> Why are we the way we are? Is Kenneth Eng a schizophrenic whose illness finds expression through florid racism? Or is he a racist asshole who is also schizophrenic?
In psychology there's the assumption that mood disorders and antisocial delusions can be distinguished from non-pathological "being an asshole." I'm not nearly well enough informed about psychiatry to say how this is done clinically, or how quantitative these methods are. But cases like Eng show that as a society we barely even try to make the distinction, or that our ability to do so is profoundly lacking.
There's thousands of homeless people who are on the streets because they're incapable of getting along socially or holding a real job. And a substantial portion of humanity is prepared to leave it at that; they didn't do anything to earn money or companionship, and they don't have what they didn't earn, so all is well. But when you can quite clearly see that one of these people is where they are because of an illness that, in better conditions, would be treated and leave them a productive and happy member of society, that rings hollow. The fact of the matter is that an amount of what we call "motivation," "agreeableness" or even "talent" come down to the functioning of relatively simple, purely mechanistic biochemical processes, which can be subject to incidental malfunction just as you can dislocate a joint or get an ingrown toenail. If you want to assign blame the individual for one and not the other, you have a lot of philosophical explaining to do.