In the 1985 book “Habits of the Heart,” Robert Bellah and his co-authors introduced “Sheilaism,” named for a woman they called Sheila Larson. Her individualized faith took the self as its highest authority: What felt right to her became the measure of what was right.
Four decades later, Sheilaism has escaped the pages of sociology. It appears whenever sympathy for a person becomes a reason to suspend judgment about what that person did.
Compassion can explain suffering. It cannot abolish judgment.
The Lindsay Clancy trial has been examined as a story about motherhood, postpartum depression, psychiatric medicine, and failures of the mental-health system. Beneath those questions lies an older philosophical one: Can a person be morally responsible for an act she sincerely believed was necessary or good when she committed it?
Clancy does not dispute that she killed her three children. Her defense argues that mental disease deprived her of criminal responsibility. Massachusetts law asks whether, because of mental disease or defect, she lacked substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform her conduct to the law. Prosecutors maintain that she retained that capacity.
That legal question rests on a deeper question about human action.
The natural-law tradition recognizes something strange about the human will: We act under the appearance of the good. That does not mean everything we choose is actually good. It means that when we choose, we choose something because, at that moment, it appears desirable.
“But I knew it was wrong” does not escape the principle.
Suppose I lose my temper and viciously insult someone. Five seconds later I say, “I knew I shouldn’t have done that.” In one sense, I did. I knew the moral rule. But in the moment, another apparent good prevailed: revenge, satisfaction, pride, the pleasure of hurting someone who hurt me. I chose the counterfeit good over what I knew I ought to do.
That is precisely what makes moral responsibility possible. Otherwise, every crime could be excused by discovering the reason that made it seem worthwhile to the criminal.
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This is where our contemporary psychology of crime can become dangerous. Americans are fascinated by explanations that help us identify with people who commit terrible acts. He was bullied. She was abused. He was desperate. She was depressed. His childhood was traumatic. Her circumstances were overwhelming.
Those things may be true. They may deserve compassion. They may affect legal culpability. But explaining why an evil act appeared reasonable to someone does not make the act good, nor does explanation by itself erase responsibility.
That distinction is especially important in the Clancy case because many women identify with some part of her suffering. The case has drawn women who see their own experiences with postpartum depression or psychiatric treatment reflected in hers.
The temptation is not confined to the political left. Conservatives who ordinarily emphasize personal responsibility can make the same move when the defendant seems familiar, sympathetic, or like someone in their own community.
The Sheilaist asks, “Could this have been me?” and then quietly shifts the question from what justice requires to what leniency she would want for herself. The shift is described as empathy. But empathy can become morally confused when it overrides judgment.
Imagine applying that principle consistently: The more completely we reconstruct the reasons that made a crime seem reasonable to the criminal, the less responsible the criminal becomes.
Soon understanding becomes exoneration. Worse, the supposedly humane approach becomes dehumanizing. It begins, “She is a person like us; we can understand how terrible her circumstances were.” It ends, “Therefore those circumstances controlled her. She could not really choose.”
But human beings are moral agents because circumstances can influence us without necessarily determining us. Depression, anger, fear, humiliation, resentment, and despair can impair judgment. The law must take severe mental disease seriously. Yet if powerful emotions automatically erased responsibility, much of criminal law would collapse.
The philosophical question, then, is not simply whether Clancy believed her actions were necessary, merciful, justified, or even good. Human beings possess an extraordinary capacity to rename evil while committing it. History is full of people who committed atrocities while persuading themselves they served justice, equality, country, family, or humanity.
RELATED: My abusive mother was not a victim — and neither is Lindsay Clancy
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The ability to rationalize evil is not an exception to human nature. It is one of its most frightening features.
So the central question cannot be, “Can I understand why she did it?” Of course we may understand a person’s reasoning and still conclude that the reasoning was morally and logically corrupt. The question is whether she retained sufficient rational and volitional capacity to recognize and choose what she ought to have done.
Here Sheilaism, in its attempt at empathy, risks denying the very agency that makes a person human. If terrible circumstances alone are enough to erase free will, then moral responsibility disappears with them.
That does not decide Clancy’s legal case. A jury must decide what her mental condition did to her capacity under Massachusetts law. But neither law nor morality can accept the proposition that killing becomes excusable merely because, in the terrible logic of a disordered mind, the killer persuaded herself it was good — or because observers think, “That could have been me.”
Law exists partly because human beings are remarkably talented at excusing objectively evil actions. Romans 13 asks whether we want to live without fear of authority and answers: “Do what is good.” The magistrate “does not bear the sword in vain.” Compassion can explain suffering. It cannot abolish judgment.
Empathy, Opinion & analysis, Postpartum depression, Criminal law, Lindsay clancy, Trial
