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Spotify In this episode, I take on the Lindsay Clancy case, but not to tell you what you should think about her. Instead, I use this extraordinarily difficult case to explore how a Stoic should think when confronted with terrible acts, mental illness, questions of responsibility, and our very human desire for punishment.
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I begin with the facts as I understand them and an important limitation: I don't know every detail of the case or trial. Clancy killed her three children and attempted to take her own life, but she had also sought extensive psychiatric help before the killings. The defence has argued that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and that her condition had previously been misdiagnosed.
For Stoicism, that raises an important question. The acts were hers in the causal sense, but to what extent were they hers in the moral sense? Stoic ethics places enormous importance on our capacity for rational assent. If someone's rational faculty is profoundly impaired by psychosis, then determining their responsibility requires us to consider how capable they actually were of perceiving, judging, and responding to reality rationally.
That does not mean pretending the acts didn't happen, nor does compassion require us to ignore the safety of everyone else. If someone remains dangerous, restraint may be entirely appropriate. Justice has obligations both to the person who is ill and to the people who require protection from them.
Drawing on Seneca, I distinguish justice from vengeance. Restraint or punishment may be appropriate when it protects others, prevents further harm, or contributes to correction and treatment. Making someone suffer simply because their actions caused suffering is something else.
Ultimately, I suggest three things we should hold simultaneously: Clancy is a seriously mentally ill human being; she may require restraint for as long as she presents a danger; and where treatment and restoration are possible, justice should concern itself with those things too.
Stoicism should make our responses to cases like this slower, not faster. We should resist the satisfaction of immediate condemnation, examine the context carefully, ask what Justice actually requires, and only then decide how we ought to respond.