| people in states of psychosis often behave in frightening ways out of their control, and do and say hurtful things to those around them. if someone hurts you or does something very frightening, fear and anger are natural emotions. but it’s not morally wrong to experience psychosis. so how could it be right for me to feel fear and anger towards that person when they haven’t done anything wrong? it is a tough contradiction. you can resolve the contradiction by just deciding to hate and fear anyone who shows signs of psychosis, treat them as if it is a morally bad trait, which many people do, see discourse about homeless people in NYC. or you can just try to pretend that psychosis doesn’t exist, which a lot of people do, like when some public figure shows obvious psychotic symptoms but people act like it’s rational behavior. or you can disavow the fear and anger, but if a person does actually frighten and hurt you, the resulting negative feelings often tend to be expressed in weird and unfair ways. i suspect this author’s employers and doctors probably do a lot of this. personally I think the least bad solution is to acknowledge that anger towards a person can be justified even if they’ve done nothing morally wrong, just feel anger, and express it only in controlled ways. but this is philosophically confusing, easy to state, hard to really believe deep down. |