does mental illness erase blameworthiness?

Many people seem to assume that, if someone is mentally ill, they are no longer morally responsible for what they do. I disagree. I think that, even for those of us unafflicted by mental illness, the ship of our basic human freedom is blown in multiple directions by conflicting squalls of foibles, both chosen and unasked-for. But none of these forces can erase the fundamental power of choice. In arguing against the existence of human freedom, Sam Harris offers the case of the mass-murderer afflicted with a brain tumor. I'd say that even that mass-murderer has the power to choose: even a person with a brain tumor can be held morally responsible for his or her actions, just as even a suicidally depressed person can be talked back, through the simple use of voice and reason, from the roof's edge.

Twenty-year-old Adam Lanza, the shooter who this morning killed his mother, twenty children, and several adults, has been described by his brother Ryan as somewhat "autistic." Leaving aside the question of whether autism even qualifies as a form of mental illness, we can nevertheless ask whether Adam's mental state absolves him of his responsibility for murdering all those people. I'd say no, it doesn't: at the very least, Adam's finger was on the trigger when those deaths occurred; at that most basic level, he was responsible for what he did, just as Cho Seung-hui was responsible for killing almost three dozen people at Virginia Tech. And Adam must have understood the gravity of what he had done: it now turns out that he shot himself as the police converged on him.

In the world of consciousness, all of us travel through storm-tossed seas: temptations, waves of emotion, idées fixes, basic primate curiosity, ego, and stubbornness. But the ship of human freedom is captained by an ineffable something more basic than those forces-- something that makes us, like it or not, masters of our own fates.

Is Adam Lanza guilty of what he's done? Oh, yes. Most decidedly.


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