2012-07-08
16 分钟This is bioethics bytes with me, David.
Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
Bioethics Bytes is made in association with Oxford's Uhiro Centre for Practical Ethics and made possible by grant from the Wellcome Trust.
For more information about bioethics bytes, go to www.
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If someone caught me shoplifting and I was later diagnosed with kleptomania, should I be held responsible?
Should I be blamed?
There's a growing body of knowledge in psychiatry and neuroscience about why people think and behave the way they do.
And according to one school of thought, as our knowledge expands, so the space for responsibility contracts.
Hannah Picard is not from that school.
She believes we can at one and the same time diagnose a disorder and hold the person with that disorder responsible.
Doctor Pickard is an Oxford based philosopher and therapist and the holder of a Wellcome Trust fellowship examining the nature of responsibility and morality within personality disorder.
Hannah Pickard, welcome to bioethics bites.
Thank you.
The topic we're going to talk about is personality disorder and responsibility.
Could we just begin by clarifying what personality disorder is?
Personality disorder, as the name implies, is a disorder of the personality.
So if you think of personality as a set of traits that incline you to act and think and feel in a stable set of ways, someone with a personality disorder has a personality where those traits cause extreme distress and dysfunction to them in their life.
Could you give an example of a personality disorder?
Well, there are almost as many different kinds of personality disorder as there are kinds of personality.