On Extreme Mental Illness and Moral Culpability

[danieldwilliam]

I don't think this very strongly but I do think it.

Even if you have a severe mental illness you are not exempt from moral responsibility for your actions. I am thinking of the sorts of mental illness that involve someone become a serial murder of other people.  There are many, many statements of basic moral codes and I think it is obvious from them that murdering people is frowned upon and pretty universally so.

If someone finds themselves in a position where they think it might be an okay thing to do they have access to all of human culture saying "It's probably not okay."

There is an external reference point to check the internal workings of your brain against. And I think someone who can reason remains morally obliged to periodically calibrate their own mental process against the outside world and where there is a significant difference between the two take efforts to understand that difference, check the validity of intenal and external models and take action to Do Good or at least avoid evil.

I totally get that it becomes fuzzier the less extreme the action but at the extremes I think, if the inside of your head says it's okay to kill someone you retain moral culpability for not double checking with the rest of the humanity.

Other people appear to disagree with me - so I'm keen to calibrate my own moral processes. I'm prepared to be talked out of this.

Comments

[andrewducker]

Killing people, in the right circumstances, seems to be very heavily approved of. We arm police, we have a military, and nearly half of the UK support the death penalty being reintroduced.

And we also, as a society, seem to approve of breaking the law if we're doing the right thing when we do so (which is one reason for removing laws which are commonly broken - you teach people that they can ignore the law).

So checking in with the rest of humanity doesn't seem likely to give a clear-cut answer.

There also, to me, seems to be a qualitative difference between "He looked at me funny, so I had to give him a good stabbing before he directly challenged my authority.", "I wanted my wife's money and I was bored of her, so I poisoned her", and "God told me that I had to kill all of the temptresses, so I set out to do so." - different mental issues, and different approaches would be needed for each of these.

A friend who worked for a year in a high security prison tells me that the first of these is the most common - people with appalling impulse control who grew up in violent areas of poverty, and whose reasoning skills are insufficient to see that their instant reaction is going to cause all sorts of problems. The second is much less common, and much scarier to be around - it's unclear what percentage of people score that highly on psychopathy. (The third tend to be locked up in different kinds of institutions.)

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I am thinking of the very narrow group of people who are in your third category and not locked up in any institution.

[andrewducker]

I find myself loath to judge people whose brains are taking in a picture of the world around them which is remarkably different from reality.

When the squid-god tells you that kneecaps are a sign of corruption and must be shattered, it's going to be a very odd person who ends up with the same morals as the rest of us.

Of course, this does raise the question of what your original statement was saying - what do you mean by "moral culpability"?

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

What do I mean by morally culpable?

Probably that they ought to be subject to judgement. More to be pitied than scolded but not entirely free of all blame.

Mostly the category of people I'm thinking of are a danger to the rest of us and ought to be removed from society to somewhere they are not dangerous.

Secondly, they are very unwell and ought to be treated for their illness in accordance with their humanity where doing so does not compromise keeping the rest of us safe.

But also a smatch of evil attaches to them - I feel they've gone so far beyond what I think are clear, universal, deep and consistently held moral views that even if very ill they ought to have spotted they were about to do something wrong. I don't think there is room in dealing with safety and treatment for any punishment but I do think there is a state of being insane but also evil.

I think there is an obligation on us all to ask "How sane am I today?"

[andrewducker]

"ought to be subject to judgement"

So there's a moral imperative for other people to judge them?

"are a danger to the rest of us and ought to be removed"

Yes, but that's purely a health and safety issue, and nothing to do with morality.

"Secondly, they are very unwell and ought to be treated for their illness"

Absolutely. I'm all in favour of helping ill people.

"clear, universal, deep and consistently held moral views"

There are no such things. Any reading of history will tell you this, in great detail, repeatedly.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I don't think there is a particular moral imperative to judge them. I think they can be morally judged. Their insanity has not removed them from the set of things to which a moral judgement can be applied.

I didn't say them being a danger was anything other than a health and safety issue and I consider it the most important aspect of the treatment of the very dangerously mentally ill.

And I'm all in favour of helping ill people. I'd prioritiise the health and safety aspects over treatment aspects where those two were incompatable and I'd heavily weight the risks so a small risk of a loss of containment was given a high importance. I hope we can find a way of doing both.

I think history demonstrates the opposite. Many people, individually or in groups, have broken moral precepts repeatedly. All of them have been judged. Usually not judged very effectively in terms of moderating their behaviour.

[andrewducker]

One can apply a moral judgement to a person (or a cat, or a rock, I suspect). People do that kind of thing all the time. Aint nobody stopping you.

"Many people, individually or in groups, have broken moral precepts repeatedly. All of them have been judged."
Yes. But that doesn't make the moral precepts universal. Gay people have been judged for breaking moral precepts against being gay, homophobes have been judged for breaking moral precepts against being homophobes. Clearly both of those groups can't be being judged for the same morality. So the fact that they have been judged doesn't make the views universal, or consistent.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

I just read this as "I think cats have moral responsibility for not throwing up on the carpet."

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I see your point.

I don't consider cats (or other entities likely to be vomiting on your carpet) to be at all human. I don't consider them to be partially human in any way.

I'm not sure I see someone who is extremely mentally ill but capable of some form of intelligent thought as not at all human.

[andrewducker]

So, morality applies to all humans, but only to humans?

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I think so. Although I would probably come at the question from the other direction. If an entity has some moral conception then that is evidence in favour of it being human. I'm not taking a species bounded view of humanity.

[andrewducker]

Moral conception being, presumably, a belief that beings should act in particular ways?

(Like, for instance, a cat who firmly believes that humans should feed them. Or a landowner who believes that slaves should do likewise.)

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I am not sure that a cat is capable of belief.

As for the slave holder - I think two points arise. Firstly, I think the behaviours which have been consistently disapproved of are a pretty narrow and special range of behavours. Bonded labour is not one of them. Sadly.

Secondly, I've read quite a lot of the moral backflips that slave-holders have gone through to justify their position and the contemporary counter-arguements. It's not the case that slave-holding has been morally unchallenged through out history.

[andrewducker]

I'm not saying it's been unchallenged. I'm saying that there are people defending both sides. And numerous other quasi-sides.

Because morality is a matter of taste and perspective.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Up to a point.

There are certainly elements of taste and perspective but I think there are some pretty firm foundations which are grounded in economics. Moral precepts that promote trust, stability, certainty and frameworks and institutions for iterated exchange of goods and services.

And the sort of psychopathic behavour that I have in mind is pretty inicimal to those structures.

[andrewducker]

I think that some people prioritise other things over the iterated exchange of goods and services.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Some people might. Some might try to do so outside the context of a society that is good at handling the iterated exchange of goods and services.

I think large numbers of such people - nations of them - tend to either not get their economy to work at all well or tend to make themselves so obnoxious to their neighbours that they get taken care of or place themselves at the apex of societies that do priortise the exchange of goods and services and learn to love taxation.

My working hypothesis here is that most moral codes currently regarded as useful are partially designed to support the sorts of society that produce prosperous economies because moral codes that don't do this tend to create societies that are filtered out by either failing economically or being irradicated as a pest by societies who have functioning economies and therefore can deploy military power over generations.

So, if you are a human alive today you are probably part of a society that has passed through a filter that filters for strong economies and therefore for the moral codes that tend to support strong economies.

[andrewducker]

"...if you are a human alive today you are probably part of a society that has passed through a filter that filters for strong economies and therefore for the moral codes that tend to support strong economies"

China seems quite keen on capitalism sans democracy. India has massive corruption issues. Between them they make up a fairly large chunk of the population, and I'm not at all sure that their systems are terribly moral in practice. So I don't find that sentence terribly convincing.

Also, I'm also not even slightly convinced that "supports a strong economy" fits _my_ feelings on moral actions. Democracy, for instance, can be quite lacking. As can transparency. And we seem to have managed quite well, economically, without same-sex marriage for 99.9% of history. And with the death penalty. And with huge wodges of racism all over the place. And with massive amounts of sexism.

Which isnt to say that things couldn't be worse. Most people don't live in Nazi Germany or North Korea. Or the middle ages.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

I don't think the humanity or otherwise of the cats or the people (about which I agree with you on both counts) is germane to the argument. There's no meaning in ascribing moral responsibility to an entity - human or otherwise - which is not capable of understanding it in your terms.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I think that's the nub of what I'm thinking about here. I'm not sure that even the very insane are entirely incapable of understanding human morality.

My prior is that any member of the human species no matter how insane is capable of understanding there are something that you just don't do. Insanity might make it difficult from some people to understand morals. These people are held to a lower standard of moral culpabilty than the rest of us. But I hold (not very strongly) that there remains a very small core of behaviour so evil and so clearly evil that anyone and everyone can and ought to check that they are not transgressing.

So, it's a three part questions.

1) Can even the very insane understand that there are moral rules that always apply and they might be about to breech them? (I think you think not.)
2) Is there a core of moral rules that are universal and consistent? (I think Andy thinks not.)
3) Are those moral rules clearly enough presented that even the very insane are capable of understanding? (Again, I think Andy thinks not, even if 2 is true.)

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

Nice frame. I definitely think not (1). (3) then becomes absorbed into that - it only has meaning on one half of the decision tree.

I'd have to reflect on (2). I seem to remember going to a lecture by George Steiner in which he said that there were no taboos that held across every society. Even incest, most usually taboo, is not invariably so. But this must have been fifteen years ago and I wouldn't swear to it.

[andrewducker]

I've read that a couple of times. I can't see the difference between (1) and (3).
(1) is "Can the insane understand X?" and (3) is "Are the rules of X clear enough that insane people can understand them?"

Can you explain what the difference is to me?

(And yes, I don't believe that there are moral rules that are universal and consistent. I think there are ones that are very common, because they're ones that are more useful in a wide variety of contexts. But morality is the product of culture, and culture varies dramatically.)

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I think 1) is a pretty straight-forward Yes / No type question.

Are the very insane capable of understanding that there are some rules that might apply to them? Might there be such a thing as a Big Book of Rules? Yes / No.

3) is about whether those rules are clear enough to be understandable to someone who is very mentally unwell in a particular way.

What does the Big Book of Rules say I ought to do in such and such a situation?

[andrewducker]

Aaah, gotcha. I managed to miss the "Are there?/what are they?" split.

It should be noted that, as a society, we try to enumerate our rules in a way that can be written down. And even then in order to decide whether someone has violated the rules requires a pair of experts arguing over the finer points, and an even greater expert keeping them both in line and making decisions on how the various rules interact with each other. And the law on something as simple as "Is killing someone ok?" runs to several pages.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1957/11/pdfs/ukpga_19570011_en.pdf