With rare exceptions, people are responsible for what they do.

You condition a vulnerable boy at puberty to become aroused by brutality. It's the violence, not the nudity. Frankly, I wouldn't mind if every teenage boy had a subscription to Playboy. They'd be looking at attractive naked female bodies while they masturbated, not eviscerated female bodies.

Killers seldom meet the legal standard for insanity, which is quite different from the way most people use the word every day. Killers may be disturbed, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they can't tell right from wrong or are compelled to maim or murder.

I like to have success experiences rather than failure experiences. So I'm more likely to compete in things I'm good at, and more likely to spend time on the things I expect to succeed at.

Psychiatrists are usually very well imbued with the clinical role, where helping the sick person is the goal. And that's quite incompatible with the truthseeking role. That's probably true of the other fields, too, but maybe more so of the personalities that gravitate toward psychiatry. They tend to care about people and wish to be helpful.

One of the few times I'm hit emotionally is when I listen to the tapes sadists make of torturing their victims. There the person is currently suffering, you can hear them suffer, and that calls out for an empathic response. But when they're dead, when they're no longer suffering, when it's over, it's hard to feel empathetic for the corpse.

With rare exceptions, people are responsible for what they do.