Badness, madness and the brain – the late 19 th -century controversy on immoral persons and their malfunctioning brains
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12220682 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Felix Schirmann (University of Groningen, The Netherlands, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 33-50 |
| Publication date | 2013-04-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History of the Human Sciences (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0952-6951 • E-ISSN: 1461-720X |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0952695113482317 |
| OpenAlex | W2324479401 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 44 |
In the second half of the 19 th -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
Agency (philosophy · Context (archaeology · Criminology · Epistemology · Immorality · Insanity · Misconduct · Morality · Political science · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Relation (database · History · Law · Mental Health and Psychiatry · Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations · Philosophy · Psychology · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment · Social Psychology
Regions of the mind
Madness, morality, and medicine
Picturing Personhood
A Cultural History of Heredity
Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior
A History of Psychiatry
Inventing our Selves
Personality, Identity, and Character
The Modern Degenerate
The Politics of Life Itself
Moritz Benedikt’s (1835-1920) Localization of Morality in the Occipital Lobes
Classic Text No. 37
Brainhood, anthropological figure of modernity
From sinners to degenerates
Witnessing Insanity
Inventing Ourselves
The Moral Self
Body and Mind
In search of human nature
Sociobiology
| Citations per year | 0.33 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2020 - 2022 (3) |
| Highly cited | No |