Résumés du XXXIIIe Congrès International de droit et de santé ...

Criminal Responsibility and Ethics: The Relevance of Susan Wolf’s Account ofSanityGerben Meynen, Tilburg University (g.meynen@utv.nl)Different jurisdictions may have different legal approaches to the insanity defense, yet they allreflect the same ethical intuition that mental disorders may excuse a person for a crime. And, asit appears, they all have their advantages as well as disadvantages. In this presentation I willconsider the possibility of a metaethics-based approach to legal insanity. The philosopher SusanWolf has argued that people can only be considered fully responsible for their actions when theyare sane. In this presentation I explore the relevance of Wolf’s account of (in)sanity forpsychiatric assessments of criminal responsibility (Meynen, 2012). I argue that, although somerevisions of her account are required, it could be helpful to forensic psychiatric practice. I alsodiscuss some limitations of such a metaethics-based approach to insanity.Delusions and Criminal ResponsibilitySusanna Radovic, University of Gothenburg (susanna@filosofi.gu.se)How and when should a false perception of reality exempt someone from legal responsibility?According to most criminal laws, a person can have criminal intent, but if he has a false view ofthe world, he may still not be held accountable for his deeds. An example from a new Swedishgovernmental report (SOU 2012:17) is that a person who believes he is in war (but is in fact not)and kills someone (a real person) should not be punished.However, this concept of false beliefs is not capricious; most jurisdictions (including theSwedish proposed law) use the criteria that the false perception of reality should be due to amental disorder. This presupposes that there is an important difference between false beliefs in apsychiatric context and “non-psychiatric” false beliefs. The standard definition from the DSM-IVis that a delusion is a false belief that is held with unusual conviction and that is not ordinarilyaccepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture. This definition raises severaldifficulties. There are examples of delusions that do not meet all of these criteria (e.g., delusionsneed not be false, and they can be shared by several people). There are also kinds of ideas that domeet these criteria, but are not normally viewed as delusions (e.g., some ideas that aremaintained by religious or cultural subgroups).Here, I will present different ways of defining delusions in the psychiatric sense, and discusstheir usefulness when it comes to assessing accountability in a legal context.The Principle of Responsibility in Healthcare Prioritizations23