Persons and psychosurgery

Joseph Margolis

University of South Carolina

pp. 71-84

in: Stuart Spicker, Tristram Engelhardt (eds), Philosophical dimensions of the neuro-medical sciences, Berlin, Springer, 1976

Abstract

As every commentator appreciates, the controversy over psychosurgery depends largely on its implications for more comprehensive issues: the range of psychotechnology, the defensibility of behavioral control, the definition of illness and mental illness, the rights of patients and the obligations of physicians or the rights of society and the obligations of citizens and professionals, the tolerance of deviance or criminality or violence, the meaning of personal and social welfare, the demarcation of psychosurgery, the purpose of medicine, the conditions of rational cost-benefit policies, the nature of human values, the relation between psychological and behavioral phenomena and the physical condition of the human body. These are by no means wild associations; but to identify them suggests the ease with which debate quite naturally turns away from the strictest questions regarding psychosurgery and the need for constructing a unified account that would facilitate linking relevant issues with some fair accommodation of competing convictions.