> A "sincere desire to make change" isn't quantifiable in the first place.

Well, that's my entire point: why use it as a metric or target? How do you tell if you achieved the objective when the target metric is unmeasurable?

When the goal is (in GP's words) "building that desire to make a change", you can never tell anything about progress towards your goal: when you've achieved the goal, when you've not achieved that goal, when you're making progress, when you're making it worse - those things are all subjective.

All we can do when treating sociopaths is to release them into the world again and judge their actions, not their self-reported feelings.

> When the goal is (in GP's words) "building that desire to make a change", you can never tell anything about progress towards your goal:

> All we can do when treating sociopaths is to release them into the world again and judge their actions, not their self-reported feelings.

What's the purpose here, to treat the condition of being a sociopath, or just to enforce enough structure on them that they don't cause other people harm?

My problem with what you said is that the entire idea of "sociopathy" is that a person lacks what the diagnoser considers to be "emotion" and is simply "pretending" to be a "normal" human by copying how they see other people behaving. That diagnosis isn't quantifiable in the first place; it's the diagnoser deciding they know what's happening in a patient's head by (guess what?) observing their words and actions.

Farther up-thread, people were arguing sociopaths should go to prison and not receive therapy (particularly if they say they don't want therapy, but more generally if they've committed a crime). You're now taking that farther by saying even if they express a desire to make change, that shouldn't be taken into account when determining any treatment/punishment, because that's only an observation of words coming out of their mouth-- but that's the same route they were diagnosed via in the first place, so I find that hypocritical.

If you're just saying criminals should be punished without regard for their mental health/conditions simply because their victims were victimized regardless, that's a valid utilitarian view. But realize (it at least sounds like) you're essentially arguing that therapy for mental conditions is generally impossible/pointless.