Aware: the common-sense view of the world is not the only one (Image: John Firth/BIPS/Getty Images)

People with serious mental disorders may understand morality after all, reveals a book by an ethics professor who pioneered research in a high-security hospital

AS A professor of ethics at King’s College, London, Jonathan Glover is accustomed to using the Socratic method to help his students refine their moral beliefs by answering tough philosophical questions. The technique, which originated in ancient Athens, is often used in colleges and law schools. One place you don’t typically encounter it, though, is in a high-security psychiatric hospital.

You don’t typically encounter the Socratic method in a high-security psychiatric hospital


In the 1990s, Glover decided to take it to Broadmoor Hospital in the south of England. There he probed a common stereotype about psychopaths – that they lack a conscience – by discussing ethics with them. Those dialogues form the starting point for Alien Landscapes?, a wide-ranging philosophical investigation of psychology and a psychological examination of philosophy.

Glover was interested in the thinking of people with all sorts of psychiatric disorders. As a result, he says, “the voices of people with psychiatric diagnoses should be listened to attentively,” in marked contrast to “bland, abstract accounts of antisocial personality disorder”.

Most of the men at Broadmoor were from broken homes, all had committed serious crimes and been diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. The assumption was that they were amoral, and therefore unable to comprehend their crimes. Even so, Glover observes: “One of the striking features of people on psychiatric wards is how much their conversation is about topics also discussed in philosophy journals.” One thing they have in common is an awareness that “the common-sense interpretation of the world is not the only one”.

Glover decided to ask the men seemingly simple questions, such as what they would teach a child about right and wrong. Many responses were predictably shallow. A patient, CQ, said that children shouldn’t swear, and perceived no ethical distinction between cursing and bullying. For ZC, who identified stealing as wrong, the only explanation was self-interest: “You’ll be locked up, locked in prison and well – you suffer. You lose your freedom.”

Glover probed deeper, using a thought experiment formulated by Plato, Socrates’s student, which allows us to commit a crime wearing an invisibility ring. Some patients (including ZC) saw no problem with stealing or killing if you couldn’t be seen, but others had more complex views. “It would be wrong, yeah,” said JF, “but if you could get away with it, you’d be one step above the law.”

A casual listener might think JF as amoral as ZC, but not Glover. He heard something that made him think it “did not fit the conceptual core of amoralism”. Many of the men had a “vocabulary of moral concepts”, and by carefully directing his questions, he found ethical qualities mapping onto those concepts, such as fairness and respect. For Glover, it was a bridge between psychopaths and the rest of us, because it showed there are many dimensions to the disorder, and most of them overlap with personality traits of some people deemed normal.

One obvious conclusion is that diagnostic boxes do not suffice in psychiatry. A subtler conclusion is that the thinking of people with disorders of the mind can enrich philosophy. Glover believes that it can, from ethics to epistemology.

His book often loses focus, meandering between the ambiguous and the obvious, but one place he clearly shows the interests of the philosopher in psychosis is when he writes about delusions. People who believe they have been, say, abducted by aliens, will often know if a set of beliefs is internally consistent but can seldom judge about whether the set is plausible.

What delusional people lack, Glover posits, is “the emotional ‘feel’ of an idea” much as their “emotional ‘feel’ for other people is often weak”. Delusions, in other words, reveal the powerful role of emotion in acquiring knowledge, challenging the notion that epistemology is purely rational.

If you’re prepared to listen, as Glover has, the Socratic method may seem perfectly natural, even at Broadmoor Hospital.

Alien Landscapes? Interpreting disordered minds Jonathan Glover Harvard University Press

This article appeared in print under the headline “Socrates for psychopaths”