Functional Delusional Beliefs and Moral Responsibility

Delusional beliefs are often associated with mental illness, and it is linked with schizophrenia spectrum and delusional disorder. Delusions are characterized as a failure of reasoning, and patients with delusions typically view their actions as caused by impervious beliefs. For this reason, a person with delusions loses their sense of agency and ownership, which is usually treated as an excusing condition for moral responsibility. We argue that this is not true in all cases. Lisa Bortolotti claims that some delusional beliefs contribute to achieving the patient’s epistemic goals and maintaining their sense of epistemic agency. Following this, we offer an analysis of patients with delusional beliefs to show that in cases where such beliefs remain epistemically functional, a patient could still be morally responsible. Our analysis is twofold: 1) we discuss the basis of moral exemption for a person with delusions owing to mental illness, and then 2) we examine the epistemic value of delusional belief in schizophrenia spectrum cases, its significance in epistemic agency, and what this implies for moral responsibility.