Integrating Ethics with Psychiatry. The case of Antoni Kępiński

• Authors: Paweł Łuków
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This paper argues that in the case of mental illnesses whose somatic bases are not known or do not exist, a promising route to understand mental illness is to see it as the lack of a patient’s engagement with some moral values that are necessary for a good human life. The paper explains how the first-person perspective, which is constitutive for mental illnesses, makes it impossible to provide an adequate, third-person explanation of the pathological. Because of its irreducible first-personal nature, mental illness must be understood (also) in terms of a moral harm to the patient, and so an integration of ethics and psychiatry (at least at the level of practice) is required. This view is further illustrated with A. Kępiński’s idea of psychiatry as therapy with moral values.

Keywords

EN

Antoni Kępiński; ethics of medicine; moral values; psychiatry; patient-doctor-relation; epistemology in psychiatry

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Philosophica. Ethica – Aesthetica – Practica
• Year: 2016
• Issue: 28
• Pages: 11-22

Dates

published

2016-12-30

Contributors

author

Paweł Łuków

• University of Warsaw, Institute of Philosophy

References

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Identifiers

DOI

10.18778/0208-6107.28.03