No [...fill in blank...], No Peace

The leader of the U.K.'s Green Party, Natalie Bennett, has said that her party is "open" to the possibility of three-way (or more-way) marriages. 

Opiates change the neurological pathways forever. Consequently some feel that, having a biologic drive for opiates is metabolically driven and hence a variant of illness, no more a crime than is diabetes.

Research shows that some rodents, when crowded, become violent and vicious. Some think this means that congested cities cause crime by their very nature and the individual is merely an inadvertent criminal product.

Freud said that every child was born with sexual lust for one parent, homicidal hatred of the other. Innately.

 

Any number of these ideas may be insightful or totally nuts but they all raise an important question: Responsibility and how the society views it. What is normal behavior, what is an unacceptable outlier? What can society reasonably ask of people? Who should be punished? What acts have environmental nuances? When does circumstance trump action. Where is motive trivial? Do we hold the grasshopper responsible for the behavior of the locust?

 

Sowell raised this question recently about the "Non-judgmental subsidies of counterproductive lifestyles" where the government underwrites people regardless of their behavior. "You cannot exempt people...from the requirements of civilization — including work, behavioral standards and personal responsibility — without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large. "

Is that observation true and, if so, who will bell that cat?