Agency and Responsibility

The controversy surrounding the 2026 BAFTA Film Awards, in which John Davidson, whose life with Tourette’s inspired the film I Swear, involuntarily vocalised a racial slur during the ceremony, generated predictable outrage. Social media rapidly framed the incident as an “outburst,” implying intent. The assumption of agency was immediate.

Yet Tourette’s syndrome, particularly in cases involving coprolalia, involves involuntary vocalisations. The utterance of taboo words is not a revelation of belief but a neurological compulsion. Coprolalia occurs in approximately 10-15 percent of people with Tourette’s and involves the brain’s failure to suppress socially inappropriate utterances. The individual has no control over the content; the words that emerge are often those most prohibited by their conscious values, precisely because the brain’s suppression mechanism has misfired.

The episode offers a useful case study in how capitalist society understands, and misunderstands, responsibility.

Agency Under Capitalism

Capitalist society rests heavily on the idea of individual responsibility. Workers are treated as autonomous units of labour power, assumed to be rational, self regulating, and fully in control of their conduct. Discipline in speech and behaviour is expected as part of employability and public legitimacy.

Where agency is compromised, through illness, disability or neurological variation, this framework strains. Instead of adjusting its assumptions, society often reasserts them more harshly. The presumption of intent remains, even where medical explanation is well documented.

This reveals a contradiction. When an individual is able to conform, their conformity is praised as personal virtue. When they cannot, their difference is interpreted as moral failure.

The Policing of Speech

Modern capitalism places significant emphasis on regulated language. Public speech is increasingly scrutinised, not only in workplaces but in cultural life. While there are good reasons to challenge genuinely racist or abusive expression, the framework often operates without regard to material context.

This is not an argument against challenging racist language. When someone with full agency chooses to use slurs, that reveals values and deserves opposition. The point is that agency itself must be established before moral judgment is applied. Treating involuntary and deliberate speech identically serves neither anti racism nor disability justice.

The Davidson incident illustrates this tension. A word can be socially harmful in its historical weight and impact. But responsibility cannot be abstracted from agency. To treat involuntary neurological discharge as deliberate prejudice collapses an important distinction.

Capitalist society frequently commodifies “inspirational” narratives of disability. Films, awards ceremonies and media profiles celebrate individuals overcoming adversity. Yet this celebration is conditional. It assumes that disability can be packaged into palatable form. When the unfiltered reality appears, tolerance evaporates.

The disabled individual is accepted only so long as they remain manageable.

Outrage as Commodity

The rapid reaction online was not incidental. Social media platforms reward immediacy and emotional intensity. Speed outruns verification. The platforms profit from engagement regardless of accuracy. A nuanced explanation of Tourette’s generates less interaction than moral outrage. The economic incentive is toward simplification and condemnation, not toward understanding the material reality of neurological conditions.

Under these conditions, moral judgement becomes performative. Expressing indignation is easier than examining neurological evidence. The result is a form of “gotcha” politics that prioritises signalling over understanding.

The Paradox of Inspiration

Davidson’s presence at the BAFTAs was itself a product of an inspiration narrative , his life “overcoming” Tourette’s packaged as cultural uplift. But inspiration requires disability to be sanitised, controlled, presented as triumph over adversity.

The moment Tourette’s manifested as it actually does, involuntarily, inconveniently, in a way that cannot be neatly celebrated, the tolerance evaporated. This reveals what capitalism often means by “acceptance”: the disabled must perform their difference in ways that affirm rather than challenge existing norms.

Responsibility Reconsidered

A socialist analysis does not abandon the concept of harm. Words carry histories; their impact is real. But justice requires proportionality and context. If an action is involuntary, then moral condemnation is misdirected.

The deeper issue is the rigidity of a society that demands uniform neurological performance in public life. When responsibility is defined without regard to material capacity, it ceases to be rational and becomes punitive.

The BAFTA incident reveals a system that confuses control with virtue and compliance with morality. It treats neurological difference as character defect and involuntary behaviour as moral choice. A materialist analysis rejects this confusion and demands that responsibility be matched to actual agency, not to capitalist fantasies of the self regulating individual.

Pablo