Steve Matthews

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder) is a condition in which a person appears to possess more than one personality, and sometimes very many. Some recent criminal cases involving defendants with DID have resulted in "not guilty" verdicts, though the defense is not always successful in this regard. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Stephen Behnke have argued that we should excuse DID sufferers from responsibility, only if at the time of the act the person was insane (typically delusional); otherwise the presumption should be that persons with DID are indeed responsible for their actions. We find their interpretation of DID and of the way in which the requirements for criminal insanity relate to this condition worrying and likely to result in injustice to DID sufferers. Our thesis is that persons with DID cannot be responsible for their actions if the usual features of the condition are present. A person with DID is a single person in the grip of a very serious mental disorder. By focusing on the features of DID which have, as we argue, the effect of deluding the patient, we try to show that such a person is unable to fulfill the ordinary conditions of responsible agency (namely, autonomy and self-control).

The quality of our public discourse – think of the climate change debate for instance – is never very high. A day spent observing it reveals a litany of misrepresentation and error, argumentative fallacy, and a general lack of good will. In this paper I focus on a microcosmic aspect of these practices: the use of two types of argument – the argumentum ad hominem and appeal to authority – and a way in which they are related. Public debate is so contaminated by the misuse of the ad hominem tactic that it is important to have an understanding of one of the ways in which its use may be legitimate. So readers who might have expected an analysis of the ad hominem fallacy will, on the contrary, be presented with an account of one of the places for its potential success. In ad hominem, arguers are viewed as legitimate constitutive targets for their own argument; in authority arguments, arguers provide a legitimate constitutive warrant for an argument they deploy. These types of argument are connected in so far as the identities of persons deploying them carry the cognitive weight of the argument. If authority arguments sometimes deserve to succeed, ad hominem attacks on them are potentially legitimate. An important motivation for this analysis is that in identifying the success conditions for one of the ad hominem types we attain some clarity in the evaluation of their use.

Among theories of personal identity over time the simple view has not been popular among philosophers, but it nevertheless remains the default view among non philosophers. It may be construed either as the view that nothing grounds a claim of personal identity over time, or that something quite simple (a soul perhaps) is the ground. If the former construal is accepted, a conspicuous difficulty is that the condition of causal dependence between person-stages is absent. But this leaves such a view open to an objection from the failure to provide a condition of individuation. If, on the other hand something like a soul is said to ground personal identity over time, such an account turns out to be more suited to a kind of continuity view.

Effective agency, according to contemporary Kantians, requires a unity of purpose both at a time, in order that we may eliminate conflict among our motives, and over time, because many of the things we do form part of longer-term projects and make sense only in the light of these projects and life plans. Call this the unity of agency thesis. This thesis can be regarded as a normative constraint on accounts of personal identity and indeed on accounts of what it is to have the life of a person in the broad, rather than narrowly biological sense. It is also a fundamental condition of social life that persons within society fulfill a range of longitudinal roles: parenthood is one such obvious example, as are teachers, health professionals, engineers, artists, and many others. The fulfillment of these and other valuable social roles requires that agents have the capacity to rationally conceive of themselves as engaged in these roles and subject to the demands of them. To be unable to fulfill any such longitudinal social roles is to have a life deficient in value. The unity of agency is thus, we argue, something we rationally strive for, and something to be morally promoted. Psychiatric states that undermine the unity of agency are morally and rationally disvaluable. Using the example of dissociation, we explain how one such state may have this undermining or disruptive effect on the unity of agency. The therapeutic ends for psychiatry in conditions involving such states are thus seen more globally as the restoration of effective agency, that is, unified agency.

In this essay I want to focus on a quality inherent in that range of feelings we associate with an experience described as ‘flow’. Csíkszentmihályi describes it as a state that arises in people involved in some skilled activity who become fully immersed in it; they reach a state of ‘intrinsic motivation’ and loss of self-awareness; their actions seem to occur spontaneously so that they seem to become simultaneously a passive witness to their own highly skilled agency. There are skilled movements and manoeuvres in sailing in which the equipment becomes, as we say, “an extension of oneself”. Under these conditions the sailor has usually reached such a level of proficiency that the state of flow just described may obtain. Moments of flow are relatively rare, and are highly prized by those who know what to look for. Losing oneself in the activity in this way is one of its highpoints, a point which makes it thereby significant and meaningful. Excellence in sailing confers a kind of fulfilment we rarely attain. It is, for this reason, an ideal worth striving for.

Social persons routinely tell themselves and others richly elaborated autobiographical stories filled with details about deeds, plans, roles, motivations, values, and character. Saul, let us imagine, is someone who once sailed the world as a young adventurer, going from port to port and living a gypsy existence. In telling his new acquaintance, Jess, of his former exotic life, he shines a light on his present character and this may guide to some extent their interaction here and now. Perhaps Jess also spent time at one of these port locations; perhaps their paths might even have crossed. They might be drawn into recounting some common events that indeed do establish a common link. Did they visit a certain famous landmark? Did they meet up at the same bars? And so on. When we open up to friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and close others through the stories we tell them, we do so by revealing bits of ourselves.

We have argued elsewhere that moral responsibility over time depends in part upon the having of psychological connections which facilitate forms of self-control. In this chapter we explore the importance of mental time travel - our ordinary ability to mentally travel to temporal locations outside the present, involving both memory of our personal past and the ability to imagine ourselves in the future - to our agential capacities for planning and control. We suggest that in many individuals with dissociative disorders, forms of amnesia, or other frontal lobe damage, our capacity for mental time travel is impaired, resulting in commensurate losses to agency autonomy, and a forensic condition essential for holding persons responsible: in legal terms, the capacity for mens rea.

In some recent criminal cases in the United States a defense has been mounted based on an affliction known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder). The crux of the defense rests on the proposition that a dominant personality was incapable of appreciating the nature and quality of wrongfulness of conduct caused by an alter personality. This defense has been successful in some cases, but not others, and so philosophers, lawyers, and psychiatrists are now in debate in an attempt to clarify the issues. One of the salient issues involves the question of personal identity between the individual who allegedly committed the offense and the individual who stands accused. Stephen Behnke and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong have recently put forward a test for establishing personal identity in these cases. In this discussion, I present reasons for rejecting their proposal.

In what sense is a person addicted to drugs or alcohol incompetent, and so a legitimate object of coercive treatment? The standard tests for competence do not pick out the capacity that is lost in addiction: the capacity to properly regulate consumption. This paper is an attempt to sketch a justificatory framework for understanding the conditions under which addicted persons may be treated against their will. These conditions rarely obtain, for they apply only when addiction is extremely severe and great harm threatens. It will be argued also that to widen the measures currently in place in some jurisdictions, though philosophically well-motivated, would require very strong evidence of a set of conditions disposing a person to an addictive future. It is doubtful that any such currently available evidence is strong enough to justify coercive treatment. Nevertheless, coercive treatment of addiction is already a reality, with the potential for more, and so some discussion will be presented regarding the extraordinary safeguards necessary to prevent misapplication of such treatment policies.

Defining privacy is problematic because the condition of privacy appears simultaneously to require separation from others, and the possibility of choosing not to be separate. This latter feature expresses the inherent normative dimension of privacy: the capacity to control the perceptual and informational spaces surrounding one’s person. Clearly the features of separation and control as just described are in tension because one may easily enough choose to give up all barriers between oneself and the public space. How could the capacity for privacy give rise to its absence? Yet both the separation and control features of privacy do seem indispensable to any sensible understanding of it. In this paper I set out an approach to defining privacy that keeps these features and avoids the tension between them

Undercover marketing targets potential customers by concealing the commercial nature of an apparently social transaction. In a typical case an individual approaches a marketing target apparently to provide some information or advice about a product in a way that makes it seem like they are a fellow consumer. In another kind of case, a friend displays a product to you, and encourages its purchase, but fails to disclose their association with the marketing firm. We focus on this second type of case and argue that the constitutive dispositions of friendship that provide for the development and maintenance of intimacy also render friends especially vulnerable to undercover marketing techniques and so to the exploitation of friendship for commercial ends. We show how this is corrupting both of the friendship and the commercial agent.

It has become quite common for people to develop `personal'' relationships nowadays, exclusively via extensive correspondence across the Net. Friendships, even romantic love relationships, are apparently, flourishing. But what kind of relations really are possible in this way? In this paper, we focus on the case of close friendship. There are various important markers that identify a relationship as one of close friendship. One will have, for instance, strong affection for the other, a disposition to act for their well-being and a desire for shared experiences. Now obviously, while all these features of friendship can gain some expression through extensive correspondence on the Net, such expression is necessarily limited –you cannot, e.g., physically embrace the other, or go on a picnic together. The issue we want to address here however, is whether there might be distinctive and important influences on the structure of interaction undertaken on the Net, that affect the kind of identity ``Net-friends'''' can develop in relation to one another. In the normal case, one develops a close friendship, and in doing so, one''s identity, in part, is shaped by the friendship. To some extent, through extensive shared experience, one comes to see aspects of the world (and of oneself) through the eyes of one''s friend and so, in part, one''s identity develops in an importantly relational way, i.e., as the product of one''s relation with the close friend. In our view, however, on account of the limits of, and/or the kind of, shared contact and experience one can have with another via correspondence on the Net, there are significant structural barriers to developing the sort of relational identity that is a feature of close friendship. In arguing our case here, and by using the case of Net ``friendship'''' as our foil, we aim to shed light on the nature and importance of certain sorts of self-expression and relational interaction found in close friendship.

Psychotherapy and counselling services are now available on-line, and expanding rapidly. Yet there appears almost no ethical analysis of this on-line mode of delivery of such professional services. In this paper I present such an analysis by considering the limitations on-line contact imposes on the nature of the professional–client relationship. The analysis proceeds via the contrast between the face-to-face case and the on-line case. At the core of the problem must be the recognition that on-line interaction imposes a physical barrier largely permitting only those disclosures of self we choose to make available, and greatly restricting the range of involuntary features and behaviours. I show why this is problematic, first, for the development of a close professional–client relationship, with particular emphasis on such failures as diagnosis and monitoring of the patient. Second I describe the importance of the development of professional character, and of how the on-line environment fails to provide a context for such character traits to emerge and develop.

In some recent criminal cases in the United States a defense has been mounted based on an affliction known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder). The crux of the defense rests on the proposition that a dominant personality was incapable of appreciating the nature and quality of wrongfulness of conduct caused by an alter personality. This defense has been successful in some cases, but not others, and so philosophers, lawyers, and psychiatrists are now in debate in an attempt to clarify the issues. One of the salient issues involves the question of personal identity between the individual who allegedly committed the offense and the individual who stands accused. Stephen Behnke and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong have recently put forward a test for establishing personal identity in these cases. In this discussion, I present reasons for rejecting their proposal.

In what sense is a person addicted to drugs or alcohol incompetent, and so a legitimate object of coercive treatment? The standard tests for competence do not pick out the capacity that is lost in addiction: the capacity to properly regulate consumption. This paper is an attempt to sketch a justificatory framework for understanding the conditions under which addicted persons may be treated against their will. These conditions rarely obtain, for they apply only when addiction is extremely severe and great harm threatens. It will be argued also that to widen the measures currently in place in some jurisdictions, though philosophically well-motivated, would require very strong evidence of a set of conditions disposing a person to an addictive future. It is doubtful that any such currently available evidence is strong enough to justify coercive treatment. Nevertheless, coercive treatment of addiction is already a reality, with the potential for more, and so some discussion will be presented regarding the extraordinary safeguards necessary to prevent misapplication of such treatment policies.

What is the role and value of pleasure in addiction? Foddy and Savulescu have claimed that substance use is just pleasure-oriented behavior. They describe addiction as "strong appetites toward pleasure" and argue that addicts suffer in significant part because of strong social and moral disapproval of lives dominated by pleasure seeking. But such lives, they claim, can be autonomous and rational. The view they offer is largely in line with the choice model and opposed to a disease model of addiction. Foddy and Savulescu are sceptical of self-reports that emphasize the ill effects of addiction such as loss of family and possessions, or that claim an absence of pleasure after tolerance sets in. Such reports they think are shaped by social stigma which makes available a limited set of socially approved addiction narratives. We will not question the claim that a life devoted to pleasure can be autonomously chosen. Nor do we question the claim that the social stigma attached to the use of certain drugs increases the harm suffered by the user. However our interviews with addicts reveal a genuinely ambivalent and complex relationship between addiction, value, and pleasure. Our subjects did not shy away from discussing pleasure and its role in use. But though they usually valued the pleasurable properties of substances, and this played that did not mean that they valued an addictive life. Our interviews distinguished changing attitudes towards drug related pleasures across the course of substance use, including diminishing pleasure from use over time and increasing resentment at the effects of substance use on other valued activities. In this paper we consider the implications of what drug users say about pleasure and value over the course of addiction for models of addiction. Well don't get me wrong, I love using mate. If I could use successfully I would. I'd still be using. I love using. I just don't like the shit that comes with it.

Marc Lewis argues that addiction is not a disease, it is instead a dysfunctional outcome of what plastic brains ordinarily do, given the adaptive processes of learning and development within environments where people are seeking happiness, or relief, or escape. They come to obsessively desire substances or activities that they believe will deliver happiness and so on, but this comes to corrupt the normal process of development when it escalates beyond a point of functionality. Such ‘deep learning’ emerges from consumptive habits, or ‘motivated repetition’, and although addiction is bad, it ferments out of the ordinary stuff underpinning any neural habit. Lewis gives us a convincing story about the process that leads from ordinary controlled consumption through to quite heavy addictive consumption, but I claim that in some extreme cases the eventual state of deep learning tips over into clinically significant impairment and disorder. Addiction is an elastic concept, and although it develops through mild and moderate forms, the impairment we see in severe cases needs to be acknowledged. This impairment, I argue, consists in the chronic automatic consumption present in late stage addiction. In this condition, the desiring self largely drops out the picture, as the addicted individual begins to mindlessly consume. This impairment is clinically significant because the machinery of motivated rationality has become corrupted. To bolster this claim I compare what is going on in these extreme cases with what goes on in people who dissociate in cases of depersonalization disorder.