I don ' t see anybody , just a disembodied chest below a head . <| sep |> Your claim is that everyone is giving sic given the faculties of knowing good and evil . Again , in attempting I assume honestly to summarize my position , you are making changes to the language and therefore my meaning . My original statement was We are given the necessary faculties to recognize evil and choose good . You offered sociopaths as a counterexample and claimed they disprove my claim . I countered that sociopaths lack one particular faculty but possess others which enable to know good and evil and choose the former . you replied that sociopaths and the like can act in their own self interest to avoid punishment for violating society ' s laws . Nope . Never said it . I said they still possess the intelligence to observe sometimes very keenly the behavior society judges to be ' good ' and ' evil ' and conform their own behavior to these norms . They also possess the will to choose between the two . It ' s why not all sociopaths in fact , a vanishingly small minority become serial killers or criminals of any kind . In fact , many ~~ need ~~ edit lead outwardly normal even upright , moral lives . I did not claim the sociopaths who don ' t ' become serial killers or criminals of any kind ' restrain their behavior solely to avoid punishment . Rather , I said they observe what society holds to be right and wrong and choose to do the former rather than the latter . That is , what they cannot sense innately , they observe objectively . They then make the freely willed choice to do good rather than evil . Their reasons for doing so inevitably vary , and some though not all may , in fact , choose to be ' good ' for fear of punishment . Many more , however , choose good for no other reason than they recognize it as such .