Rachel Higginbotham

Nonliteral uses of mental illness terms abound. Common examples include criticizing a person’s mood swings by saying “you’re bipolar,” hyperbolically exclaiming that a particularly difficult college exam “gave me PTSD,” or responding to a compliment about the cleanliness of one’s home by saying “I just have OCD.” There has been some pushback in recent years, both socially and within the philosophical literature, against using mental illness terms nonliterally to imply something negative about the subject. The focus so far has been on the pejorative nature of the utterances. Nonliteral uses which imply something positive about the subject have gone largely ignored. One might think that these positive uses are innocent, perhaps even helpful in combatting stigma. On the contrary, as I argue in this paper, all nonliteral uses of mental illness terms are harmful, and they are harmful for the same reason. I argue that they contribute to what I call hermeneutic hijacking. Hermeneutic hijacking occurs when a term’s literal meaning is eclipsed by a nonliteral usage in a way that prevents the original term from functioning as it should. Though people have recognized the harm of pejoration, they have overlooked the way that nonliteral uses of mental illness terms, even absent pejoration, cause hermeneutic injustice.

The existence and coherence of self-directed duties (that is, duties one owes to oneself) has been the topic of much debate lately. However, beyond defending their existence, not much work has been done to compare self-directed duties to their other-directed counterparts. In this paper, I examine three ways that self-directed duties might be thought to differ from self-directed duties: compensatory obligations, liability to defensive force, and respective weightiness. For each of these, I will provide some reason to think an asymmetry is not so obvious. In doing so, I will identify what one would need to show in order to demonstrate that there is a genuine asymmetry between self-directed duties and their other-directed counterparts and argue that such a standard has not yet been met. I conclude that self-directed duties are not so obviously different and carry many of the same consequences as their other-directed counterparts.