Abstract Book - International Academy of Law and Mental Health

with unusual conviction and that is not ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’sculture or subculture. This definition raises several difficulties. There are examples of delusionsthat do not meet all of these criteria (e.g., delusions need not be false, and they can be shared byseveral people). There are also kinds of ideas that do meet these criteria, but are not normallyviewed as delusions (e.g., some ideas that are maintained by religious or cultural subgroups).This presentation outlines different ways of defining delusions in the psychiatric sense, anddiscuss their usefulness when it comes to assessing accountability in a legal context.Hate Crime, Mental Disorder, and Criminal ResponsibilityChristian Munthe, University of Gothenburg (christian.munthe@gu.se)Hate crimes are ordinary crimes committed in connection with a negatively prejudiced, biased,disparaging, or antagonistic attitude towards the victim in terms of a perceived membership of asocial group. Some hate crimes are elaborate political acts of terror or elaborate persecution,some are so-called “hate speech,” but the overwhelming majority are instances of mundanecriminality, involving everything from murder to theft and harassment. Hate crime policies reston the idea that the bias or “hate” feature make such crimes worse, and that offenders for thisreason should be held more firmly responsible. At the same time, the attitude of making a crimeinto a hate crime involves more or less distorted ideas about reality, together with a willingnessto transgress social norms on that basis. In some cases, these views amount to major delusions,resistant to rational scrutiny. In other cases, we may move closer to a point where the beliefdesirecluster can be seen as ordinary negligence. Thus, many hate crimes have features that maybe argued acting to diminish responsibility according to standard ideas in the philosophy ofpunishment. The presentation maps underlying value conflicts, tensions, and incoherence in legalpractice connected to this complexity of criminal law.The Principle of Responsibility in Healthcare PrioritizationsNiklas Juth, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden (niklas.juth@ki.se)Principles of responsibility in health care claim that those whose need for health careinterventions is a consequence of their own voluntary choices, choices for which it would bereasonable to hold them responsible, should receive lower priority. Such principles have been outof fashion for a long time in legislation and bioethical literature. They have been consideredarbitrary due to the difficulty of determining who can reasonably be held responsible for theirhealth, and moralizing, due to its tendency to focus on some causes of poor health (like smokingand eating) and not others (like fire-fighting and abstaining from pregnancy). However, in recentyears, principles have received renewed attention and are defended again to an increasing extent.These defenses commonly rest on some form of so-called “luck egalitarianism,” according towhich justice requires us to cater to the claims of victims of bad brute luck before there is an12