NCJ Number
177383
Date Published
1996
Length
150 pages
Annotation
Mentally ill persons often commit unlawful, offensive, or morally wrong acts, and conditions under which these individuals should be held morally responsible for their actions are discussed.
Abstract
From a moral standpoint, some mental disorders are important because they affect a person's desires, while others are important because they affect a person's beliefs. Mental disorders affecting a person's desires include impulse control disorders such as kleptomania, pyromania, and pathological gambling, as well as obsessive-compulsive disorders and psychosexual disorders including exhibitionism, voyeurism, pedophilia, and some fetishes. Mental disorders that affect a person's beliefs and other cognitive abilities include psychoses such as schizophrenia, psychotic depression, and bipolar affective disorder. Individuals with personality disorders should be held morally responsible for their actions, as judgments of responsibility are judgments about the connection between an agent and an action and this connection is not affected by personality disorders. On the other hand, individuals with a psychopathic personality cannot understand morality and moral concerns and should not be blamed when they act wrongly. Likewise, severe mental disorders such as schizophrenia can exonerate persons from moral responsibility for their actions in fairly straightforward ways related to compulsion and ignorance. The author reviews the insanity plea in the context of mental disorders and legal responsibility, mental disorders and criminal responsibility, character judgments and personality disorders, and issues of morality and moral responsibility. He draws on the fields of philosophy and psychiatry to develop a conceptual framework for judging the moral responsibility of mentally ill offenders. References and notes