Mladen Bošnjak

The notion of mental disorder plays an important role in criminal law, particularly in relation to competency to stand trial, culpability, and entitlement to special treatment. However, how this concept should be understood in this context is rarely discussed explicitly in recent literature. To address this issue, the present paper explores which concept of mental disorder would be most suitable for criminal law. Using the explicationist methodology, the paper outlines several desiderata for an adequate concept. Among these, it identifies a crucial desideratum labeled the “non-redundancy criterion”. This criterion holds that, to play a non-redundant role in criminal law, the concept of mental disorder must be defined independently of the capacities that underlie criminal responsibility. The paper evaluates several traditional accounts of mental disorder from the philosophy of psychiatry—including objectivist, value-laden, and hybrid views—and assesses which best satisfies this criterion while also fulfilling the broader roles that mental disorders serve in criminal law. The paper concludes that the objectivist understanding of mental disorders provides the most suitable explication for the purposes of criminal law.

Doubts about an offender’s criminal competence typically lead courts to mandate a psychiatric evaluation to determine whether a mental disorder impaired the defendant’s capacity to understand their actions or to control their will. While criminal law relies on folk-psychological concepts to determine responsibility, psychiatry examines behavior through cognitive and neurobiological frameworks. This contrast raises the question of how the folk-psychological explanations central to legal reasoning relate to, and can be integrated with, the neurobiological and mechanistic explanations employed in psychiatric assessment. The issue exemplifies the broader philosophical problem known as the interface problem, which concerns how to understand the relationship between personal- and subpersonal-levels of explanation and the constructs associated with them. The paper considers three solutions—autonomism, functionalism, and the co-evolutionary view—and argues that the co-evolutionary view provides the most suitable framework for forensic psychiatry.

This paper investigates, from a philosophical perspective, whether high functioning autists are legally responsible for the crimes they may commit. We do this from the perspective of the Croatian legal system. According to Croatian Criminal Law, but also criminal laws adopted in many other countries, the legal responsibility of the person is undermined due to insanity when two conditions are satisfied. The first may be called the incapacity requirement. It states that a person, when committing the crime, suffers cognitive or volitional incapacities or limited capacities that are relevant for exculpation. The second, we may call the mental disorder requirement, which states that these exculpatory incapacities are due to the presence of a mental disorder. In this paper we focus on the incapacity requirement. The review of the studies on executive functions deficits associated with high-functioning autism suggests that many autists should not be held categorically responsible for the crimes they may commit. Nonetheless, we argue that these impairments in executive functions generally do not provide an unqualified excuse.

The supporters of the neurodiversity movement contend that autism is not a mental disorder, but rather a natural human variation. In a recent paper Jerome Wakefi eld, David Wasserman and Jordan Conrad (2020) argued against this view relying on Wakefi eld’s harmful dysfunction theory of mental disorder (the HD theory). Although I argue that the HD theory is problematic, I contend that arguments offered by Wakefi eld et al. (2020) against those of the neurodiversity movement are plausible, except in one respect: their claim that high functioning autism in general is not a disorder is not well supported. I argue instead that the disorder status of high-functioning autistic persons should be judged on a case-by-case basis, depending on the harmfulness of the condition. In this regard, I maintain that the list of basic psychological capacities provided by George Graham (2010) provides an adequate conceptualization of harm. Moreover, I show how this framework may offer an appropriate tool for a case-by-case assessment of harm associated with high-functioning autism.

The paper examines the relationship between mental disorder and moral respon- sibility. The issue is what conditions a person must meet to be considered morally responsible for their behavior, and how we can reliably determine the extent to which a mental disorder affects the abilities relevant to moral responsibility. The paper argues that by linking the theory of mental disorder by George Graham and the theory of moral responsibility by John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, we get an adequate theoretical framework for considering the moral responsibility of people with mental disorders. In support of this thesis, the theories above are applied to the specific case of a person diagnosed with schizophrenia who is accused of burglary and grievous bodily harm.

In this paper, we focus on the propensity toward identifying natural kinds with successful scientific categories in contemporary discussions of natural kinds within the philosophy of science. Success in this case is understood as the fulfillment of epistemic interests or goals in a given field of scientific research. The prevailing view is that, in order to have a theory of natural kinds that successfully captures current scientific practice, the relevant epistemic interests are the current interests of scientists working in a particular field. In contrast, we concur with the Franklin-Hall (2015) that a wider range of possible interests needs to be taken into account, in order to avoid making natural kinds too dependent on the current stage of research. But unlike Franklin-Hall who suggests looking for an intersection between the interests and goals of current epistemic agents and our neighboring epistemic agents (the categorical bottleneck view), we advocate the view that all these different interests and goals need to be taken into account, and thus our view takes into account a much wider range of categories.