Abstract

The subject of the investigations presented in this article are the causes of historical shifting of the extensions of moral evaluations and psychiatric diagnoses. The current vagueness of the extensions of these categories of human behaviour is, on the hand, a result of the revision of too rigid assumptions concerning the criteria of psychic normalcy and pathology, and on the other, a source of extensive decomposition of the meaning of the central psychiatric and moral categories, and thus results in a widespread arbitrariness of pronouncements. The characteristic trait of the growing trend to hold moral evaluations and psychiatric diagnoses coextensive is to be found, says the author, in two phenomena: in the occurrence of new psychiatric concepts, very remote from the traditional division into psychogenic and somatogenic impairments, in the criticism or psychiatry from the viewpoint of specific moral values and in the criticism of specific moral values from the viewpoint of psychiatry. A need is felt to establish a definition which will regulate the concept of sanity and in a completely new way and mark the boundary between moral evaluations and psychiatric diagnoses, returning in effect to the extensional exclusion of the procedures of moral evaluation and psychiatric labelling.