than another. Another version is shared by Gary Watson and Charles Taylor: what matters is not different orders of desires, but the contrast between desires and values. I am free when the desires that win out are in harmony with my deepest values, and I am unfree when dominant desires and deepest values are in conflict. There is considerable plausibility to this approach, although it leaves open difficult questions about how the distinction between desires and values is to be drawn and about how, when values are in conflict, we are to decide which are deepest. (2.)
2. “It wasn't the real me": character-distorting conditions.
In these cases of conflict, a “psychiatric” condition seems to have taken over part of a person. Even more difficult are the issues raised when a psychiatric disorder seems to take over and distort someone’s whole personality and character. How should we think about such cases?
On the one hand, accepting or rejecting an excuse is largely about how far an apparently bad action does or does not reflect the person’s character. Excuses protect character by disconnecting it from objectionable actions. So it seems strange to allow as an excuse the claim that psychiatric disorder has changed a person’s character for the worse. Does not such a plea mean that the person’s present character is open to precisely the sort of criticism that the objectionable action suggests?
On the other hand, where a medical condition brings about a radical transformation of character, we are inclined to say that “it is not him but his illness”. The easygoing, friendly man we all knew for many years becomes unrecognizably difficult, stubborn, and bad-tempered as his dementia progresses. Or a woman’s whole personality is changed for the worse when she gets a brain tumour. We may feel that blaming them for what they now do shows a lack of understanding. The behaviour is surely down to changes in the brain over which they have no control. The same psychological changes may lie in wait for any of us, if our brains start to go the same way.
Those close to people who seem greatly changed by dementia sometimes say such things as “He isn’t the man I married”, or “She is a different person now”. At one level we all understand what such comments mean. But at another level they raise philosophical problems about the boundaries of personal identity.
Those who make the comments may not be clear how literally they mean them. If they are meant literally, some philosophers will accept them and others will reject them. Those who see personal identity as a matter of physical continuity will think in terms of the same person having a changed psychology. Those who take a more psychological view of personal identity will be more willing to see discontinuities of memory or of personality as raising doubts about the person being the same. Others will say that the earlier person may survive to some degree. Here these issues will be sidestepped. I will talk in terms of the same person having a changed character and personality, but the discussion could be translated without loss into the language of the old and the new person, or into the language of earlier and later selves.
A. Aristotelian Common Sense.
How does the thought that this person has changed so radically bear on his or her responsibility for the actions shaped by the new personality?
One possible answer is that it makes no difference at all. In other contexts, people often change radically. People have religious conversions. They change partners and jobs and they emigrate. They take up drugs or enter convents. Any of these upheavals may change character and personality sharply. But the immigrant or the nun are still held responsible for what they do. The new actions flow from the new personality, and it is still appropriate to evaluate the person on the basis of them. The novice nun’s piety (or the new immigrant’s patriotism) is not less relevant to our picture of them because they are newly acquired. So why should the aggression of the person with dementia or a brain tumour be different?
A