Self Disclosure, Mental Illness and Moral Responsibility

In this chapter, I look at how deep self views assign responsibility and autonomy to individuals suffering from mental ill health. Deep self views say that an agent is only acting autonomously and responsible for their actions if these align with their deep self, if they endorse their desires and motivations. That kind of view of responsible agency seems particularly well suited to give a theoretical grounding to the everyday intuition that sometimes an action is better ascribed to the illness than to the agent and that the agent is therefore not responsible. I show how deep self views differ from reasons responsiveness accounts of responsibility in who they count as responsible. I then discuss cases which deep self views are particularly well placed to deal with, where individuals are alienated from desires and motivations that arise from their mental health condition. Finally, I turn to cases deep self views struggle with, where desires that are symptomatic of the illness are endorsed by the individual but deeply harmful for them. I show that sometimes, these will have to be counted as autonomous desires that express the deep self but also suggest possible ways of avoiding this conclusion.