Knowledge Evaluation and Conclusion: What Makes Humans Bad is...

Throughout the quarter, I have been writing these entries to get a better understanding of what makes humans bad. I have been reading, learning, and having discussions about humans in the knowledge areas of humanities, social science, and natural science and with them I have built a stronger understanding of the theme of the class. Instead of just saying that humans are bad because of my gut feeling or what I was told when I was little, I can now back up my thoughts with the readings of articles and paper.

My Premises and Conclusion:
Situations can make humans bad. All humans are placed in different situations based off of the where they are born, how they are raised, and the decisions they make. All humans can be bad depending on their situation.

I think that the theme of the class was more to make us think deeply than to come up with an answer to the question of the theme. The theme made me think again about what actions people can condone and where the line can be drawn when it comes to good and bad. I believed that humans became bad because they decided to do a bad action, one that could not made better by an apology and making up for it but one that is the physical harm of another human being. When a person commits a bad action, they have made the decision to do so, making the decision a bad one. They could have made the bad decision based on the situations that have made up their lives.

The knowledge that I have gained in the classroom has included a wider understanding of humans and to be open when I am learning. Throughout learning, I have been able to identify two theories on knowledge from Pritchard and one perspective on knowledge from Blackmore. Blackmore showed me that consciousness is a controversial term because there is no agreed definition on it, but it does involve the way a person has an experience. Consciousness is a complex theory about the human mind because it can be perceived to be an addition to the brain that allows us to have the unique feature to think about our actions. The questions on consciousness that Blackmore keeps returning to is that if we have a conscious, what does it do for us as humans and why do we have it? While Blackmore offered ideas on consciousness, she also explained her ideas based on how the brain works and how it can be altered and evolved based on situations and experiences. Pritchard showed me that knowledge is subjective based on the types of knowledge that exist and how we come to know the information. My theory on knowledge based on reading Pritchard's What Is This Thing Called Knowledge? is that epistemology, the theory of knowledge can helps us gather a better understanding of knowledge and determine what is good knowledge that is supported and which is not. Propositional knowledge and ability knowledge is where we started our discussion of knowledge at the beginning of the quarter. My theory is that we have propositional knowledge based on the information of an opinion compared to the ability knowledge that we gain through knowing information that we have physically learned how to do in life. If humans have propositional and ability knowledge then we each have the capability to accumulate knowledge in life. To gain knowledge humans must absolutely know the truth based on research and information to back up ones beliefs, not just a mere true belief on what we know. Pritchard's information on knowledge has offered a way to come up with a connection between mere true belief and truth gained by knowledge, one can have a mere true belief and after research that belief can become knowledge that is supported by facts. Knowledge is valuable in life because it is how we grow, but not everything we know in life is valuable for every step we take towards our future. With propositional knowledge of true beliefs, a person will consider all knowledge valuable because they can help a person attain the goals they set in life. The information of knowledge that I have gained were relevant and important to my understanding of the theme because I was able to set a line of where I thought of what made humans bad and then I was able to grow my mere true beliefs based on the way the human brain worked with the consciousness that I believe each person has. Consciousness is not a supported fact because scientists have not found a way to explain if people have them or not but with enough support to the idea of their existence I feel comfortable enough to say that they do exist and that with them humans can come to the conclusion of right and wrong. I have come to the conclusion that a person's conscious effects their actions for the better, but that the situations a person is dealt in life can still cause a person to be bad.

Knowledge Domains:
Knowledge in the humanities has expressed that linguistics is more than just the words being spoken, the words expressed can reveal where a person comes from and why a person says the things they say. The humanities revealed to me that people can be bad or good in life based on John Locke's theories of everyone starting life as white paper where we gather information and knowledge and it adds art to the canvas of our lives. With the situations we experience in life we add marks to our paper life. The social sciences have taught me that everyone in life experiences life differently based on the situations that make up our life even before we are born and decide for ourselves. We can be born into a broken home, bad neighborhood, a loving family, in a great school district but we each also can control what actions we take while in those situations. The situations in our lives are challenges that guide us into the people we become. Natural science knowledge has brought the way the brain works into consultation when questioning what makes up a person bad by looking into the brain itself in a scientific setting. By looking into the way the brain can be altered, changed, and works in general, I have been able to learn more about what makes humans what they are and how more than our conscious can affect us. The knowledge domains have shaped my position on the theme and in life because they have offered me a way to understand more about humans and the interactions that we face to establish stronger support on my mere true belief. I now believe that humans can be bad based on the situations that they each are placed in whether they were their decisions or not. My beliefs are reflective on the lessons from the knowledge domains as well as those of Pritchard and Blackmore.

The new insights I have gained are that the world has more gray space than I originally thought. I know that the world is not all black and white, but there are parts that are black and white to me and the physical harming of another human being to the point where a life is lost is the line. I am referring to murder, I do not see justifiable homicide or suicide by cop as murder because that is a gray area in killing another human being, but if that person has killed or is trying to kill another person or someone else then they are in no position to be seen as a victim in my eyes. I personally would like to investigate further into the line between murder and justifiable homicide.

By writing this blog, I have grown my ability to understand that the gray area in life is larger than one can ever imagine. As I wrote the blog I was able to get to know myself better as well as express what I have learned and the ideas that I have been drawing to conclude where I believe I stand on right and wrong in the world around me. My conclusion is not one based purely on my beliefs of right and wrong but on the research and journal articles of others. As I wrote, I was able to identify my position based on the lessons of knowledge domains and through the premises I made as we learned I was able to come to the conclusion that situations and our conscious decisions affect us as human beings. The process of writing the blog on this theme has helped me come to the final conclusion that all humans can be bad depending on their situation.

Blackmore, Susan J. Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2005. Print. 

Pritchard, Duncan. “Some Preliminaries.” What Is This Thing Called Knowledge? London: Routledge, 2006.

What Makes a Person a Serial Killer? Are Serial Killers Bad?

Serial killers are humans so we must look into the Psychological aspects of Social Science to understand the way that their psyches work by gathering information and completing experiments to come up with a conclusion of what factors can make a person become a human. The factors that create serial killers can also be used to identify what kind of a human being they are, and if they can be deemed as bad humans because of those specific factors.
Before I started to look into and analyze the readings after hearing the knowledge fair presentations on serial killers, I wanted to come up with my full standing on them. I have a mere true belief that some serial killers are born that way due to birth defects and that others become that way because of what has occurred in their lives, but that all humans still can decide what actions to take in life. My mere true belief is based off of my being against murder and all acts of violence and that we each have control over our own actions and lives.

Serial killers are people that commit a series of three or more killings where a cooling off period occurs in between the murders. In the article The Monster Within: How Male Serial Killers Discursively Manage Their Stigmatized Identities Jayne R. Henson and Loreen N. Olson discuss the background of criminal attributes and examine the experiences and social position of male serial killers. Data was collected for three months where the researchers met with each other discussing their criteria that the serial killers had to fit in and were interviewed by credible sources. In the end, they based their research on interviews with thirteen infamous serial killers. The serial killers that they looked at were David Berkowitz, Kenneth Bianchi, Theodore Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy Jr., William Heirens, Henry Lee Lucas, James Paul, Dennis Rader, Richard Ramirez, Gary Leon Ridgeway, Michael Ross, and Arthur Shawcross. Each of those serial killers discussed his actions and interactions with other people to the interviewers to offer insight and attempt to make sense of why they committed serial murders. Each of them came from different backgrounds, interviewed at different stages of their criminal proceedings, and had different numbers of victims. The serial killers were able to reflect on their lives and actions to allow the interviewers, readers, and researchers a chance to try to understand the serial killers and their lives that possibly made them become serial killers. Their findings were that serial killers were able to get away with murder because of their ability to blend in and be normal members of their society, but they said that they could not be normal because of a force that was out of their control so they killed to relieve their deviant selves and tendencies. The serial killers rejected the idea that they killed because they were predators that enjoyed the thrill of killing, and instead called themselves victims of forces in their lives that were out of their control. This article fulfills social science knowledge by investigating the psychological aspect of serial killers and using the information from the interviews to gather an understanding of why they say they killed people and to find connections between the serial killers their backgrounds. "The Monster Within: How Male Serial Killers Discursively Manage Their Stigmatized Identities" contributes to my mere true belief by describing the forces that the serial killers blamed for their actions, but I disagree that those forces can make a person justify killing another human being. Biological imperatives, emotional detachments, demonic possession, and sexual arousal were all forces that the serial killers used to justify killing people, but their justifications involved explaining how they could not control themselves, did not feel anything after killing, and that once they were buried they were gone. With the serial killers thinking that the problem would simply disappear and that they could go through life killing and being a normal member of society they are treating the people as if their lives do not matter. The killers would compare themselves to what they thought a serial killer was and how they were portrayed and correct the notions that society believes about killing. By correcting the methods of murder they serial killers explain the ways one can take a life.

There are factors that serial killers use to explain their actions, but those factors do not start at the beginning of a life because no one is born evil. The article No One Is Born a Serial Killer! by Ioana Ilie Magdalena she discusses that serial killers find pleasure in murder because they lose mental tension after committing murder. Serial killers are violent and the most dangerous of criminals because of their horrifying aggression that ends in a death. Magdalena's research involved the division of psychopathology and what life events makes a human become a serial killer. The focus that was looked at was the connection between psychopaths and serial killers, and the way that their brains work and connect to violent means to obtain goals in life.  Magdalena's findings were that people in today's society must know what makes a person a serial killers to help fix society into preventing the creation of more serial killers. This article fulfills social science knowledge by looking at the psychological aspects of social science when it compares psychopathic killers and psychotic killers. "No One Is Born a Serial Killer!" contributes to my mere true belief by connecting the reason of serial killers and giving an explanation for their actions without condoning the loss of lives. Magdalena explains how no one is born a serial killer but that anyone can become one if the biological factors, social, cultural, educational, and socioeconomic environment are right. I can understand that there are factors that can make a person's life hard and that when mental illness is involved people do not have full control, but when you are in control and know that you have done something wrong how a person with empathy can keep killing does not make logical sense. Serial killers may not be born, but if they are created then they must also have control over their own lives and actions.

Both of the articles focus on serial killers and how there are factors that are thought to be the reason for their existence. While the article The Monster Within: How Male Serial Killers Discursively Manage Their Stigmatized Identities talks about the interactions and actions of serial killers and what they blame their need to kill on, the article No One Is Born a Serial Killer! focuses on the background of psychopathology and the things that can occur in a person's life that can make them become psychopaths and serial killers. This post complements the previous post on social science because they both look at the situations that can cause people to commit bad actions. This post connects to the theme that what makes humans bad is when they cause physical harm to other people. My understanding and belief based off of the articles on serial killers is that when a person has lost empathy and will repeatedly kill people without any remorse and act like life is normal.

Henson, Jayne R., and Loreen N. Olson. "The Monster Within: How Male Serial Killers Discursively Manage Their Stigmatized Identities." Taylor & Francis Online. Routledge, 20 Aug. 2010. Web. 20 Nov. 2015.

Ioana, Ilie Magdalena. "No One Is Born a Serial Killer! ☆." No One Is Born a Serial Killer! Elsevier Ltd, 2013. Web. 18 Nov. 2015.