Abstract

I have great sympathy for what seem to be two main goals in Michelle Ciurria’s (2014) “Moral Responsibility and Mental Health: Applying the Standard of the Reasonable Person,” although I am not sure the reasonable person standard achieves either of the goals. These central goals seem to be to preserve an objective standard of moral responsibility and to do so in a way that “does not depersonalize the target individual” (Ciurria 2014, 7). In this commentary, I focus on my doubts about the adequacy of the reasonable person standard, at least as presented in Ciurria’s paper, to meet either of these goals. It might be that had she chosen the example of the psychopath rather than Tourette syndrome to work through in a ..