Metaphysics and Morals: Moore's Medicine for a Misunderstood Marriage

Abstract

Contemporary Americans seem fascinated, indeed obsessed, with continuing clash between law and psychiatry. Few legal policies have captured popular and professional attention as extensively as have insanity defense, diminished capacity defense, and civil commitment process. This fascination should surprise no one, for in confronting these topics, we confront essential questions about human beings: Why do people act? When should they be held responsible for their actions? When should they be excused? The principles underlying law and psychiatry seem to supply widely disparate if not irreconcilable answers to these questions: Where law sees a person with free will and rationality, psychiatry beholds a creature controlled by unconscious, conflicting mental forces producing behavior that is anything but rational. Law and Psychiatry repudiates this account. Michael Moore argues that widespread view of law and psychiatry as fundamentally in conflict rests on superficial and simplistic analysis. It is his thesis that the legal and psychiatric views of minds and persons do not contradict one another, and that nothing in psychiatric view of persons contradicts law's presupposition that a person is an autonomous and rational agent (at 2). Moore constructs this argument by painstakingly unpacking philosophical presuppositions of two disciplines. He seeks thereby to undermine what has become conventional wisdom about law and psychiatry. Moore's analysis is minutely detailed and reflects considerable research in philosophy and psychoanalysis. At times reader untrained in these fields