Your moral compass

[EruptedCarcassBloat]

But don't you wish there were a way to, idk, save those people from a life condemned to a cell? I feel bad for people that have to go through that. It would be cool if with neuro science we could go in and like, rewire their brain so they're not psychopathic. 

That's often how my thoughts pan out. I try to imagine things that are way outside of the box.

You can do that.  It's called a frontal lobotomy.  The question is partly whether a person who's live all their lives with one set of traits would not see a person with another set of traits as death, or possibly murder, of the self.

I know, for example, that I could be a much better person if I were "rewired."  By from my current perspective, would I want that new-thinking guy fucking my wife and living my life?  No.  I have to accept myself, my limitations, my dreams and failures, as part of what it means to be me, and losing that would amount to death of the self.

Well I don't agree with lobotomies at all, and that's not what I mean. I meant what if there was some sort of transmogrifier that could rearrange the particles inside of your brain into a more ideal form, and only effect the part of you responsible for psychopathic behavior. So yeah, it would change a part of that person, but for the better. And that seems like it would certainly be a better way of dealing with these things than just saying that a person should be locked away inside of a cell for the rest of their life. 

I have a problem with that. Because I find the idea of anyone having so much control over someone else, that they could just toss out their life as if it was a dead chunk of skin or something, to be philosophically unsettling. I think that all human life should be valued more highly than looking at each individual human as if they were just a blood cell in a larger organism. The way I see it, the way we treat people in our society is we treat them like blood cells in a machine. If a blood cell becomes cancerous and doesn't do it's job, we cut it out and kill it. Human beings deserve much more compassion than that. That same logic is the reasons that cops shoot first and ask questions later, it's the same reasons that countries go to war with other countries. In the end, whoever the good guy and the bad guy is is just the guy who got to write history.

Also, isn't what defines our experience as a human being our memory, not our personality? If you still had your memory you would still have all the experiences that make up your life, and you'd still have the continuous stream of memory that connects the earliest memory to your current memory, meaning you'd still unequivocally feel and be "alive."