When someone does a terrible thing that seems senseless, such as murdering children, others will try to explain it. Some will say the person is mentally ill because a sane person would not do something so terrible and senseless. Others claim the person is evil because non-evil people would not do something so terrible and senseless. Both views are attempts to explain and understand what occurred. As might be imagined, the distinction between being evil and being mentally ill is a matter of concern.
There is the issue of responsibility and the correct way to respond to someone who has done something terrible. If a person acts from mental illness rather than evil, then it is reasonable to see them as not accountable to the degree they are ill. After all, if something terrible occurs because a person suffers from a physical illness, the person is generally not held accountable. For example, my running friend Jay told me that a person driving on his street had an unexpected seizure apparently due to a stroke. Their foot stomped on the gas pedal and the car rocketed down the street, smashing into another car and coming to a stop in someone’s back yard. The car could have easily plowed over my friend, injuring or killing him. However, since the person was not physically in control of his actions (and he had no reason to think he would have a seizure) he was rightfully not held morally accountable because he did nothing wrong. If a person had intentionally tried to murder my friend with his car, then that would be evil. Unless, perhaps, the driver was mentally ill in a way analogous to that seizure. In that case, the driver might be as innocent as the stroke victim.
There seem to be at least two ways that a mentally ill person might be absolved of moral responsibility to the degree they are mentally ill. I must note that I am writing as a philosopher about accountability. I am not a psychiatrist or psychologist and hence have no expertise to talk about mental illness as illness.
First, someone might be suffering from perceptual and interpretative disorders so they perceive and interpret reality incorrectly. For example, a person suffering from extreme paranoia might think that Jay intends to steal his brain, even though Jay has no such intention. In such a case, it would be reasonable to not see the person as evil if he tries to “protect” himself from Jay. In contrast, someone who wanted to kill Jay to rob his house or just for fun would seem to be acting from evil. Put in general terms, mental conditions that distort a person’s perception and interpretation of reality might lead them to do harm even though their moral reasoning might be normal.
Following Thomas Aquinas, it seems sensible to consider that such people might be following their conscience as best they can, only they have distorted information to work with in their decision-making process and this distortion results from mental illness.
Second, the person might be suffering from a disorder of judgment so that their ability to reason is defective due to a mental illness. The person might (or might not) have correct information, but their reasoning results in judgments that would be regarded as evil if made by a “normal” person. For example, a person might infer that because someone is wearing a blue hat that person should be killed.
One obvious concern is that “normal” people are bad at reasoning and commit fallacies with alarming regularity. As such, we need to distinguish bad reasoning from reasoning that would count as being mentally ill. One point worth considering is that bad reasoning could be fixed by education whereas a mental illness would not be fixed by learning, for example, logic.
A second obvious concern is discerning between mental illness as a cause of judgments and evil as a cause. After all, evil people can be seen as having a distorted sense of judgment when it comes to moral values. In fact, some philosophers (such as Kant and Socrates) regard evil as a mental defect or a form of irrationality. This has some intuitive appeal—after all, people who do terrible and senseless things seem to have something wrong with them. Whether this is a moral wrongness or health wrongness is, of course, the question.
One reason to sort out the difference is figuring out whether a person should be treated (cured) or punished (which might also cure the person). As noted above, a person who did something terrible because of mental illness would (to a degree) not be accountable and hence should not be punished (or the punishment should be tempered). For some it is tempting to claim that the choice of evil is an illusion because there is no free choice. Perhaps we do what we do because of the biochemical and electrical workings of the bodies that are us. As such, people should not be punished but repaired. Of course, there is a certain irony in such advice: if we do not have choice, then advising us not to punish makes no sense since we will just do what we do. Of course, the person advising against punishment would presumably have no choice but to give such advice.
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