I have little experience in this, but I do know that the human brain has two main types of cholinergic neuroreceptors, muscarinic and nicotinic. The latter, as you might guess, is key in addiction to nicotine. The human brain effectively forgets how to make its own and relies on serum levels of nicotine to be delivered to the brain for its use via smoking. It makes nicotine addiction about the most terrible addiction and one very difficult to overcome.


A very few people have quit cold-turkey. Most simply cannot. They have to have substitutes, a lot of support, and to slowly wean themselves off of both the chemistry of tobacco addiction and its social 'chemistry'. I think that the same would be true of any addiction or dependency, as is the case with so many brain-chemistry-modifying drugs. The gradient to reduce the dosages should be gradual, meaning small steps and over a longer period than six to ten weeks necessarily. I don't know what empirical evidence there is to say that a person using Zoloft for 10 years will need a longer period of reduction than someone who has been on it for three years...but maybe that's the case. I would think one would need a bare minimum of about a year to get rid of it.


I also understand the wisdom of waiting for a person to get well-used to changes of any kind. As a sufferer of severe sleep apnea, we soon learn that even tiny changes to one's pressure support with PAP machines can have serious consequences, but one doesn't rule the experiment a failure on the basis of a single night's apnea/hypopnea index (AHI) rising above 5/hr. One goes a full week or so to see how reliable each night's count is, and what the variance is relative to the week's average, the month's average, and so on. A single night doesn't constitute a trend. But a string of really bad weeks trying to get off Zoloft, starting with an almost irrational/irresponsible prescription of an initial reduction of a whopping 25% borders on criminal, or at best incompetent in my opinion.

"... Creativity is randomness and can be replicated..."

??? On the face of it, this is self-contradictory. Random is patternless, meaning it can never be precisely the same twice as an intended end.

One with good will would not exceed the limit through a speed zone. One without good will wouldn't care of the outcome or the fact that their behaviour is immoral, unethical, illegal, or merely charitably ant-social standing on its own. If acting in good will, her intent would be not only to obey the law for the law's sake, but to embrace and to uphold it for the reasoning and spirit behind its enactment, beneficence. That is the good will. Good will is acting out of duty. It is not a duty to speed through speed zones, it is an expression of motivation.


I fully agree, the nature of the act isn't changed solely by the motive, but the motive is an expression of one's orientation to others which is the Good Will. Anti-social behaviours have all kinds of motives, none of which are expressions of Good Will as Kant describes it.

Read Parfit, hence cometh Kantian reasoning. It's the act, not the outcome. It's the orientation, the lack of good will, that makes an act unethical.

It's one thing to show why he may be misapprehended, but quite another to show that he is intolerant. A bigot is a person who will go to extremes, including violence/ad baculum in an attempt to assert his/her views. A thread (as opposed to a threat) on a public forum hardly amounts to intolerance.

We should hope a moderator is somewhat wiser about silencing opposing views than you are....?

According to Kohlberg, morality has its root in our ability to accommodate the varying positions of others around us, or at least to tolerate them. We call this empathy. In his more advanced stages of moral development, he asserts that reason and prediction play greater roles in shaping our behaviours. Oddly, morality tends to want to beget a regression to the mean, or conformity, to values, standards, and acts permissible in a culture. People in a culture tend to desire to behave in a narrow range of permissible behaviours. It helps with belonging and acceptance, which those researching interest-based models of social interaction would say is an important element in well-being.

Lack of foresight, impulsivity, and ego-centric reasoning, which Larry Kohlberg would say is the purview of those stuck in the bottom two levels of moral reasoning, they comprising his First Stage.

As is the case with most behaviours, moral reasoning is learned and adopted for its perceived values. For those with arrested development, or brain damage of a defined/undefined type, moral reasoning has little meaning. It might be still interest-based though, and adopted because the alternatives in many contexts are not going to serve the person well. Very intelligent, but otherwise amoral, people can still function well in society because it's the easiest path for them. It's not to say they won't be more opportunistic than others whose conscience plays a larger role in shaping their overt acts.

It's interesting that almost every person will, if comfortable, admit to fantasizing about immoral acts they wouldn't dream of carrying out if others were ever to find out or to observe them. We have to ask ourselves why such behavior is at odds with otherwise lawful and ethical people, and what drives them to value these contrarian acts for sexual or non-sexual reasons.

I don't know that 'the beasts' are capable of moral reasoning...I would think not...but they have instinctual tendencies to act in ways that seem altruistic. I think of dogs defending a toddler from danger, or apparently empathetic toward a crying person, as is commonly seen.

Bigot? Is that word useful here? Apart from attempting to thwart further dialog due to the ad hominem, it doesn't seem to apply. A person who is a bigot is intolerant of a variant viewpoint, and you haven't established as much in this case.

I like the topic creep. From racism to capitalism......as if it's even remotely necessary. Apparently, no non-capitalists are racists. Or, if one is a capitalist, he/she is de facto a racist.

I guess we should add slave owner to that list of defects.