Moral Vision and the Idea of Mental Illness

This paper aims to arrive at a coherent concept of one sort of mental disorder and of appropriate methods of treating it. Incoherence arises because of the conflict between modern conceptions both of morality and of health and illness and the necessary us e of moral terms in defining what makes some mental disorders. Modern moral philosophy and modern conceptions of health and illness imply that health is a non-moral good, and so that illness is a "disorder" in a non-moral sense. Ancient ethics, on the oth er hand, allows states as well as actions to be morally evaluated, and so for the notion of a moral order or disorder which is not consciously chosen. It is argued that some kinds of mental disorder can be modeled on this conception of an unchosen moral d isorder, and that the appropriate treatment for them is that species of moral education that we call "psychotherapy."