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In podcast 2316 Daniel Mackler, a guest host who is into self-knowledge as much if not more than Stef, asks Stefan how he would determine moral responsibility. Stefan responds by saying moral responsibility is determined via the person's use of morality to influence others' behavior. An example is used where a child molester inherently in his actions is saying to the child "the satisfaction of my wants is the good" while violating that standard with the child because sexual abuse is not something the child wants. I'm confused because I don't know if Stefan means someone is morally responsible for every decision they make following their first use of moral reasoning to another, or if a person is morally responsible for the situation to which he uses moral reasoning to justify his own actions (again to another person). For example... is it: Bob argued why it was ok for him to steal his sister's dollar when he was 6 years old, therefore Bob is morally responsible for every action forward of 6 years old because he has demonstrated an understanding of morality. Or is it... Bob argued why it was ok for him to steal his sister's dollar when he was 6 years old, therefore Bob is now morally responsible for the theft of his sister's dollar. Basically, is that specific action of justifying what you did to another person confirmation of your knowledge of ethics? Or do ethics apply regardless of whether you use ethical arguments to justify your actions to another person? The question is, how would you know someone understood ethics if they didn't try to justify what they did to another person?

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?

I got very emotional during the second call, as soon as the second caller did (who was talking about moral responsibility and how he tormented his sister). I started to feel defensive and angry when Stef attempted to uncover the caller's reason for tormenting his sister in the moment. One thought that came into my head was "That's not important, just blame the parents" - a particularly disturbing thought because I realize that that is likely exactly how his parents likely justified their abuse of him (though they are obviously far more culpable for torturing him as adults), and is one of the first excuses my dad made for his sadistic behavior towards me as a child (he was quick to deflect his abuse towards me with how his parents treated him). Also, a feeling of horror came over me as Stef empathized with his sister - it brought to mind all the images I have in my mind of me making my sister cry and yell, and all the times I mocked her and filled her so full of rage, she couldn't bear it and ran into her room, locked the door, and made gutteral sounds as a desperate attempt to get me to leave her alone - memories which I've tried in vain to disassociate from myself. I started crying when listening to the podcast and felt immense sadness and anger. I haven't even finished listening to the call, but I think for me the reason for seeking out and starting conflicts with her where I could cause her pain was obviously that I enjoyed causing suffering in others and was becoming a full-on sadist. As I'm typing this I'm getting even more angry at my parents and I want to yell at the top of my lungs "YOU TURNED ME INTO A SADISTIC MONSTER!" It is starting to make sense to me why I was so depressed from 11th grade onward - I no longer had anyone to unload my rage onto - I no longer had a helpless little sister and my brother became bigger than me (he is 2 years younger and she is 5 years younger) - I was one of the smallest kids at school. So I had a brain wired for sadism in an environment which I had no power in - which explains why I became so withdrawn and anti-social and fearful of strangers. My brain was telling me that the world was a win-lose environment, I was now in the lose category - the victim category, and so my actions reflected that of a victim. It seems (based on Stef's actions during the call, and during the call with the guy who put other kids in the hospital) that in order to heal from having inflicted harm on others, you must give yourself responsibility for the damage you've caused others, no matter how old you were, and no matter what was modeled for you which led to that behavior being seen as an feasible option. This is hard for me to accept emotionally, though obviously that has no bearing on the validity of that idea. I suspect that my father and mother are both full-blown sadists, though neither of them were ever diagnosed (though my mom has been taking medication for schizophrenia for a long time). I suspect that if I had been big and strong (I'm fully grown now and 5'8, 125lbs), I would have been a vicious and dangerous bully physically, like the second caller in "Shame-Based DNA Death," so it's hard for me to really look at myself as any different from him as I chose the means of sadism which I could get away with (verbal abuse, not just towards my sister, but towards a couple of easy targets at school) just as he chose the means of sadism which he could get away with. There have been plenty of times since I found out about this show (which was about 6 years ago) when I almost wished that I didn't have a conscience because it has been so unbelievably painful to uncover and explore the truth about my history and there have been so many times along the way when I've been unable or unwilling to face the truth about the things I've done and the things which have been done to me - thoughts came up of "How could this be true? How could my parents have been so evil? How could it have really been that bad? How could I have done that?" Even though I've done a lot of self-work through journaling and therapy so far, It seems like every time I explore an incident from my past, 10 more come to the surface and I push them away to a later date (I know this is not technically true, but I do feel overwhelmed by how much bullshit I have to slog through just to achieve a reasonable level of happiness, or at least not fearing punishment from others on a daily basis). I know that I've done a lot of work so far and made a lot of progress from when I started therapy, but I can't rid myself of the thought that I need to work even harder and give myself less leeway to spend time on other things. It's the same thing in therapy - every session I feel that I have to push important things to the side for the sake of time for the things which I perceive to be even more important (which has its benefits but obviously drawbacks as well). I only have a couple of memories of my dad playing with me when I was a child, the other memories consist of him ignoring me, mocking me, and denying me the attention I needed from him and hitting me with on the bare-ass with wooden spoons, metal spatchulas, and a plastic pasta-stirring spoon with spikes. My mom hit me with the same items, frequently sicked my dad on me because he could hit harder, and though she was not neglectful in the sense that she spent a lot of time with me in early childhood (stay-at-home mom who homeschooled me), I can see very clearly now that she was trying to turn me into her subservient little pet and only gave me affection for doing what she wanted me to do and the threat of punishment was ALWAYS there if I openly expressed disagreement or argued with her, whether that punishment was physical (hitting, washing my mouth out with soap, making me eat too much hot sauce) or withdrawal of affection. She was unable to cope with reality by the time I was 9, and she now lives in a group home across the country, heavily medicated past the point of having humanity - she may as well be dead in my opinion. My parents heavily indoctrinated me with fundamentalist Christianity and punished me very frequently for supposed immorality, so according to the argument Stef made in this podcast as I interpreted it, they hold a very high degree of moral responsibility for what they did to me and how it affected me (please feel free to correct me if I misunderstood or misinterpreted Stef). Hopefully it is clear to anyone reading this why it is so emotionally hard for me to take responsibility for the way I treated my sister for YEARS, I'm talking 6 or 7 years of making her life hell, even though I logically accept it to a certain extent (I think my parents are even more to blame than I am). I felt angry when Stef said he couldn't understand why other children in abusive environments don't stick up for each other. The first thought that came to mind was, "Because you (meaning me) didn't side with your sister over your abusers, you are/were evil or at least morally inferior to Stef - who faced lots of abuse and neglect and was a good enough person to not hurt others when he knew how much he hated being hurt." On the other hand, I also have the thought that "If I was morally inferior, it was the fault of my parents, and my childhood must have been worse and/or at least I must have had some genetic predisposition towards sadism which Stef did not have." I later had the thought that "Comparing how good of a person you are to how good of a person Stef is is not productive or useful - how you deal with your wrongdoings moving forward is the only thing that matters." I'm a bit lost on how to reconcile these thoughts into some kind of emotional clarity, and I also suspect the caller may have been dealing with the same types of thoughts. Though, now that I've kept listening to the podcast, I can see that the alternative to me taking my anger out on my sister was probably worse - likely killing my parents or going on a shooting spree (something I've had a fantasy about doing several times in my life), or killing myself. That gives me some comfort, but it doesn't change the fact that I did those things and have to live with those memories which is still horrible. I apologize for the wayward nature of this post, but I fear that if I don't write this now, it will be a LONG time before these thoughts return to my mind and desperately want some discussion with rational and empathetic people about what I've written here.