Piers Benn

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.2 (2003) 189-192 [Access article in PDF] The Responsibility of the Psychopathic Offender:Commentary on Ciocchetti Piers Benn Christopher Ciocchetti has valuable things to say in his article. He takes as his starting point some common ground between his views and my own, especially about the importance of Strawsonian participant reactive attitudes to our understanding of psychopathy. But he proceeds to claim that the distinguishing feature of psychopaths is not their lack of such attitudes but their inability to understand how relationships are affected by their behavior—and indeed their inability, in some sense, to understand interpersonal relationships at all. He also takes me to task for claiming that the participant reactive attitudes (PRAs)—presumably he includes things like resentment, indignation, gratitude, and so on—are essentially communicative. For him, this is too strong a claim, because we can imagine cases when such attitudes are expressed, but without any communicative purpose.On the latter point, I concede that people often do express PRAs even though they know such expression will have no effect on those whose behavior or attitudes gave rise to them. Different things can explain this lack of effect. For example, imagine a normally responsive person who obstinately fails to see that a certain judgment applies to him or her in a particular case. Take a woman who repeatedly expresses frustration and anger toward her husband for failing to do any domestic chores, but without having the slightest effect on him. Eventually her expressions of anger serve more as an emotional release than as an attempt to get him to change. As in Ciocchetti's example of Mary's reaction to her calls not being returned, she gives up in the end, expressing anger but without any hope of getting through to the other person.But there is another possible explanation for her anger: suppose the husband's failure to contribute to the housework does not arise from his inability to respond to moral claims upon him, but because he thinks he is already doing his duty by being the sole wage earner, and is quite intransigent about this. In that case, the woman might still see him, in general, as a proper object of her PRAs. She sees his fault as local rather than general; a failure, or perhaps even an inability, to think properly about this particular issue rather than about moral demands in general. She might regard her angry outbursts as justified, not because they will have any effect on him now, [End Page 189] but because they are a proper participant response to some earlier failure, which he was then able to do something about—maybe he neglected to think properly about fairness when forming his moral outlook.Compare this case, though, with someone who just does not understand the nature of relationships and the obligations they impose. This is the sort of case Ciocchetti has in mind. Anger is, on his account, understandable, not because it is meant to communicate anything, but because it is "an expression with no further aim at all" (2003, p. 178). On this point, I agree that people sometimes do express anger (or other emotions) without trying to induce a response in someone. At the same time, there is a significant difference between times when we do hope to elicit an appropriate participant response like shame, and times when we do not. When we express such attitudes without any hope of a participant response, we miss something that is, if not essential to, at least typical of such expressions. Getting angry with the neighbor's aggressive dog or scrounging cat is understandable, but it is simply not the same kind of thing as getting angry with a normal, rational adult. The typical case, maybe the necessarily typical case, is when we experience or express such emotions toward, or at least concerning, beings capable of PRAs—and, again typically if not always, such beings are capable of understanding when and why the PRAs of others are directed toward them.But the thrust of Ciocchetti's paper lies not...

It has often been thought that there is a special difficulty involved in conceiving of one’s own death. It is easy to think that, while one can easily conceive of, and acknowledge, the death of another person, one cannot ever conceive of what it is for oneself to die. Various things have been inferred from this. The most extreme inference is that one’s own death, or, to be more precise, one’s own non-existence, is actually impossible, since what is inconceivable is impossible. One might also try to infer that one’s existence had no beginning either, although this view is less popular. But even if one does not embrace such extravagant conclusions, conceiving of one’s own ceasing-to-be can easily seem to present a great difficulty. Some existentialist writers and theologians influenced by existentialism have made great play of the supposed mystery. Paul Edwards writes of the temptation to think of death as “existence in a dark, impenetrable abode,” as if non-existence, or the absence of experience, were in fact a peculiar kind of experience which presents us with a great mystery. On this view, even when we conceive of the death of others, we cannot grasp the essential mystery. As Heidegger puts it: “And even if, by thus Being there alongside, it were possible and feasible for us to make plain to ourselves ‘psychologically’ the dying of Others, this would by no means let us grasp the way-to-be which we would then have in mind—namely, coming-to-an-end. We are asking about the ontological meaning of the dying of the person who dies, as a possibility-of-Being which belongs to his Being. We are not asking about the way in which the deceased has Dasein-with or is still-a-Dasein with those who are left behind.” One might make a similar point as follows: I cannot observe my own passing from the world, and observe the world’s continued existence. Once I cease to exist, then “my world” finishes. Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus: “The world is my world”—and while there is a way in which this is obviously false, it captures much of the intuition under discussion.

This article offers a qualified defence of the view that there is a moral difference between telling lies to one's patients, and deceiving them without lying. However, I take issue with certain arguments offered by Jennifer Jackson in support of the same conclusion. In particular, I challenge her claim that to deny that there is such a moral difference makes sense only within a utilitarian framework, and I cast doubt on the aptness of some of her examples of non-lying deception. But I argue that lies have a greater tendency to damage trust than does non-lying deception, and suggest that since many doctors do believe there is a moral boundary between the two types of deception, encouraging them to violate that boundary may have adverse general effects on their moral sensibilities