Did Lindsay Clancy lose her mind — or her free will?

In the 1985 book “Habits of the Heart,” Robert Bellah and his co-authors introduced “Sheilaism,” named for a woman they called Sheila Larson. Her individualized faith took the self as its highest authority: What felt right to her became the measure of what was right.

Four decades later, Sheilaism has escaped the pages of sociology. It appears whenever sympathy for a person becomes a reason to suspend judgment about what that person did.

Compassion can explain suffering. It cannot abolish judgment.

The Lindsay Clancy trial has been examined as a story about motherhood, postpartum depression, psychiatric medicine, and failures of the mental-health system. Beneath those questions lies an older philosophical one: Can a person be morally responsible for an act she sincerely believed was necessary or good when