Fort Hood - PTSD vs. Islam

[pallas_marisa]

I've noticed an interesting controversy in the news media/blogosphere regarding the incident at Fort Hood where Nidal Hasan, "a gunman, trained as a psychiatrist," as one New York Times article called him, opened fire on his colleagues. It appears that the army PR folks are offering the line that it was not Hasan's Islamic faith that led him to

Comments

[firmament]

I think in cases like these people look for comforting explanations that show that ordinary people don't do these kinds of things, that only terrible things like Communism, Islam, PTSD, etc. can twist people into doing such things.

[firmament]

But I don't know what that says about the idea of people as responsible moral agents. I think we might still want to think of people who do a certain range of things that way.

[inhumandecency]

Not only am I ninja'd, but in about 1/20th the space! Good show.

Brevity

[firmament]

I don't know whether to thank my 6 years of training in analytic philosophy or my two and a half years as a Twitter user.

[inhumandecency]

I don't think there's anything new about wanting explanations for people's behavior, although the terminology of psychological diagnosis does make it sound weirdly technical. I imagine that pre-DSM and pre-Freud, people would have been making up stories about how he must have been in a love affair that went bad or something like that. I guess that if that were true, it would indicate a shift from situational explanations for someone's behavior (he did it in response to something) vs. dispositional ones (he did it because there was something wrong with him). "He got PTSD from working with traumatized soldiers" is interesting because it blends the two

[deviantsaint]

We cling to the idea that as an individual we cannot have responsibility. We believe that predators are victims, that we are not supposed to defend ourselves and that only as part of an identified victim group do we have value rather than an aware individual. When people act according to their will we villify them because we want to think that our lack of action/fear/and irresonsibility is normal and anything else is the abberation.