The Moral Character of Mental Illness

Abstract

This paper offers a reimagination of Thomas Szasz’s claim that mental illness is a myth. His idea that mental illness actually constitutes moral problems is expanded upon with a novel moral framework that makes the claim easier to grasp and advocate for. The argumentative strategy used is intended to bypass the major extant debate about the scientific validity or natural kind status of mental illnesses. Szasz’s selective elimination of mental but not physical illnesses is vindicated via an epistemic reduction of the mental features to moral features, which does not parallelly obtain for physical features. This solution is optimised to address the criticisms of R.E. Kendell, arguably Szasz’s foremost critic.