UC Riverside

The literature on philosophy of agency often appeals to atypical cases of agency, particularly addiction, psychopathy, compulsion, and psychosis. These appeals are sometimes distorted in ways that obscure both the disorders themselves and any more general insights about human agency that might be gained from analyzing them. While some of these distortions are documented and discussed in the literature (as is the case with psychopathy), little has been done to address philosophical mischaracterizations of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Here I provide the beginnings of a moral psychology of OCD, tracing ways in which it challenges a variety of held assumptions in the agency literature and charting a path toward an illuminating and univocal philosophical account of OCD.