Research project financed by the University of Rijeka (2014-2017)
One acute social problem concerns the classification and social response to different types to anti-social and sexual behaviour. The existing social responses to these types of behaviours fall in a spectrum that goes from medical categorisation to punishment.
The central hypothesis of the present research is that the norms that guide these social responses be individuated and evaluated by means of a interdisciplinary approach that includes social epistemology (functioning of individual, group, collective and institutional epistemic agents), epistemic deliberative democracy and the method of public reason (elaboration of norms by means of democratic debate and pubic reasons), analytic philosophy of psychiatry (the basis for the norms that specify normality and deviance within psychiatric theory and practice), analytic philosophy of sexuality (the norms of human sexuality).
The descriptive dimension of the project involves investigating the values that underlie the existing applications of the relevant medical, ethical and legal concepts. The normative and prescriptive dimension of the project, based on the assumptions of contemporary philosophy of politics and social epistemology, involves a critical evaluation of these values and associated practices. The main aim of the research is to offer criteria for distinguishing between behaviours that can be classified as disorders or illnesses from those behaviours that are unusual or eccentric.
The project is focuses on the following questions:
(1) Which methods of social epistemology, public reasoning and deliberation should shape the social reactions to individuals whose behaviour represent departures for what is ordinary?
(2) How can we distinguish between anti-social disorders of personality and deviant sexual behaviours from departures from statistically common behaviours and acceptable reactions to problems of living and legitimate life-styles?
(3) Which type of social intervention can be legitimate with individuals classified as having anti-social disorder of personality those who manifest deviant sexual behaviour by at the same time protecting them from unjustified repression and stigmatization?