Expertise and Causal Attribution in Deciding between Crime and Mental Disorder

Abstract

Medicolegal expertise raises many issues of sociological and political concern, some of which are discussed here in relation to the insanity defence and the plea of diminished responsibility. The paper describes the social process of attributing a crime either to punishable conduct or to mental abnormality in terms of voluntarist and mechanist accounts of motivation. This description explains some current difficulties. But the paper then criticizes logical and empirical shortcomings in this description and therefore reformulates mechanism and voluntarism as terms within a common scheme for classifying causes. It is then possible to analyze structural reasons for the difficulties facing psychiatric expertise and for the general failure to achieve a coherent theory of responsibility. The paper concludes by suggesting how a social psychology of causal attribution might link the intellectual process of classifying conduct with the social distribution of power and authority.