, etc. — anyone who might find themselves thrust into a position of power, whether or not they see themselves as the “kind of person” who has power or who yields it, wisely or otherwise.

I think it’s a combination of that, and what you said further down about power corrupting. We certainly have seen people who got into teaching, even to “normal” children, who seemed to despise children in every way. Additionally, some people seem to be attracted to the “free halo” that comes with working with certain people who are generally considered undesirable and that nobody in their right mind would voluntarily spend time with– and there’s a particular prestige attached to working with “special needs children.” We’ve seen people who failed to treat others with any kind of decency and courtesy pull out the trump card of “but I work with special needs children!” as if that alone proved their essential virtue as people. It certainly makes it easy for people to pull the wool over their own eyes and convince themselves that they do it out of essential altruism, if society constantly reinforces this perception.

But corruption through power, I think, also waylays people who come into the system with the best of intentions. A corrupt system will ruin even those with good intentions. Just as with animals, people tend to dismiss certain things as minor– they only hit them *once* or locked them in a closet *once* or deprived them of food *once*, and they can’t talk anyway so no one will know, and they probably don’t have the mental capacity to remember it anyway, do they? When people end up in positions of power, there’s also a tendency to interpret any “defiance” or “noncompliance” from the one they have power over as a personal insult, and the person who does it as essentially “bad” in some way.

1) the person really DOESN’T understand those two rights, or has no way of communicating a preference between the two rights, or for some other reason is not in a good position to make a judgment between those two rights (an example would be someone who is acutely suicidal, who (arguably) may be so overwhelmed by emotion that they are not able to make a “rational” choice that their safety is important.) These cases, I think, are a huge source of controversy and I, for one, have no clear-cut answer as to what to do there.

2)the judgment between rights has to be applied to a whole category of people, not just individually. So again with privacy vs. safety, an example would be US policy on measures to prevent crime that might infringe on civil liberties.

3)Each right belongs to a different person, so you have to choose between one person’s safety and another person’s privacy. An example here could be taking measures against someone who has a certain likelihood of harming others, but who hasn’t committed any out-and-out crimes.