Moral Responsibility and Mental Illness: a Call for Nuance
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Moral Responsibility and Mental Illness: a Call for Nuance Matt King & Joshua May
Received: 27 April 2017 / Accepted: 13 September 2017 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017
Abstract Does having a mental disorder, in general, affect whether someone is morally responsible for an action? Many people seem to think so, holding that mental disorders nearly always mitigate responsibility. Against this Naïve view, we argue for a Nuanced account. The problem is not just that different theories of responsibility yield different verdicts about particular cases. Even when all reasonable theories agree about what’s relevant to responsibility, the ways mental illness can affect behavior are so varied that a more nuanced approach is needed. Keywords Free will . Accountability . Blame . Excuse . Psychopathology . Mental disorders
Introduction In the summer of 2001, in a small town outside of Houston, Texas, Andrea Yates drowned each of her five young children in a bathtub, one by one. Yates’s psychiatrist had recently taken her off of Haloperidol, an anti-psychotic medication. In previous years, she had attempted to commit suicide and was treated for major
M. King (*) : J. May Philosophy Department, University of Alabama at Birmingham, 900 13th Street South, Birmingham, AL 35294-1260, USA e-mail: [email protected] J. May e-mail: [email protected]
depressive disorder. During her trial, Yates pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, and the jury ultimately agreed. Her lawyer proclaimed the verdict a Bwatershed event in the treatment of mental illness,^ presumably because it promoted the idea that having a mental disorder can compromise one’s free will and thus reduce one’s culpability, even for terrible acts [1]. Some vehemently resist such conclusions, however. Just over ten years later in Texas, Eddie Ray Routh was convicted of killing two men at a shooting range, one of whom was celebrated sniper Chris Kyle. A former marine, Routh had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and schizophrenia. His counsel sought the insanity defense, but failed to convince the jury that Routh did not know his actions were wrong. The district attorney, Alan Nash, won the jury over, stating, BI am tired of the proposition that if you have a mental illness, you can’t be held responsible for what you do^ [2]. When and how does mental Billness^ or psychopathology sufficiently undermine one’s moral responsibility? This question figures heavily in legal discussions regarding both criminal liability to punishment and civil authority for private law decisions. The issue is also relevant to designing public health policy and to our ordinary practices of assigning praise and blame. Indeed, while philosophers have traditionally focused so intently on determinism as a threat to free will and moral responsibility, some have turned their attention to psychopathologies. Walter Glannon, for example, identifies Bbrain dysfunction^ as the Breal threat to free will^ ([3], p. 69).
M. King, J. May
Our guiding question is h
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