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I was listening to Podcast 2254 and in it the caller is confessing to physically abusing his siblings from when he was (I think) eight to early 19. The caller is able to see his lack of total responsibility when he was a younger teen, but when he mentions that he still inflicted this abuse when he was 18, Stefan mentions that it was already a habit by then. When he says this it feels like he's absolving the caller of some responsibility for his actions. This may be the case and this may be true, but I can't pinpoint the reason why habitual abuse holds the abuser less responsible than just abuse in general. My gut tells me that since his environment was so severe, he had no external indicators that what he was doing was wrong, and that knowledge of alternatives (arguments against what he was doing) were not easily accessible, his only line of defense which would be that shred of empathy that his parents were beating out of him was all that stood between him and abuse, and naturally that fell. Now abuse to him would become commonplace. He'd get used to it, his mind would be warped by it, and as he aged it would become a part of life. I think the key here is when you start abusing. If he would have started when he was 18, he would not have been desensitized to the violence as he was. With more maturity he certainly would have had a harder time starting considering it wasn't something he'd become accustomed to. It would be like bringing this alien into his life he'd never seen before. Another thing to consider is that right when he found FDR he stopped. UPB was that alternative that helped him see his abuse. It shined a flashlight on this thing that nobody had ever shined light on before. What does everyone here think about this? Moral responsibility isn't always a black and white ordeal as we know, but is it shifted by habitual abuse that started when the mind was much less mature that alternatives weren't available for?