ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relation between mental illness and moral responsibility by drawing upon two resources. First, it reviews philosophical work on the related topics of free will and moral responsibility. Second, the chapter focuses on the collection of mental illnesses that are not all that fashionable in the literature on free will and moral responsibility. These include generalized anxiety disorder, clinical depression, and attention-deficit disorder. The chapter also examines the various kinds of pleas meant to show that a person is not blameworthy, and looks at the conditions for blameworthiness. It presents an example illustrating how a reasons-responsive theory of free will works, and it will help expose the main explanatory burden for such theories. Reasons-responsiveness comes in degrees, and it allows for a threshold above which an agent might act freely even if less responsive than one would be in the absence of the illness.
