Sickness and Wickedness: New Conceptions and New Paradoxes

This article is a discussion of the conceptual relationship between wickedness and (mental) illness, quite apart from their uses in the criminal law. One of the theses defended in the article is that in ordinary language illness has lost much of its power to mitigate and excuse, so that "sickos " are treated as if they were some strange minority or political sect. This article is about serial killers, people who kill more than one person, but only one at a time. Some of these criminals are prepared to kill whenever doing so will help promote their own interest, such as the cover-up of an earlier crime by elim-inating a possible witness. Others kill only for the sake of killing. For them, murder is a way of life and they kill frequently simply because they enjoy it. In recent years, there have been a num-ber of well-publicized serial killers. The name that first comes to mind is that of Jeffrey Dahmer, whose atrocities, I pre-sume, are well known to you and need not be dwelled upon, except perhaps to men-tion that they included multiple dismem-berment, torture, rape. cannibalism, and even necrophilic mistreatment of corpses. Almost everyone would acknowledg