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The Responsibility Of Mental Defectives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Vinit Haksar
Vinit Haksar
Affiliation:
Queen's College, Oxford.
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Extract

It is generally agreed that at least those who suffer from severe mental subnormality, like idiots, are not responsible for the antisocial actions that they may commit. Even Lady Wootton agrees that in the case of idiots and imbeciles ‘the defect is so great that no dispute is likely to arise, either as to the reality of the handicap or as to its effect in impairing capacity to conform to expected standards’.1 This passage, incidentally, contradicts some of her other views, e.g. the view that we can never make judgments about people's capacity.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 38 , Issue 143 , January 1963 , pp. 61 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1963

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References

page 61 note 1 Social Science and Social Pathology (1959), p. 254.Google Scholar

page 61 note 2 Tizard, : ‘The Prevalence of Mental Subnormality’, W.H.O. Bulletin, 1953.Google Scholar

page 61 note 3 Incidentally, it is worth distinguishing three different arguments.

page 62 note 1 Social Science and Social Pathology, pp. 256-57.Google Scholar

page 64 note 1 Kingsley Davies in his article: ‘Mental Hygiene and the Glass Structure’, Psychiatry, 1938, an article very highly thought of by Lady Wootton, uses a similar argument to the one Lad Wootton and Penrose used. Davies says ‘Be the causes of mental disorder what they may, it is easy to show that the criteria are always social. Sanity lies in the observance of the normative system of the group…. Thus we all forget, but a man who forgets the wrong things, such as his own home, his own city, or the excretory separation of the sexes, is definitely crazy.’ Here again the following seems to me to be the chain of reasoning that has led Davies to regard the criteria as culture-relative: Take the case of forgetting. We only regard the forgetting of some things, e.g. forgetting our name, as signs of sickness; there are other things which we can forget without being regarded as sick. What then is the basis of this distinction? Is it not just our normative system?Google Scholar