Topic > A Critique of “Mental Health and Responsibility” Article by Susan Wolf

Sanity is the requirement of the self to the extent that we ascribe moral responsibility to it. Susan Wolf in her essay "Sanity and Responsibility" wants to appeal to our "pre-philosophical" intuitions about moral responsibility by arguing that moral responsibility is not attributed to someone on the basis of whether determinism is true or not, but rather whether one has a true “healthy deep self”; that is, a self that is capable, cognitively and normatively, of self-correcting and self-revising its conception of the "good" which, for Wolf, is the crucial component of the qualification of "morally responsible." The structure of his "deep healthy self" - the fundamental object of his claim - is based on the claims of Frankfurt, Watson and Taylor who all share a conception of the self as morally responsible, or "free will", to the extent where he can reflect on his own desires, values ​​and ideas; the ability to remove oneself from one's superficial self thus creating a deeper self through this process. However, Wolf makes an alteration by adding a further qualification to this conception with the idea that the Francortian (et al..) "deep self" cannot stand alone in indicating the presence of MR through the use of its "Jojo the second". thought experiment. The solution here is that Jojo, and his violent depravity, is not morally culpable for his actions on the basis that at some point, even though his deeper self seems to condone and want to be the self that he is, his infinite iterations are deeper. The selves of the nth order could not have been, to begin with, self-created and thus full moral culpability cannot be attributed to either Jojo or ourselves at any time. But this is not only true for Jojo but it is also true for everyone else; This is empirical, as Wolf states, and implies that this conception of MR is inconsolable in the wake of the deterministic characteristics of our reality. Wolf wants to create a conception of the self that is realistically committed to determinism, but only up to a point; she wants to create a divide between us and Jojo by adding the qualification of "deep healthy self" to "self" as she sees it. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Wolf argues that a morally responsible “self” is not only thoughtful but also healthy. Sanity is the innate ability of some to cognitively and normatively self-correct and revise their conception of the “good” based on a realistic understanding of the world. For Wolf, this ability is as innate as running, laughing, and having feelings, and unfortunately, due to the presence of indeterminate luck, some either have it or not. The division here can be illustrated with the analogy of two people; someone who is crippled versus someone who is not; meaning Jojo would be first and the rest of us would be second. No matter how much one tries to make the cripple escape, he will not be able to do so because he simply does not have the ability and therefore the cripple cannot be responsible for his inability in this case. Consequently, for Wolf, it may be that all selves are initially determined by features of the world that are beyond their control, but what constitutes morally responsible beings is the capacity to self-correct or self-adapt beyond their initially determined state and therefore According to Wolf , what is at issue in the free will debate is not determinism, but rather the indeterminate endowment of some over others. Therefore Jojo is not morally responsible because he is crazy and not because he was determined. One objection to this statement is that it presupposes that.