With the arrest of Nick Reiner for the alleged murder of his parents, Rob Reiner and Michelle Singer, commentators have taken to simultaneously pitying the accused for his mental illness while condemning him for his evil actions.

This is logically contradictory.

On the one hand, if it is an illness that explains why Nick Reiner committed a crime, then he cannot be held morally responsible for his actions. It is just to hold him morally responsible for his actions only if it’s the case that Reiner could have chosen, based on reasons, not impulses or compulsions, to have done other than what he allegedly did.

If, on the other hand, we insist upon blaming Reiner for having committed an evil deed, then it is just as irrelevant to appeal to mental illnesses from which he may have been suffering as it would be irrelevant to appeal to whatever physical diseases may have afflicted him.

The vocabularies of illness and evil aren’t just two logically incompatible modes of discourse. They embody distinct, incompatible worldviews.

Every worldview is constituted by a metaphysic, an epistemology, and an ethic.

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that speaks to the question of what is ultimately real. We know what appears to be real. A metaphysic makes a claim as to what’s really real.

Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge: Can we know what’s ultimately real, and if so, how so?

Ethics offers a theory as to what it means to be a human being within the worldview.

To put it bluntly, the dominant mental health paradigm expresses a worldview that allows no space for the concept of........

© Townhall