(I think that gels with what you said.)
I don't believe it's either all society's fault ("Gee, I got a social disease!" to quote the song "Officer Krupke" in West Side Story) or entirely the individual's, either. Sometimes, however, it does slant to more one side (society, i.e. socio-conomic deprivation) than to the other (individual), however. The problem ultimately becomes when everyone has a "good reason" (past emotional abuse/economic poverty/state privilege) to commit any manner of sociopathy, whether it's slaughtering folks in Iraq, guarding concentration camps, or slaughtering one's own kids after a bad day at work. There are "good" reasons for all these things. There do have to be some absolute, uniform standards, like the Nuremberg Principles. But unless those absolute lines are met, case-by-case judgments seem best, weighing individual & social background in each offense.
-B.
Chris Doss wrote:
> I hypothesize that the "the individual is culpable"
> and the "the social setting is culpable" approaches
> (like the free will vs. determinism debate they are
> clearly a variant of, or vice versa) are akin to
> Kantian antinomies of pure reason. Both lead to
absurd
> conclusions when their internal logics are
> relentlessly applied, and they are a product of how
> our minds process ethical matters, not reflective of
> the actual world.