Perlin M L
New York Law School, New York 10013, USA.
Bull Am Acad Psychiatry Law. 1996;24(1):5-26.
The author presents the case that society's efforts to understand the insanity defense and insanity-pleading defendants are doomed to intellectual, moral, and political gridlock unless we are willing to take a fresh look at the doctrine through a series of filters-empirical research, scientific discovery, moral philosophy, cognitive and moral psychology, and sociology-in an effort to confront the single most important (but rarely asked) question: why do we feel the way we do about "these people" (insanity pleaders)? He examines this question finally through a model of structural anthropology and concludes that until we come to grips with the extent to which ours is a "culture of punishment," we can make no headway in solving the insanity defense dilemma.
作者提出，除非我们愿意通过一系列的过滤器——实证研究、科学发现、道德哲学、认知与道德心理学以及社会学——重新审视这一学说，以直面那个最重要（但却很少被问到）的问题：为什么我们对“这些人”（以精神错乱为由进行抗辩的人）会有这样的感受，否则社会在理解精神错乱抗辩及以精神错乱为由进行抗辩的被告方面所做的努力注定会陷入智力、道德和政治僵局。他最终通过结构人类学模型审视了这个问题，并得出结论，除非我们能够理解我们所处的是一种“惩罚文化”的程度，否则我们在解决精神错乱抗辩困境方面将毫无进展。
