Liability, moral consciousness and psychopatology. International comparative profiles

Abstract

The paper considers the concepts of intentionality, judgment, desire, awareness and the relative scientific, psychological, psychiatric and neurophysiological studies, including the concept of "moral consciousness" and the evolution of moral standards, marked out by Piaget and Kolberg. There are several references to a psychopathology point of view, for which mental infirmity is independent from the verification of an organic substrate and classification in official nosology (it is said, then, that "it is true that mental infirmity can exist even in the absence of a typical disease of the mind, framed in the scientific classification of mental illness, it is still necessary that a defect in part descended from a morbid state, dependent on a pathological changes in clinically ascertained" (as Cass, Sec. I, n. 9739/1997). The concept of illness, then widens to include not only the organic psychoses, but psychic morbid disorders such as psychopathy, neuroses, disorders of affect too: under investigation, therefore, it is no longer the person-body, but the person-psyche. In psychiatry there are existing guidelines which assert an "integrated model" of mental illness, able to explain mental disorder based on different explanatory hypotheses of its nature and origin: essentially consisting of "an integrated vision that takes into account all the variables, biological, psychological, social, relational, that come into play in causing the disease", in such a manner developing from the monocausal etiology of mental illness vision, to a "multifactorial integrated" conception.