Special Report
Thirty-Three Dead
By Yale Kramer
Published 4/27/2007 12:08:17 AM
Many years ago — before the sixties, when activist reformers discovered the notion that mentally ill patients were an oppressed people, like Negroes (as blacks preferred to be called then), women, and homosexuals (as gay men were identified then), and decided that they must be set free from their sadistic doctors and nurses (deinstitutionalized) in order to become independent (homeless) — I was a resident physician studying psychiatry at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital.

1. Start with the so-called Frankfurt cases (these are due to Harry Frankfurt (1969), which show elegantly that with regard to the concept of ‘free will’ neither leeway (access to alternatives) nor sourceness (singular agent initiative) are sufficient. Here are two simplified adapted Frankfurt cases: 1) Someone (Person A) believes he/she choses to stay in a room, but unbeknownst to A, the door has been locked locked from outside; 2) Person B can choose to do behavior X, but unbeknownst to B, if some behavior other than X would have been chosen by B, a drug would have been administered to B to ensure that B did do behavior X.