Philosophy

Is it ethically permissible to use deception in psychological experiments? We argue that, provided some requirements are satisfied, it is possible to use deceptive methods without producing significant harm to research participants and without any significant violation of their autonomy. We also argue that methodological deception is at least at the moment the only effective means by which one can acquire morally significant information about certain behavioral tendencies. Individuals in general, and research participants in particular, gain self-knowledge which can help them improve their autonomous decision-making. The community gains collective self-knowledge that, once shared, can play a role in shaping education, informing policies and in general creating a more efficient and just society.

Do non-human animals have rights? The answer to this question depends on whether animals have morally relevant mental properties. Mindreading is the human activity of ascribing mental states to other organisms. Current knowledge about the evolution and cognitive structure of mindreading indicates that human ascriptions of mental states to non-human animals are very inaccurate. The accuracy of human mindreading can be improved with the help of scientific studies of animal minds. But the scientific studies by themselves do not by themselves solve the problem of how to map psychological similarities (and differences) between humans and animals onto a distinction between morally relevant and morally irrelevant mental properties. The current limitations of human mindreading – whether scientifically aided or not – have practical consequences for the rational justification of claims about which rights (if any) non-human animals should be accorded.

It is far too early to say what global impact the neurocognitive and neuropsychiatric sciences will have on our intuitions about moral responsibility. And it is far too early to say whether the notion of moral responsibility will survive this impact (and if so, in what form). But it is certainly worth starting to think about the local impact that these sciences can or should have on some of our distinctions and criteria. It might be possible to use some of the tools offered by these sciences in order to refine or revise some of the categories currently used, without – for the time being at least – worrying too much about the fate of the notion of moral responsibility. This is an area where a piecemeal approach might be more productive: only after an evaluation of many distinct cases and situations it will be possible to say something general about the current notion of moral responsibility.
In this article, we will focus on a single clinical case: a young man who has been convicted for assault on a neighbour and whose sentence was affected by a pre-existing diagnosis of mental illness. We will use this case, and an analysis of the similarities and differences between this case and other possible cases, in order to raise some (local but important) issues about the implications that discoveries in neuropsychology and neuropsychiatry can have for the way moral responsibility is attributed to agents and, more specifically, to agents with diagnoses of mental illnesses.

The main purpose of this paper is to explore the implications of the epistemic faults of delusions and confabulations for the autonomy of the people affected by these conditions. The issue whether autonomy is compromised and to what extent is of great practical relevance. Do people affected by psychiatric disorders that manifest with delusions and confabulations have capacity to consent to treatment? More generally, should they be allowed to make, and deemed responsible for, significant decisions that affect their well-being?

We propose to look at autonomy as self-governance and to make a distinction between (a) whether one has the capacity to govern oneself and (b) whether one is successful at governing oneself. We argue that the capacity for self-governance depends on the capacity to develop a self-narrative which encompasses the capacity to endorse attitudes and actions on the basis of reasons. Success in self-governance depends on the coherence of self-narratives and on their correspondence to real life events.

Our thesis is that, in most cases, people with delusions or confabulations have the capacity for self-governance, but are unlikely to be successful at governing themselves. This is because they are likely to demonstrate failures of rationality and self-knowledge that impact on the coherence of their self-narratives and the correspondence between these narratives and real life events. Although in some cases the very capacity for self-governance may be compromised (e.g., in ‘primary’ delusions where no reasons are offered in support of the delusion or in delusions and confabulations which occur at advanced stages of dementia) our claim is that having delusions and confabulations does not necessarily imply a lack of capacity for self-governance. That said, delusions and confabulations interfere with the exercise of self-governance.

Various authors have argued that progress in the neurocognitive and neuropsychiatric sciences might threaten the commonsense understanding of how the mind generates behavior, and, as a consequence, it might also threaten the commonsense ways of attributing moral responsibility, if not the very notion of moral responsibility. In the case of actions that result in undesirable outcomes (e.g., someone being harmed), the commonsense conception—which is reflected in sophisticated ways in the legal conception—tells us that there are circumstances in which the agent is entirely and fully responsible for the bad outcome (and deserves to be punished accordingly) and circumstances in which the agent is not at all responsible for the bad outcome (and thereby the agent does not deserve to be punished).

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler have been arguing for what they named libertarian paternalism (henceforth LP). Their proposal generated extensive debate as to how and whether LP might lead down a full-blown paternalistic slippery slope. LP has the indubitable merit of having hardwired the best of the empirical psychological and sociological evidence into public and private policy making. It is unclear, though, to what extent the implementation of policies so constructed could enhance the capability for the exercise of an autonomous citizenship. Sunstein and Thaler submit it that in most of the cases in which one is confronted with a set of choices, some default option must be picked out. In those cases whoever devises the features of the set of options ought to rank them according to the moral principle of non-maleficence and possibly to that of beneficence. In this paper we argue that LP can be better implemented if there is a preliminary deliberative debate among the stakeholders that elicits their preferences, and makes it possible to rationally defend them.

In this paper we explore two aspects of gradualism as they apply to the phenomenon of delusions, that is, the acknowledgement that it is difficult to distinguish pathological from non-pathological beliefs and the defence of the view that there is considerable continuity between delusional and other epistemically faulty beliefs. We also identify the implications of these two aspects of gradualism for questions about one’s moral and legal responsibility for action that is motivated by one’s delusional beliefs. In the first section of the paper, we argue that an effective demarcation between pathological and non-pathological beliefs cannot be successfully achieved on mere epistemic grounds, that is, on the basis of the epistemic quality of the relevant belief-forming and belief-maintaining processes. We offer some reasons to endorse the thesis that delusional beliefs are continuous with other epistemically faulty beliefs. In the second section of the paper, we examine the implications of the continuity thesis for the association—common in everyday thinking but also in ethical and legal frameworks—between being diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder featuring delusions and having reduced or no responsibility for action that is motivated by one’s delusions. We consider some interesting cases of agents who committed crimes related to the content of their epistemically faulty beliefs, and ask whether their beliefs qualifying as delusions makes a difference to whether such agents were responsible for their actions. Finally, we make some suggestions about how the continuity thesis can inform attributions of moral and legal responsibility for action.

Prendendo come spunto alcuni aspetti della Legge 40/2004 in materia di procreazione medicalmente assistita e il suo tortuoso iter legislativo e giudiziario, in questo articolo sosteniamo come la delega democratica e gli strumenti classici di partecipazione diretta della popolazione si mostrino inadatti a trattare delicati temi bioetici. Di assoluta rilevanza, in questo senso, potrebbe essere la funzione svolta dal Comitato Nazionale per la Bioetica (CNB). In questo articolo sosteniamo, tuttavia, che il CNB sta svolgendo in maniera inadeguata il ruolo che potrebbe e dovrebbe ricoprire e sviluppiamo quindi una proposta di sua riforma in senso deliberativo e realmente partecipativo. L’efficacia delle linee guida che proponiamo in questo contributo è attualmente oggetto di una sperimentazione che prevede l’implementazione di un forum online per la discussione della regolamentazione nazionale del mercato dei test genetici di suscettibilità medica.