(November 21, 2017 at 11:56 am)Catholic_Lady Wrote:(November 21, 2017 at 11:52 am)Grandizer Wrote: Legally, yeah, but still doesn't exclude the possibility that they may be mentally ill. Is psychopathy, for example, (or ASPD) not ever a mental illness? Is NPD not ever a mental illness?
What? I'm not excluding the possibility of mental illness. I'm talking about whether the mental illness was severe enough to deem a person innocent of the crime they commited.
What makes ASPD or NPD a mental illness then? Both are partly characterized by lack of empathy (and lack of conscience in the case of psychopathy), which indicates there is an important element that is absent in moral thinking, and that absence may be a reason for why some people do horrendous stuff, even when they plan the act in a calculating matter. Just because they know how/when/where to kill or whatever, doesn't mean they morally know what they're doing.
