by the definition of madness provided by John Locke in which delusional symptoms were required. In legal trials this definition had proved to be a great source of embarrassment to alienists because unless delusional symptoms could be clearly shown judges would not consider a plea of insanity. In terms of involuntary commitment of individuals alleged to be insane, Prichard was cautious in using the diagnosis of moral insanity, partly because the educated classes that were typical clients tended to hold the asylum system in very low regard. Prichard tended to suggest it came down to an assessment of individual mental state and ability. He emphasized property and social order as the rationale for confinement: "Of all these arrangements the maintenance of public order is the principal object, and the second is the preservation of the property belonging to the lunatic and the interest of his family." Implications Ultimately, the concept of moral insanity did not change the orthodox legal defense of insanity which required the clear presence of delusion, as embodied in the M'Naghten rules in 1842 which are still referenced today. Nevertheless, modern conceptions of responsibility have been forged in part through the medical and legal exchanges over moral insanity, including anticipations of the diagnosis in the writings of Benjamin Rush, in the context of concepts of free will associated with religious Common Sense Realism. Moral insanity came to be increasingly seen as a form of genetically inherited degeneracy, and toward the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century converged with ideas of moral imbecility and deficiency, as well as with an anti-vice moral hygiene movement. Several writers have sounded caution over the notion that the diagnostic category of moral insanity was a direct forerunner of psychopathic disorder. As stated by the historian F.A. Whitlock: "there [is] not the remotest resemblance between their examples [Pinel's and Prichard's] and what today would be classed as psychopathic personality." Prichard's "moral insanity" was a catch-all term of behavioural disorders whose only feature in common was an absence of delusions: it is not cognate with the modern diagnostic category of antisocial personality disorder. However, Whitlock has suggested that the diagnosis gradually changed into moral imbecility over the turn of the century and that in turn transformed into something like the current concept of psychopathy. The psychiatrist Koch sought to make the moral insanity concept more scientific and suggested in 1891