Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Olivia Siegfried, currently studying for a Master’s degree in the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham. Olivia is interested in youth mental health, personality disorders, and forensic psychology, and adopts a social constructionist perspective to understand these issues. This is part of a series of posts by students of the Philosophy and Ethics of Mental Health and Wellbeing module at the Institute for Mental Health. They share some of their views on key topics discussed in the module. Olivia Siegfried Responsibility without blame As personality disorders are notoriously hard to treat, Hannah Pickard has put forward the ‘responsibility without blame’ approach ( Pickard, 2011 ) for clinicians to adopt to foster the best clinical outcomes. Although sounding inherently paradoxical, we can hold people responsible without blaming them by segregating responsibility from morality and instead defining it through a person’s agency.  Taking responsibility for...

This post is by Jane Kisbey, PhD student at the University of Birmingham. Jane talks about her research on psychopathy and moral responsibility in this video interview . Jane Kisbey Some philosophers have recognised that in psychopaths there appears to be a failing in prudential concern. Philosophers characterise this in various ways, however I offer a new conceptualisation of the psychopath. My hypothesis says that we can best understand psychopaths as extreme future discounters . This account draws upon Neil Levy’s (2014) account to substantiate my hypothesis. However, there is a crucial difference between mine and Levy’s view. Whilst Levy thinks that psychopaths are unable to imagine what it is like to be a future person, it seems that this is not the case. It is rather that psychopaths cannot see why they should care about their future self, because for psychopaths, it is only what happens now they should care about. Levy argues that psychopaths have an impaired ability to mental...

This post is by Meghan Griffith  (Davidson College). Meghan Griffith In “ Narrative Capacity and Moral Responsibility ”, I argue that our ability to understand and tell stories plays a role in moral responsibility. One standard approach to moral responsibility involves “reasons-responsiveness.” If we can recognize and react to reasons for acting, then it seems that we are in control of our behavior, and therefore responsible (see Fischer and Ravizza 1998 for an influential account). I think “narrative capacity” enhances our sensitivity to reasons. Narrative capacity is a way of making sense of the world (Velleman 2003, 1) and involves understanding the “meaning-affecting” relation between events (Rosati 2013, 34). In other words, we come to understand and interpret the events in our lives within the context of a story. Each event is not interpreted on its own. Instead, its meaning is “conditioned by” its relation to other events (Schechtman 2007, 162). For example, an event might b...

Luca Malatesti and Filip Čeč collaborated on the project Classification and explanations of antisocial personality disorder and moral and legal responsibility in the context of the Croatian mental health and care law ( CEASCRO ), funded by the Croatian Science Foundation (Grant HRZZ-IP-2013-11-8071).  Both are based in the  Department of Philosophy  of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka (Croatia). Luca is associate professor of philosophy and works mainly in philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychiatry. Filip is assistant professor of philosophy and his interests include the metaphysical problem of free will and moral responsibility, and the history of psychiatry. In this post Luca and Filip summarize their chapter " Psychopathy, Identification and Mental Time Travel ", that is contained in the collection edited by Filip Grgić and Davor Pećnjak,  Free Will & Action . Psychopaths are characterised by a callous, manipulative a...

This post is by Katrina Sifferd , Professor of Philosophy at Elmhurst College regarding her recent paper ‘ Are Psychopaths Legally Insane? ’ co-authored with Anneli Jefferson , Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Philosophy department at the University of Birmingham. Exploring the nature of psychopathy has become an interdisciplinary project: psychologists and neuroscientists are working to understand whether psychopathy constitutes a mental disorder or illness, and if yes, of what sort; and moral philosophers and legal scholars are using theories of psychopathy to understand the mental capacities necessary for culpable action and whether psychopaths are morally and legally responsible. In our recent paper , Anneli Jefferson and I argue that a diagnosis of psychopathy is generally irrelevant to a legal insanity plea. It isn’t clear that psychopathy constitutes a true mental disorder; but even if it is a disorder, tests for legal insanity require that specific mental defi...

Sometimes, agents should not be held responsible for what they have done, for example because they lacked relevant information when acting, their reasoning was impaired or because they had insufficient control over their actions. However, it is controversial under which conditions we should refrain from attributing full responsibility. On May 18, we looked at some such hard cases in a one day workshop. In the morning, speakers focused on non-clinical cases, in the afternoon, the focus was on impaired responsibility in individuals suffering from mental disorders. In the first talk of the day, Philip Robichaud asked whether the presence of behavioural nudges make the nudged agent less praise- or blameworthy for what she has done under the influence of nudging. He argued that the extent to which agents' decisions are influenced does not differ fundamentally from other familiar cases where situational factors affect agents’ decisions. The main problem Philip identified for...

This post is by Katharine Chisholm (pictured above), Research Fellow in the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham. In this post she discusses the study she and colleagues conducted of mental health education for young people, published in their paper  ' Impact of contact on adolescents' mental health literacy and stigma: the SchoolSpace Cluster Randomised Controlled Trial ' published in BMJ Open.  Educating young people about mental health and ill-health is important. Mental disorders impact young people disproportionally, with around two thirds of mental illnesses having their onset prior to the age of twenty-five. Young people also tend to have a relatively poor understanding of what mental illness is, and with a lack of mental health education in schools, young people report relying on popular media or cult images to gain an understanding of what mental illness might look like. These representations tend to be sensationalist at best and wi...

This post is by Marion Godman (pictured above), researcher at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the Philosophy of Social Sciences (TINT) at Helsinki University. In this post she draws on a discussion she lead at the Moral Psychology Interdisciplinary Workshop , CRASSH, on 9th October 2015.  As intriguing as reasoning about psychopathy is, it is also bound to make us uneasy. People with the condition commit a disproportionate number of crimes compared to other psychiatric groups (Coid et al. 2009 ) and are also over-represented in the criminal statistics concerning recidivism, predatory violence and serial killings (Hare 1999 ). So for legal and policy purposes, it is imperative to think about these far from perfect minds prone to manipulation and violence. But at the same this makes it difficult to keep one’s head cool when approaching psychopathy. How do we think about the disorder without disapproval and disdain clouding our judgment? Or could it be...

This post is by Marko Jurjako (pictured above) and Luca Malatesti (pictured below), collaborators on the project Classification and explanations of antisocial personality disorder and moral and legal responsibility in the context of the Croatian mental health and care law (CEASCRO) , funded by the Croatian Science Foundation and based in the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka (Croatia). Marko is a junior researcher on the project and his interests lie in moral psychology and evolutionary approaches to metaethics. Luca is assistant professor of philosophy and works mainly in philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychiatry. In this post they summarise their paper ‘ Instrumental Rationality in Psychopathy: Implications from Learning Tasks ’, forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology. Psychopathy is a personality disorder that involves traits such as pathological lying, manipulativeness, superficial charm, no or little concern for the ...

This post is by  Marijana Vujošević  (pictured above), who is working on a project on Immanuel Kant’s moral psychology at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). In this post Marijana summarises her approach in a new paper 'Conscience as the Rational Deficit of Psychopaths'.  While writing my paper on Kant’s theory of conscience (' Kant on Conscience: The Judge in the Mirror '), I had become very interested in issues regarding lack of conscience and immorality in psychopathy. Psychopaths are commonly described as individuals without conscience. Even if we weaken this claim by stating that they possess an underdeveloped conscience (which I propose we do), we still need to explain whether this impairment affects their competence in judging moral issues and in being motivated to act morally, and if so how. In spite of the usual portrayal of psychopaths, moral psychologists do not find the link between psychopaths’ impaired conscience and their moral dys...

This post is by André Martens, pictured above. Here André summarises his recent paper ‘ Paternalism in Psychiatry: Anorexia Nervosa, Decision-Making Capacity, and Compulsory Treatment’ , appearing in New Perspectives on Paternalism and Health Care edited by Thomas Schramme. Currently, decision-making capacity (DMC) is intensively discussed in disciplines such as bioethics, philosophy of psychiatry, and psychology. Some authors regard it as (mental) competence. But what exactly is DMC? What are the mental preconditions of making genuine decisions? And what role does DMC play in ethics, especially regarding the normative status of treatment decisions of psychiatric patients with reduced, or even completely lacking DMC? In my paper I try to answer these questions. Initially, I looked at the so-called traditional account of DMC, which is associated with the work of Paul S. Appelbaum and Thomas Grisso , among others. Here, DMC is formulated in terms of certain abilities, each bein...

On 9th October CRASSH organised a Moral Psychology Interdisciplinary Conference in Cambridge, featuring keynote talks, panel discussions and discussion groups. This is a brief report on the sessions in which I participated. The first session was a panel symposium with Josh Greene (Harvard) and Molly Crockett (Oxford) on the future of moral psychology chaired by Richard Holton. Josh started discussing the assumption in popular culture and the media that there is a “moral faculty” where all moral beliefs and decisions can be found, somewhere in the brain. But this is a myth according to him: morality is like a vehicle. “Vehicle” is a category, but what makes something a vehicle is not its internal mechanics. What makes something a vehicle is its function. Same with morality. If morality is a thing, people who study morality are interested in its function. The processes, operating principles and behavioural patterns involved in moral thinking are not distinct to morality. Molly mad...

Being Amoral by Thomas Schramme This post is by Thomas Schramme . Thomas introduces his new edited collection,  Being Amoral: Psychopathy and Moral Incapacity (MIT Press) . It would be useful to know what kind of capacities human beings require in order to be moral. This piece of information would have tremendous practical significance, as we could try to organize institutions, such as education, to provide an environment where these capacities can develop and flourish. It would also be an interesting theoretical piece of information, as philosophers have for a long time quarrelled over the issue whether moral capacities are mainly due to reason or emotion. One way of making progress in this debate on the necessary faculties in becoming a moral person is to study people who apparently lack morality; who are, in philosophical parlance, amoral persons. There seem to be indeed real-life exemplars of such amoral persons, and to study them might lead us exactly in the de...