Imagine a married, middle-aged high school teacher who suddenly started seducing young girls. His behaviour was so brazen that that he was quickly arrested and convicted of molestation; he was sent on a treatment programme, but he was expelled from the programme after propositioning several women there.
Having failed rehab, he was to appear in court for sentencing, but the day before his court date, he passed out after complaining of blinding headaches for several hours. After ordering an MRI, the doctors saw the source of the problem: he had an enormous tumour in his frontal cortex. The tumour was removed, and the deviant sexual urges disappeared immediately and permanently.
The man was no longer a hypersexual monster. However, he was still to face the jury.
Should he be perceived as a serious threat to society, or a rare survivor of a life-threatening health problem?
In your hypothetical story, the extenuating circumstances would be taken into account and the man would most likely be acquitted by a jury. The judge would probably order some from of follow up medical reports. Sounds like the sort of defence Bill Clinton should have tried. ‘Hypersexual monster’ adding that to the CV!
In your imaginative incident, the man whose dysfunctional moral values were led by rather mechanical causes, which apparently, according to you, put him as “victim of causality” not as some “uneducated psycho-maniac”, who never had such medical means for treating their chemical or physical imperfections.
Believing in the purpose of social, and sometimes, religion based moral values I do believe the guy should be sentenced with respect to the applicable laws currently in charge. Not he himself, but perhaps his past attitude was a threat to society in the first place, and this is what should deserve the sentence as a committed crime.
Here’s some addition to your fictitious case: The guy having tumors committed extensive molestation keeping three little girls locked in the classroom, trying everything but failing to do anything, then raped a fellow teacher who have happened to come to the door and knocked the door willing to check the classroom; to add little more tragedy, consequently, she was perfectly impregnated by our otherwise lovely guy.. of course, the baby will have to grow unattended.
Because his tumors would have been removed, but not the memories of those little girls, not the teacher’s new dark life, much less needing to mention an orphan. Well, if some laws attempt to clean him, those outstanding victims wouldn’t pardon any bit of it if they were ever to be asked.
As for your question, I believe three of those cases do apply on him at the same time; with each of them bringing about their own consequences.
Your articles are challenging, I love your (in)sight..
Kind regards;
The was a story somewhat similar to this on Law & Order SVU of a woman who couldnt control her sexual urges towards young boys because of a tumour in her head. He shoudlnt be convicted because he had no control over his urges because of the tumour.
Firstly, neither study esasilbthes the original vitamin state of the participant. It is quite likely, for instance that the Puerto Rican participants were mostly both vitamin and calcium deficient.Secondly, the Swedish study is quite flawed. The vitamin use has been determined by questionnaire and the marked yes for supplementation if the subject admits to taking one a week. No attempt has been made to determine type of multivitamin taken or quality of multivitamin.There are a limited number of multivitamin formulations available in Sweden. All contain Vitamin A (which is fairly toxic) and 300-400mcg of folate. Women who took the multivitamin were far more likely to take additional folate making their total intake very high. High levels of folate have been associated with increased cancer risks in some studies (this caused the withdrawal of folate supplementation of bread last year)In addition, the study found that multivitamin users were more likely to be nulliparous, use oral contraceptives and postmenopausal hormones, all of which are strongly associated with breast cancer. Though they have corrected for this, their resultant confidence intervals are so wide as to render this study virtually meaningless.There are multiple US cohort studies that find either no association or a negative association between breast cancer and multivitamins. It is therefore highly likely that some other factor that the study has not corrected for is causing this correlation, rather than the simple use of multivitamins.