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Comment by fein | Hacker News Reader

> because most gun violence is not committed by people with mental health problems. Rather, it is committed by people who feel they are morally right in committing that act.

Is there a reason that delusions of morality don't count as a mental health issue? I don't see these things being mutually exclusive.

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Let's say you grow up in a poor community where murders happen often but are not often solved. You don't trust the police to serve justice to those who have wronged you. You notice that many of your neighbors solve their problems themselves - by fighting, threatening, killing. People often heckle you because you try to not fight back when people pick on you - there's a culture of toughness and honor all around you.

Now someone wrongs you - let's say they hurt your significant other. Are you mentally ill for wanting to serve what you think is justice?

Doesn't that classify as self-defense?

IIUC self-defense does not extend to the defense of others, and it applies only when there's an imminent threat to your person. If somebody hurts you and then next week you go over to their house and shoot them dead, it's 1st-degree premeditated murder.

Beyond the legal issues, you can get into all sorts of moral issues once you consider uncertainty, culture, and history. Say your sister is in an abusive relationship, and has been beaten severely enough on multiple occasions that you fear for her life. She refuses to go to the police, as many domestic violence victims do. Are you justified in going over to their house and shooting her husband dead? What if you happen to be visiting, but arrive to find him with her hands on her throat, choking her to death? Both scenarios are highly illegal and will get you charged with murder, but morally, many people would have a lot of sympathy for someone in that situation.

Defense-of-others, strictly speaking, is not the same as self-defense, but they're discussed in the same breath and generally legislated together, and usable in the same circumstances. Thus references to one are generally read as encompassing both.

You would indeed be justified in shooting the husband if you stumbled upon him choking her to death (in most jurisdictions), but not if you just expected it to happen eventually.

I think the word you're looking for is "vendetta", or "revenge", and generally isn't considered a valid legal defense for violence.

If I find out that someone punched my kid, I'm not allowed to drive to their house with a baseball bat and hit them with it. If I happen to be carrying a bat, and someone starts punching me, I'm _probably_ allowed to use it for defense ... but I am not a lawyer and there are many nuances there as well. :)

Indeed, it does not count as self-defense. It counts as retaliation, and it is justified in some societies (e.g. honour killing).

> Is there a reason that delusions of morality don't count as a mental health issue?

Yes. It's a dangerous line to cross. For example, in some communist countries, people who were dissidents were considered to be mentally ill (and put into institutions), because who in their right mind would oppose communism? One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest pretty much deals with a similar dilemma.

> Is there a reason that delusions of morality don't count as a mental health issue?

It's a bit dangerous if you start defining deviations from group norms; which is what delusions of morality would look like from within a group; as mental health issues without some moderating factor. Under those conditions the person who expresses, 'Maybe we shouldn't kill her just because she left the faith,' is mentally ill within an appropriate honour killing culture.

It makes deviation more difficult, and thus retards social progress, if you're prepared to bring the violence of the mental health system into those sorts of issues. Very close to instituting thought crimes.

I've been trying to come up with a response to this and keep ending up in a rabbit hole of thought.

Ultimately what I feel is that we can step away from the micro image of religious and cultural influences, and actually look at what is right for all of humanity. We have a pretty decent system for that in what the world considers "basic human rights"

I would argue that an honor killing culture is by definition mentally ill. Of course I may be a fairly shit point of view for this, because I ultimately believe that all religion is a form of mental illness. It's not a popular opinion, but I maintain it.

Have you looked closely at the core of Zen?

The problem is that you do not occupy a privileged ontological position. You may seem mentally ill to someone in the future, who has a different set of morals. There are plenty of other people in the history of the world who have thought that what they were doing was the best for humanity, or at least the part of humanity they cared about. If you really believed that disbelieving in God got you sent to a place of eternal suffering - and even worse, if you believed that disbelief could be caught from heretics - then you would be acting in a perfectly virtuous way in trying to stamp out that sort of heresy with violence. If you really believe that drugs ruin lives, if you think the world functions in that way, then you are acting in a perfectly virtuous way in operating the war on drugs.

Of course we can note a lack of evidence, or even contrary evidence, in both of those cases. That's not the point, the point is that that's just how reality looks to people in those positions and you have no reason to presuppose that you are not sharing similar errors in whatever you would decide on as "right for all of humanity." You will even find disagreement over what people believe constitute "basic human rights" you will find places, and times in history, where your right to life would have been – and still is in some places – a laughable concept. And even today you find certain rights that seem to contradict other rights, I'm reminded of the fact that you have a right to an education in Germany but that this right has been interpreted as a mandate. Which rather seems in conflict with my right to pursue happiness, my right to be free from imprisonment, and so on. (Granted, people generally don't treat children as having many rights - but since we're talking right for all humanity.) Similarly there are great number of rights that you would think people have but that for various reasons they do not – or at least have no functional way of asserting. My right to control my reproductive system for instance - I've found it almost impossible to get my tubes tied on the NHS because doctors continually tell me that I'm too young to make those sorts of decisions about family. (Or, in one rather vexing case, outright asked what was wrong with me.) Despite being a woman in my twenties who reacts extremely poorly to birth control (i.e. it makes me a crazy bitch). They interpret a right to a family in a strongly positive sense - they've decided that's right for all humanity.

The sort of power you're talking about would ultimately be wielded by politicians, by psychologists, by the same sort of doctors who make decisions about what people can do with their lives and their health who have made terrible decisions in the past and continue to make terrible decisions today. Do you trust those people? The same sorts of people who decided that being gay was a mental health problem? Even if we accepted that you could get together a small group of people who honestly did not desire to be tyrants, even if we accepted that you would only define those things that seem to us on the basis of our current morality as the most egregious examples of violations as mental health problems, there is no one worthy of giving that sort of trust to. That's probably how the situation looks to everyone who ends up as a tyrant.

They have misused that power in the past, they continue to miss use it today, and you have no reason to suppose that they will not miss use it in the future.

>delusions of morality

Can such a notion exist with relative morality?

What we could say is that their morals deviate to far from the social norm, but are we willing to be so self aware?

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