SiennaInLondon said:
I would, as you predict, counter your conception of an artist. There are many many many many artists who don't comply to these ridiculous stereotypes as written in the rock n' roll handbook (written by Ozzy Ozbourne or some other ghastly relic) but in this age of quick fixes and hard hits, most people concentrate on the ones who seem the most extreme.
And others focus on the art that makes them feel like saints. Well, what can I say, I think both ways of handling the world are about equally frustrated. But one is a great deal of fun, the other is not.
As for morality/education, you didn't actually illustrate how they are not interlinked other than saying that they were not. As you are a scientist, in scientific terms, how many of the requirements of behaviour that would comprise mine and your concept of morality, apply to a human being left feral? Probably not many because then the laws of the jungle take over. I think you might be mixing up the term 'morality' with the term 'conscience' Morality is not the human conscience, it is a set of laws, a belief system, a legal system. The consience is a watered down morality inbuilt into our systems to a very unsophisticated degree for the sake of survival. For example, Human hurts brother, human feels bad because unecessary antagonism would result in a human cast out from an essential social network. etc etc. It is the same as bees not stinging you unless they absolutely have to. Morality on the other hand is a set of codes that most people know by the time they are teenagers but they only know them as mindless rules. The more one learns about politics and legal systems and their own society, they learn WHY these laws exist and the beauty of those laws. Then the more sophisticated they get in their understanding, the more likely they are to become the people who implement those laws and change those laws. They either become the establishment or they become the protesters and the anarchists.
As for education and morality - perhaps it should be a correlation, but I find very little correlation in reality. This is probably because education is one thing and implementation is another, and morality is all about implementation. But yes, it is true that education should at least give a person better grounds for believing in a set of rules. But, without going into detail, because that would be going against the guidelines, there are some laws which seem quite counterintuitive to a lot of people, these laws are related to Pete's illegal activities.
As for your theory that someone with Pete's genetic makeup is almost intended for the sort of disease he has inflicted on to himself... well, I have never cared much for that sort of nihilistic determinism that science seems to be hurtling towards. Not only is it a counter productive worldview (if predestination led to the ranters, I wonder where we are heading from here?) but it is wholly false in my opinion. Almost contradictory also because if Pete's moral shortcomings are in his genetic makeup and implicitly not his fault, then surely morality IS a product of man given education because we are then working on purely base levels? Despite varying views on morality, it is not a loose notion as assume, and if Pete is swayed about his genetic malfunctions, then morality has nothing to do with it? Do you see what I mean?
Actually, thinking about how our genomes dictate us can help us understand others and their weaknesses, or what we perceive as weaknesses, instead of leading to condemnations. It is a grave mistake to believe that people are all similar, or even near identical. In other words -
you don't know what it is like to walk in his shoes. And in addition to being somewhat deterministically minded, I also think that by applying our brains we can overcome our particular weaknesses, which are really the result of receptor differences. Breakthroughs in medicine/biochemistry will soon lead to better treatments for people with addictive behaviour - treatments that will enable them to be more like others and not overdo it, instead of either die or become scientologists/"your choice of whacky religious person".
I wish scientists would recognise that theirs is a religion too because then they would be more aware of the sweeping statements they make. But then I also wish religions would conduct themselves more as a science and that people did not view art and science as different things when essentially they are not....
I know that many scientists behave like religious people. But of course, the nature of science is supposed to be a matter of logic and verified information (although the latter is impossible to achieve, you can have approximations of it, Hume etc), whereas religion is a basically unabashedly irrational conviction. As for art and science - well, I agree in that the choice of what to investigate in science, is basically a matter of taste. They are not dissimilar. But the attempt at an objective standard for judging science has come a little further than a similar standard for art...and I don't really think there should be one of course.
r u kidding me???
Morality is something created by shame, and it starts happening when we are learned what not to do as a baby, that is hardly education. 
