Thomas Schramme – författare

Investigations of specific moral dysfunctions or deficits that shed light on the capacities required for moral agency.

Psychopathy has been the subject of investigations in both philosophy and psychiatry and yet the conceptual issues remain largely unresolved. This volume approaches psychopathy by considering the question of what psychopaths lack. The contributors investigate specific moral dysfunctions or deficits, shedding light on the capacities people need to be moral by examining cases of real people who seem to lack those capacities.

The volume proceeds from the basic assumption that psychopathy is not characterized by a single deficit—for example, the lack of empathy, as some philosophers have proposed—but by a range of them. Thus contributors address specific deficits that include impairments in rationality, language, fellow-feeling, volition, evaluation, and sympathy. They also consider such issues in moral psychology as moral motivation, moral emotions, and moral character; and they examine social aspects of psychopathic behavior, including ascriptions of moral responsibility, justification of moral blame, and social and legal responses to people perceived to be dangerous.

As this volume demonstrates, philosophers will be better equipped to determine what they mean by “the moral point of view” when they connect debates in moral philosophy to the psychiatric notion of psychopathy, which provides some guidance on what humans need in order be able to feel the normative pull of morality. And the empirical work done by psychiatrists and researchers in psychopathy can benefit from the conceptual clarifications offered by philosophy.

ContributorsGwen Adshead, Piers Benn, John Deigh, Alan Felthous, Kerrin Jacobs, Heidi Maibom, Eric Matthews, Henning Sass, Thomas Schramme, Susie Scott, David Shoemaker, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Matthew Talbert

In seinem Essay Über die Freiheit (1859) plädiert John Stuart Mill, einer der Stammväter des Liberalismus, für das Recht jedes einzelnen, seine Überzeugungen frei zu bilden und das eigene Leben nach diesen Überzeugungen frei zu gestalten. Daher gibt es für Mill nur einen Grund, der es Staat und Gesellschaft erlauben würde, dieses Recht auf individuelle Selbstbestimmung zu beschneiden, den er als Grundsatz formuliert, „daß der einzige Zweck, um dessentwillen man Zwang gegen den Willen eines Mitglieds einer zivilisierten Gemeinschaft rechtmäßig ausüben darf, der ist: die Schädigung anderer zu verhüten“. In diesem Band wird in Form eines kooperativen Kommentars Mills Hauptwerk Über die Freiheit für Studierende, Lehrende und Forscher aufgeschlossen und interpretiert.

In seinem Essay Über die Freiheit (1859) plädiert John Stuart Mill, einer der Stammväter des Liberalismus, für das Recht jedes einzelnen, seine Überzeugungen frei zu bilden und das eigene Leben nach diesen Überzeugungen frei zu gestalten. Daher gibt es für Mill nur einen Grund, der es Staat und Gesellschaft erlauben würde, dieses Recht auf individuelle Selbstbestimmung zu beschneiden, den er als Grundsatz formuliert, „daß der einzige Zweck, um dessentwillen man Zwang gegen den Willen eines Mitglieds einer zivilisierten Gemeinschaft rechtmäßig ausüben darf, der ist: die Schädigung anderer zu verhüten“. In diesem Band wird in Form eines kooperativen Kommentars Mills Hauptwerk Über die Freiheit für Studierende, Lehrende und Forscher aufgeschlossen und interpretiert.

Philosophy and psychiatry share many topics and problems. For example, the "solutions" of the psychiatry of the philosophical body-soul problem have direct effects on the self-image of the discipline. Despite these obvious overlappings, and unlike the English-speaking countries, interdisciplinary research on "philosophical psychopathology" has been scarce in Germany. The current anthology closes these gaps, because the authors - renowned experts as well as young scientists, whose new approaches open promising perspectives - come from both disciplines. The individual contributions deal with philosophical debates as they arise within the context of psychiatric theory and practice.

This work sets the stage regarding debates about paternalism and health care for years to come. The anthology is organized around four parts: i) The concept of paternalism and theoretical issues regarding the idea of anti-paternalism, ii) strategies for justifying different forms of paternalism, iii) paternalism in psychiatry and psychotherapy, iv) paternalism and public health, and v) paternalism and reproductive medicine. Medical paternalism was arguably one of the main drivers of debates in medical ethics and has led to a wide acknowledgement of the value of patient autonomy. However, more recent developments in health care, such as the increasing significance of public health measures and the commercialization of medical services, have led to new social circumstances and hence to the need to rethink issues regarding paternalism. This work provides an invaluable source for many scholars and practitioners, since it deals in new and original ways with one of the main and oldest issue in health care ethics.​

This is the first wide-ranging, multi-authored handbook in the field of philosophy of medicine, covering the underlying conceptual issues of many important social, political and ethical issues in health care. It introduces and develops over 70 topics, concepts, and issues in the field. It is written by distinguished specialists from multiple disciplines, including philosophy, health sciences, nursing, sociology, political theory, and medicine. Many difficult social and ethical issues in health care are based on conceptual problems, most prominently on the definitions of health and disease, or on epistemological issues regarding causality or diagnosis. Philosophy is the discipline that deals with such conceptual, metaphysical, epistemological, methodological, and axiological matters. This handbook covers all the central concepts in medicine, such as ageing, death, disease, mental disorder, and well-being. It is an invaluable source for laypeople, academics with an interest in medicine, and health care specialists who want be informed and up to date with the relevant discussions. The text also advances these debates and will set the agenda for years to come.