Capacity is Not in Your Head

Abstract

I may have taken the subject of this volume, “Moral Capacity,” too literally, or too medically, because my concern is with how to determine a patient’s decision making capacity, and how it relates to medical ethics — not moral capacity per se so much as the union set of capacity and morality. I will use two case studies of elderly patients. I will focus on the relation of capacity to philosophical concepts of personhood and, also, the relation of capacity and psychiatry. Both share an underlying theme of the commonsense or “folk” nature of our concepts of capacity and persons, and how distortions can arise from trying to define these concepts in more scientific ways, distortions with serious ethical consequences.