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]

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.