Benjamin Campbell

Disordered wrongdoing describes wrongdoing which is causally connected to a wrongdoer’s mental disorder. A common attitude toward disordered wrongdoing is that the disorder is an “explanation” but not an “excuse” for the wrongdoing. Mental disorders, though, are often thought to be conditions that limit one’s freedom to choose alternative courses of action. These sorts of constraints on freedom are taken in ethical philosophy and democratic judicial systems to strongly reduce one's moral responsibility for a wrong act, if not remove it altogether in many cases. Rather than focusing on this legal interpretation of responsibility, I will focus on the “holistic” ethical context of how we treat disordered wrongdoers: our ethical comportment. I argue that our basic attitude toward disordered wrongdoers, on account of these constraints in freedom, should be compassionate. I explicitly focus on the meaning of compassion as it relates to a moral obligation to be understanding toward the reasons disordered wrongdoers have for their actions. We close out by giving a formal statement of our thesis, as well as a summary of what we have concluded throughout the paper.

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental disorder that has gained a great deal of attention since its formal inception in the 1970’s. But like many other mental disorders, there exists a gap between the lived experience of the PTSD sufferer and the scientific knowledge of the psychiatrist. If phenomenology is, as Husserl says, the unifying, sense-giving foundation of all science, it seems we must start inquiry with a scientific understanding of lived experience. I will attempt to bridge the gap between psychiatry and lived experience by using phenomenology to make clear the essence of PTSD. In our investigation, we will examine PTSD through a broadly Husserlian lens. Guided by the symptomology of PTSD, we will attempt to make clear the features of consciousness that render PTSD possible as a configuration of consciousness. Special attention is paid to memory, presence, and the Heideggerian concept of care. We uncover, by the end, that the essence of PTSD, is temporal “stickiness”—wherein the past sticks to all temporal modes through recollection. Assuming that our description is successful, we have more evidence to believe that phenomenology is a proper and reliable methodology for understanding lived experience—and therefore all science.