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MD, there is nothing innate in human beings. If you allow your child to grow in the back yard, on a leash, feed him like, give him enough water to survive, and never talk to him, he will not be human (as in "raised human") when he reaches the "age of reason," although genetically he had the potential to become one. But in this case, he will neither speak, not read, nor have social graces. He will act like a beast that we are in our nature.

In rare instances where children somehow survived in the wild, they never became fully integrated into the civilized society. What I am trying to say is: neither conscience nor synderesis, nor anything we associate with morality is innate in us. We only have a capacity for it and even that capacity is a limited window of opportunity.

What we are is what we have learned in life. We are domesticated beasts capable of being transformed into saints. This is where God's power is really evident in my opinion. It is a true transfiguration, and it is not "natural."

Yes, even a drug addict can be called to priesthood, and the lion can be next to a lamb, as the Desert Fathers remind us. The whole creation is restored under grace. But pride and arrogance stand in the way, beginning first and foremost with me.

MD, there is nothing innate in human beings.

No Asberger's autism? No neurological defects or anomalies? No retardation? No learning disabilities?

And if we see this innate things, can we not imagine that for some the wiring is so messed up that the normal affect related to the "remorse' might be messed up?

A typical question in the psych work-up of a special needs infant or toddler is whether he responds to the approval or disapproval of his parents.

I recommend "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat" as an provocative book on the exogenous and endogenous variations in human consciousness.

(I'm assuming your post is in response to what I wrote about psychopaths and conscience?)

So you deny synderesis and argue that our entire moral consciousness is conditioned?

Of course I disagree. I think that in a way similar to that in which Pythagoras, Euclid ... Lobachevsky make new mathematical discoveries by the application of innate abilities to perceptions, there is a sense among humans (generally, though not in every case) of justice and mercy and the rest and that ethical thought, though full of errors, is the application of innate capacities to experience and our reactions to them and assessments of them.

I don't know how to argue this, though. What's your take on the first arguments in Lewis's Mere Christianity

What do you think the imago dei includes?

You've rocked me back on my heels.