Badness, madness and the brain – the late 19^th-century controversy on immoral persons and their malfunctioning brains

Abstract

In the second half of the 19th-century, a group of psychiatric experts discussed the relation between brain malfunction and moral misconduct. In the ensuing debates, scientific discourses on immorality merged with those on insanity and the brain. This yielded a specific definition of what it means to be immoral: immoral and insane due to a disordered brain. In this context, diverse neurobiological explanations for immoral mind and behavior existed at the time. This article elucidates these different brain-based explanations via five historical cases of immoral persons. In addition, the article analyses the associated controversies in the context of the period’s psychiatric thinking. The rendering of the immoral person as brain-disordered is scrutinized in terms of changes in moral agency. Furthermore, a present immoral person is discussed to highlight commonalities and differences in past and present reasoning.

Who decides when people can have sex? Australian mental health clinicians’ perceptions of sexuality and autonomy

“…There is a long history of fearing madness as a source of immorality and danger, including sexual danger, in psychiatry, law and society more broadly (Foucault et al, 1978;Schirmann, 2013). This fearing of madness as a danger and potential contaminant to a well-ordered society persists in the social psyche (Douglas, 1966;Levey, 2014) and was illustrated in the data; for example, in the fear of the male 'mad sexual predator' and the collective anxiety over the reproductive rights of women with serious mental illness diagnoses.…”

“The wondrous eyes of a new technology”—a history of the early electroencephalography (EEG) of psychopathy, delinquency, and immorality

“…The focus on criminals' bodies and brains gave rise to a new class of medical experts, new discourses on guilt, and new options for policing and controlling badness. Against this backdrop, bio-medicine offered solutions for the management of society, e.g., via eugenics (Smith, 1981 ; Richards, 1987 ; Wiener, 1990 ; Becker and Wetzell, 2006 ; Schirmann, 2013a ). Although bio-medical views on immorality and crime had been continuously criticized on scientific, social, and political grounds, they still constituted an explanatory resource within British and American psychiatry in the 1940s and 1950s.…”