Madness and Moral Responsibility

The analogy with disease underlying the medical view of madness is found wanting, particularly as it is reflected in contemporary legal trends, and so also are certain tenets of anti-psychiatry. The widespread acceptance of moral attitudes concerning madness and moral responsibility was associated with the appearance of a secular and medical understanding of madness which gained significance with the decline of an earlier, religious one. In the medieval period, demonic possession was believed to cause madness: depriving people of their reason, according to the fifteenth-century Malleus Malificarum was Lucifer’s sixth way of injuring humanity. The medical view of madness is germane to the belief that the insane are blameless in having their condition. The ‘irrationality’ of madness when that term merely connotes deviance is unremarkable. Philosophers have consistently disregarded madness in their discussions of irrationality.