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  • Essay / A Critique of “Mental Health and Responsibility” Article by Susan Wolf

    Mental health is the self-demand to the extent that we grant it moral responsibility. Susan Wolf, in her essay “Sanity and Responsibility,” wants to appeal to our “pre-philosophical” intuitions about moral responsibility by asserting that moral responsibility is not attributed to someone based on whether determinism is true or not. , but rather according to whether one has a true “deep and sane self”; that is to say, a self capable, on a cognitive and normative level, of self-correction and of self-revision of its own conception of "good", which, for Wolf, is the crucial element of qualification as “morally responsible”. The framework of his "deep, sane self" – the founding object of his claim – rests on the assertions of Frankfurt, Watson and Taylor who all share a conception of the self as morally responsible, or "free to will", insofar as where he can. reflect on one's own desires, values ​​and ideas; the ability to withdraw from one's superficial self, creating a deeper self through this process. However, Wolf makes a modification by adding an additional qualification to this conception, believing that the Franfurtian "deep self" (et al..) cannot on its own suffice to indicate the presence of MR through the use of its " Jojo the second.” " thought experiment. The settlement here is that Jojo, and his violent depravity, is not morally culpable for his actions on the grounds that at any given moment, even though it seems like his deepest self tolerates and wants to be the self that it is, its endless iterations are deeper The nth order selves could not have been, in the beginning, self-created and therefore full moral culpability cannot be attributed to either Jojo or us-. same at no point in time But this is not only true for Jojo but also for everyone. This is empirical, as Wolf says, and implies that this conception of MR is inconsolable in the face of the deterministic characteristics of our reality. Wolf wants to create a conception of the self that is realistically linked to determinism, but only to a certain extent she wants to create a gap between Jojo and us by adding the qualification of "deep and sane self" to the "me" as it is. she sees it. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get the original essay Wolf argues that a morally responsible “self” is not only thoughtful, but also sane. Reason is the innate capacity of some to self-correct and cognitively and normatively revise their own conception of “good” based on a realistic understanding of the world. For Wolf, this ability is as innate as running, laughing and feeling and, unfortunately, due to the presence of indeterminate luck, some either have it or not. The division here can be illustrated by the analogy of two people; someone who is infirm versus someone who is not; in the sense that Jojo would be the first and the rest of us would be the second. No matter how hard one tries to make the cripple run, he will not succeed because he simply does not have the capacity to do so and therefore the cripple cannot be held responsible for his incapacity here. Following this, for Wolf, it may be that all selves are initially determined by features of the world beyond their control, but what constitutes morally responsible beings is the capacity to self-correct or self-correct. -adjust beyond their initially determined status and therefore For Wolf, it is not determinism that is at issue in the debate on free will, but rather the indeterminate endowment of some over others. Jojo is therefore not morally responsible because he is.