- Kenneth
- Ny
Let's be careful here, lest we decide that all that it takes to deprive someone of all their rights is to declare them too abnormal to be considered "sane." Psychiatry is not predictive enough to say who is a menace, and given the spat over what's in the new DSM-V, we cannot even seem to universally agree on what's "abnormal."
The power to declare someone mentally incompetent, and therefore take away his rights, has been abused very heavily in the past. If the law is unsettled, it's because our laws assume competence on the part of its participants, and that grey area is a giant moral, scientific, and ethical morass that isn't tackled for not merely for lack of political courage but because there are questions that few people would want to touch.
The power to declare someone mentally incompetent, and therefore take away his rights, has been abused very heavily in the past. If the law is unsettled, it's because our laws assume competence on the part of its participants, and that grey area is a giant moral, scientific, and ethical morass that isn't tackled for not merely for lack of political courage but because there are questions that few people would want to touch.
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