December 28, 2025
‘Mental Health’ or ‘Evil’?
By Jack Kerwick
With the arrest of Nick Reiner for the alleged murder of his parents, Rob Reiner and Michelle Singer, commentators have taken to simultaneously pitying the accused for his mental illness while condemning him for his evil actions.
This is logically contradictory.
On the one hand, if it is illness that explains why Nick Reiner committed a crime, then he cannot be held morally responsible for his actions. It is just to hold him morally responsible for his actions only if he could have chosen, on the basis of reasons, not impulses or compulsions, to have done other than what he allegedly did.
If, on the other hand, we insist upon blaming Reiner for having committed an evil deed, then it is just as irrelevant to appeal to mental illnesses from which he may have been suffering as it would be irrelevant to appeal to whatever physical diseases may have afflicted him.
more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/12/mental_health_or_evil.html
