I have had an opportunity to browse via Encyclopedia Britannica and not only it stunned me with poor quality (I would say on the Wikipedia level, maybe even worse) but it also made me laugh because of the childish understanding of the world it has had.
Their biography section had some divisions: the good guys and the bad guys (for example, the great scientific minds vs. criminals). I wouldn’t have believed they had considered it as such. As our morality is quite weird (to put it diplomatically) and animalistic, no one should apply such a solution in this super-complex system our morality is.
While criminology is robust science (even though a human science), we should accept genetics and nurture produce criminals. You may be genetically made a sociopath or your environment is so bad (you have to steal things in order to survive in a real ghetto, you were beaten, abused, neglected, and all that stuff). And then we don’t have anything like free will. It doesn’t mean we should tolerate criminals, there should be some repression, however, the division between good and bad people is quietly outdated.
So while we should examine all options and base our world view by science-made morality, this encyclopedia has only these childish things to offer.
By the way, I was really disappointed while reading their article on intelligence. Shame on you!
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