Moral Responsibility and Tourette Syndrome: A Surprising Preliminary Report

Tim Schroeder

Tourettic individuals are of special interest to philosophers because they appear to represent clean test-cases for theories of moral responsibility. No one would hold a Tourettic individual responsible for throwing a plate, shouting "shit!" or jerking her head in a way which led to some morally unfortunate outcome. Philosophers generally take this position either because they hold Tourettic individuals cannot do otherwise, or because they hold their actions are not expressions of their "Real Selves." As it turns out, however, the actual phenomenology of Tourette Syndrome is far more complex than philosophers imagine. In this talk, I describe how very many Tourettic individuals experience themselves, show the problems this makes for philosophers taking either the could-have-done-otherwise based or Real Self approach to responsibility, and suggest that the real problem lies in how desires to act are generally conceived.