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‘Irresistible Impulse’ and Moral Responsibility1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
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Should the insane and the mentally ill be held morally responsible for their actions? To answer ‘No’ to this question is to classify the mentally abnormal as not fully human: and indeed legal tradition has generally oscillated between assimilating the insane to brutes and assimilating them to children below the age of discretion, neither of these two categories being accountable in law for what they do. In what respect relevant to moral responsibility were the insane held to resemble brutes and children? In the case of brutes, the answer seems to have been that the doings of the insane appeared to lack whatever it is that marks out human actions as distinctively human. What the insane did could not be thought of as issuing from deliberation, or as capable of having issued from deliberation, but seemed rather to be the result of the unbridled operation of nature — if a diseased nature. The natural comparison with insane killings seemed to be, for example, the killing of birds by cats. This distinction between animal doings and human actions does not depend on Cartesian views about the workings of animals; the operation of nature need not be thought of as mechanical. The thought is simply that where there is no room for deliberation there is no room for moral appraisal. Children, on the other hand, though capable of distinctively human action — i.e. of deliberating about what they do — were held not to be capable of the relevant kind of deliberation: for they were held ‘not to know the difference between right and wrong’.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1977
Footnotes
1
I am grateful to David Hirschmann, David Wiggins and Andrew Woodfield for criticisms of earlier versions of this paper.
References
NOTES
2 This did not imply anything very subtle; evidence of concealment was acceptable as evidence of knowing the difference between right and wrong, presumably because it was taken as showing knowledge that the doer ought not to have done the deed. But concealment could, of course, be just the result of a desire to avoid unpleasant consequences, and not at all of shame or consciousness of wrong-doing. So by this criterion, knowing the difference between right and wrong appears to collapse into knowing that some things are forbidden.
3 Walker, Nigel, Crime and Insanity in England, Edinburgh University Press, 1968, p. 155.Google Scholar
4 Sacks, Oliver, Awakenings, Duckworth, 1973, p. 233 footnote.Google ScholarPubMed
5 Suppose, for example, her friend had left the double-doors open and Miss Z. had tried to reach her bed by the figure-of-eight round the kitchen, knowing that she risked miscalculating the angle and consequently breaking the vase. If she then decides to take the risk and does in fact break the vase, this outcome is one that she has foreseen but not intended; and her friend could justly reproach her with having taken the risk. Some measure of responsibility for what happened still accrues to her.
6 de Rougemont, Denis, L'Amour et l'Occident, Paris 1939, p. 39.Google Scholar
7 In Moral Concepts, ed. Feinberg, Joel, O.U.P. 1969, p. 104Google Scholar. Aquinas's Latin original runs as follows:
Ad quartum dicendum, quod ille qui habet scientiam in universali, propter passionem impeditur ne possit sub ilia universali sumere, et ad conclusionem pervenire; sed assumit sub alia universali, quam suggerit inclinatio passionis, et sub ea concludit. Unde Philosophus dicit, quod syllogismus incontinentis habet quatuor propositiones, duas particulares et duas universales, quarum una est rationis, puta nullam fornicationem esse committendam; alia est passionis, puta delectationem esse sectandam. Passio igitur ligat rationem, neassumat et concludat sub prima; unde ea durante assumit et concludit sub secunda.
It will be seen that my objections perhaps relate more to Davidson's presentation of Aquinas (particularly of the example) than to Aquinas himself.
8 ‘Deliberation and Practical Reasoning’, PAS, 1975–1976.Google Scholar
9 The notion of different strengths of desire I have in mind here is that deriving from our experience of appetites of different degrees of urgency. Just as all such degrees may be amenable to reason, so all such degrees may be inamenable to reason.
10 The fourth case is based on the composer Erik Satie, but the case as described here differs considerably from what is related of him. I would not wish to claim either that Satie was mad or that he suffered from irresistible impulse.