Carolina Seminar on Philosophy, Ethics, and Mental Health: “Affect, Value and Decisional Capacity” with Jennifer Hawkins, PhD

Carolina Seminar on Philosophy, Ethics, and Mental Health: “Affect, Value and Decisional Capacity” with Jennifer Hawkins, PhD Associate Research Professor of Philosophy at Duke University

Wednesday, September 28, 2022 at 6:00pm
Contact daniel_moseley@med.unc.edu for Zoom link

Our ability to look after ourselves and promote our own interests can be (and often is) undermined by mental disorder in ways not anticipated by current models of decision-making capacity. Our standard ways of assessing capacity do not detect all the cases of incapacity they should. In this talk I first explain the nature of this problem and argue that it deserves more attention than it has generally received. I then offer a diagnosis of the problem, i.e. I explain why I think the problem arises, and why it can seem so hard to solve. Finally, I offer an original new solution that, I argue, avoids being objectionably paternalistic.