74 Diminished Responsibility Redux

This chapter is almost entirely the contents of a letter Ulrich receives from his father about an argument he is having with a certain Professor Schwung, "whom you may remember from earlier days before I had seen through him, so that for years he could pass as my best friend."

The argument is over the following statement that Ulrich's father had submitted as part of  a "future" Austrian penal code:

No criminal act has been committed if the perpetrator was in a state of unconsciousness or pathological disturbance of his mind at the time he was engaged in the act under consideration --

Schwung had also submitted this addition using exactly the same words.  But Schwung and Ulrich's father differ regarding how the sentence should end:

Professor Schwung submitted a proposal beginning with exactly the same words. But then he continued as follows: "so that he could not exercise his free will," while mine was to read: "so that he did not have the capacity to perceive the wrongfulness of his act.

Ulrich's father proposes a compromise that includes both endings:

No criminal act shall have been committed if the offender was at the time of his act in a state of unconsciousness or a morbid disturbance of his mental activity, so that he did not have the capacity to perceive the wrongfulness of his act and could not exercise his free will.

But Schwung comes back with a counter proposal:

. . . he arrogantly insisted that the "and" in my statement had to be replaced with an "or." You see the point? . . . Schwung was trying to stigmatize me as a superficial thinker by exposing my readiness to find a compromise, using the "and" to unite both formulations, exposing it to the suspicion that I had failed to grasp the real magnitude of the difference to be bridged, with all its implications.

Ulrich's father sees Schwung as representative of:

. . . the present tendency to legal obfuscation, which falsely dubs itself humanitarianism, [which] consists in the effort to extend the concept of mental impairment, for which punishment is not in order, in the vague form of diminished responsibility, even to those numerous individuals who are neither insane nor morally normal: . . .

This revisits the dilemma first presented in greater detail and more seriously in chapter 60 when the narrator describes Moosbrugger as "one of those borderline cases in law and forensic medicine known . . . as a case of diminished responsibility."

In a world of people who have no sense of themselves, who are "without qualities," how are they to make any clear moral decisions.  That is one of the unanswered questions that arises from the uneasy condition of "modern" man.