Hello! I’d like to begin by giving a description of what appears on the screen. I’m a white woman with short hair. I’m wearing large plastic glasses and long earrings. Behind me, to my right, there’s a clock on the wall and a window with curtains. Behind me, to my left, there’s a ceiling fan.

I’ve joined this conference from the ancestral territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabeg. The territory was the subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and the Ojibwe and Allied Nations around the Great Lakes.

I’m very grateful to Camisha Russell, Bonnie Mann, and the other conference organizers for inviting me to participate in this plenary.

My presentation is entitled “Reproducing Eugenic Injustice” and zeroes in on some ways in which ableist injustice is reproduced and philosophy’s role in reproducing this injustice. An expanded version of the argument will appear as “Disaster Ableism, Epistemologies of Crisis, and the Mystique of Bioethics,” my chapter in The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability.

If you wish to read along with me, I have now posted the text of the presentation to the BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY blog. You’ll find the presentation at the top of the blog.

REPRODUCING EUGENIC INJUSTICE

Section One: Misconceiving Disability and Mystifying Bioethics

Philosophers increasingly engage in pointed discussions about academic freedom in philosophy and academia more widely, as well as participate in heated debates with members of the broader public about freedom of speech in society at large. The most impassioned discussions and debates concern the philosophical legitimacy of so-called gender critical feminism, the publication of articles about supposedly innate differences between allegedly natural races, and the extension to Peter Singer and Kathleen Stock of invitations to present their work in light of the former philosopher’s remarks about the permissibility of infanticide in the case of disabled infants and the latter philosopher’s renown as a leading advocate of so-called gender critical feminism and its claims about the immutability of binary sex.

Notice the disparate levels of generality at which these discourses take place. Although Singer’s arguments about disability are repeatedly condemned in the philosophical community, the systemic and structural character of the ableism that precipitated the arguments has gone virtually unaddressed and flourishes unabated.

In other words, the singularity conferred upon Singer’s arguments–which in turn frames common objections to them–enables both the eugenic impetus of the field of bioethics and the perilous statements of other bioethicists to remain systematically unchallenged, to be neutralized, and to persist. My argument is that the repeated identification of certain bioethicists (such as Singer) as the purveyors of eugenics within bioethics should be recognized as a surreptitious technology that enables the undisrupted reproduction of eugenic ableism as a fundamental condition of possibility for the field of bioethics, including feminist bioethics and disability bioethics.

Misconceptions of bioethics, according to which bioethics is an innocuous, if not progressive, field of inquiry are vital to the “mystique of bioethics.” I use the term mystique of bioethics to refer to, first, the technology by which the eugenic impulse of bioethics is concealed; second, the structural gaslighting that enables this concealment whereby the field of bioethics is cast as the domain of a distinct specialist knowledge that renders bioethicists uniquely qualified to evaluate a purportedly distinctive set of questions and concerns; and third, the technology of this supposedly specialist knowledge whereby, through practices and strategies of mystification, which are constitutive of the apparatus of disability, systemic social and political problems are constituted as natural, individual, and medical in origin.

In this presentation, I draw upon Kyle Whyte’s work on epistemologies of crisis and Naomi Klein’s writing about disaster capitalism to further elaborate my thesis that bioethics is a neoliberal, neocolonial technology of government. Whyte uses the term epistemologies of crisis to refer to colonialist narratives and ways of knowing that characterize certain situations and states of affairs as “unprecedented” and “urgent,” ignoring histories of colonization to do so. Klein uses the term disaster capitalism to describe elements of neoliberalism that variously produce, exploit, and aggravate economic, political, environmental, and social disasters and crises in ways that expand the reach of unregulated economic markets. My objective is to combine both Whyte’s insights and Klein’s remarks with Michel Foucault’s approach to argue that bioethics is an instrument and mechanism of biopower’s neoliberal eugenics and, ultimately, an insidious enterprise of colonial power.

The conception of disability that predominates in philosophy construes disability as a philosophically uninteresting, objective, and value-neutral biological trait or property that some people embody or possess. Insofar as philosophers hold this naturalized and individualized conception of disability, they assume that disability is a prediscursive entity, with transhistorical and transcultural properties, that medicine and science can both astutely recognize and accurately represent and to which universal philosophical principles can be applied.

Yet a different understanding of disability is available according to which the ontology of disability, the ontological status of disability, and the application of philosophical principles and theoretical frameworks to the phenomena of disability are performative and co-constitutive. As I argued in “Reproductive Freedom, Self-Regulation, and the Government of Impairment In Utero,” which appeared in Hypatia in 2006, the ontology of disability is always already a contingent political, and hence, value-laden, state of affairs, an apparatus that should be historicized and relativized.

In Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, I assert that bioethics emerged as a technology of government to resolve the problem that the production of disability poses for the neoliberal management of societies. Indeed, the subdiscipline of bioethics (including feminist bioethics and so-called disability bioethics) is an institutionalized vehicle for the biopolitics of our time, that is, the intellectual resources that bioethics provides facilitate the strengthening of certain populations and the elimination of others.

In short, the field of bioethics is a premier arena for the adjudication of biopower’s governmental capacity to make live and let die, as Foucault put it. In other words, bioethics is a modern form of race science; that is, bioethics is founded on the rationalization of eugenics. For example, the subfield of bioethics rationalizes the proliferation and use of biotechnologies such as prenatal testing and genetic selection and, in doing so, bioethics simultaneously contributes to the constitution and elimination of impairment through the identification, evaluation, classification, and categorization of it, thereby enlarging the purview of the apparatus of disability and extending its reach. Hence, my argument is that in order for philosophy to advance justice for disabled people, bioethics–as a mechanism and technology of the apparatus of disability–must be abolished.

As I have noted elsewhere, however, most philosophers nevertheless regard bioethics as the most suitable domain in philosophy for considerations about disability, as the persistent lack of job opportunities in philosophy of disability and the concurrent proliferation of jobs in bioethics and cognate fields indicate. In so-called Canada, for example, bioethicists have played a crucial role in the creation of a culture of eugenics within the discipline of philosophy and in the Canadian milieu at large, both influencing the development and promulgation of legislation in Canada to expand state sanctioned assisted suicide and euthanasia (that is, MAiD) and ensuring that disabled specialists in philosophy of disability do not enter the ranks of professional philosophy in Canada. Canada now has the most permissive euthanasia/assistive-suicide legislation in the world, thanks in no small part to Canadian bioethicists and other philosophers.

Insofar as bioethics is an instrument and mechanism of neoliberalism, which aims to normalize populations in ways that make them cost effective and governable, an understanding of the operations of neoliberalism, in a broader sense, can help us identify and understand the power relations that animate bioethics and enable the proliferation of its governmental strategies.

Section Two: Disaster Neocolonialism, Disaster Neoliberalism, and Disastrous Ableism

In The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Klein sets out to show how neoliberal capitalism and capitalists variously produce and exploit disasters and crises in order to drastically change economies and governments. Klein’s goal is to demonstrate that the detrimental impact on disenfranchised and other subordinated social groups of these economic and political swings is both foreseeable and disregarded, if not their desideratum. For Klein, the wizard of this social movement was Chicago-school economist Milton Friedman.

For example, as Klein explains, Friedman used Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans in 2005 to facilitate privatization of the city’s public education system, a far-reaching policy change that was among the disastrous consequences of Hurricane Katrina that disproportionately affected the city’s Black residents. As Friedman put it at the time: “Most New Orleans schools are in ruins … as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.”

Less than two years after the levees were breached, privately-run charter schools had almost entirely replaced the New Orleans public school system, the contract with the New Orleans teacher’s union had effectively been torn to pieces, and the union’s 4700 members had been fired. For Klein, this dismantling of the New Orleans public school system post-Katrina exemplifies “disaster capitalism,” which she defines as “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities.”

In an article that recently appeared in The Guardian, Klein and Kapua ’ala Sproat explain how disaster capitalism–which takes different forms in different geopolitical contexts–has conditioned responses to the wildfires that occurred in Maui last month. Indeed, as Klein and Sproat write,

“Some Native Hawaiians have taken to calling their unique version [of disaster capitalism] by a slightly different term: [that is,] plantation disaster capitalism. It’s a name that speaks to contemporary forms of neocolonialism and climate profiteering, like the real estate agents…cold-calling Lahaina residents who have lost everything to the fire and prodding them to sell their ancestral lands rather than wait for compensation. But it also places these moves inside the long and ongoing history of settler colonial resource theft and trickery, making clear that while disaster capitalism might have some modern disguises, it’s a very old tactic.”

For more than a century, Klein and Sproat point out, water across the western region of the island has been extracted to benefit outside interests: first, large sugar plantations and, more recently, their corporate successors. Shortly after the wildfires broke out, these corporations and business interests, with collaboration from Hawaii’s governor, Josh Green, began to seek ways both to nullify the legislated protections of Hawaii’s most precious natural resource–that is, its water–and to further divert the water available to Native Hawaiians.

Klein and Sproat maintain that settler colonial water consumption all over Maui–water consumption both limited and authorized through legislated water-use permits–that is, water used for the swimming pools of lavish Hawaiian hotels, the glistening wet golf courses of Maui, and the luxury estates that large corporations all over Maui operate, limited the extent to which the wildfires of Lahaina could be extinguished.

It is especially pertinent to my work on disability and eugenics that disaster capitalism exploits disasters and crises to mold social values, norms, expectations, and explanations in ways that promote neoliberal social and political agendas amongst academics, the media, NGOs, and populations at large, in addition to how it exploits these events to profoundly change governments and economic systems themselves.

I contend that all levels of government in so-called Canada, as well as various academics, journalists, think tanks, corporations, and foundations have seized upon the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportune occasion to engage in (what I call) “disaster ableism,” that is, have exploited the pandemic and the circumstances that surround it to cultivate norms, values, and beliefs that promote ableist agendas and eugenic goals. In particular, the government of Canada and the bioethicists to whom Canadian politicians regularly defer and appeal have employed disaster ableism to usher into law legislation—namely, Bill C-7—that significantly expands and more deeply embeds eugenics in Canadian society.

In the midst of a global pandemic, when the residents of Canada were losing their loved ones, their dwellings, and their incomes due to COVID-19; were living in situations of fear, misinformation, and confusion; and were distracted and isolated, the Canadian government bypassed adequate public consultation, usurped international treaties, ignored the objections of Indigenous leaders, manipulated parliamentary procedure, and made a mockery of disabled experts invited to participate in its legislative proceedings, in order to ensure passage of Bill C-7, legislation that would make sweeping changes to existing Canadian laws on medically assisted suicide and euthanasia.

In short, the same (neo)liberal government which, throughout the pandemic, has consistently refused to provide financial and other social supports to disabled people–allowing thousands of them to die from COVID-19 and neglect in nursing homes and other carceral institutions in which disabled people are confined–has adopted a pernicious way to (in the words of Friedman) “permanently reform” distribution to disabled people, namely, by providing them with easier access to premature death rather than by providing them with the means to live their lives.

Canadian bioethicists, law professors, politicians, and some very privileged white disabled people maintain that Bill C-7 promises greater equality for disabled people by further enshrining their rights to autonomy and self-determination; however, poor, racialized, Indigenous, trans, and queer disabled people recognize that Bill C-7 constitutes a threat to their collective existence, in addition to the threat that the legislation poses to their personal safety, sense of security, sense of belonging, and self-respect.

While Canadian bioethicists, law professors, and politicians have elicited pathos from the Canadian public with poignant speeches about disabled people who require immediate deliverance from the suffering that their lives would impose if Bill C-7 were not passed, disabled activists, academics, policy researchers, and their allies have pointed out that poverty; structural ableism and racism; lack of affordable, accessible housing; and settler colonialism are among the factors that constitute unlivable lives for disabled people in so-called Canada. Insofar as philosophers disregard the expertise of these disabled critics of MAiD–including the expertise of disabled philosophers of disability–they engage in a duplicitous form of epistemic oppression that runs counter to established and emerging feminist and other social epistemologies.

Through medicalization and individualization, bioethics promotes euthanasia and medically assisted suicide by mystifying the socio-discursive and biopolitical origins of the contingent circumstances that surround the enactment of this dreadful intervention, reconfiguring these circumstances to seem as if they require the specialized knowledge that bioethicists are claimed to possess. Although Canadian bioethicists, law professors, and politicians assert that Bill C-7 was a unique corrective to past legislative mistakes and that arguments to the contrary amount to fallacious “slippery slope” reasoning, disabled people in Canada adamantly argue that Bill C-7 is of a piece with a long and treacherous history of eugenic policies and practices in Canada such as forced sterilization targeted at disabled people and Indigenous people (among others) that the incremental normalization of the policies and practices depoliticizes and erases.

Insofar as proponents of medically assisted suicide conceive of power, freedom, and autonomy in terms of negative liberty, they obscure the successful normalization of neoliberal relations of power by and through the effective inculcation and utilization of a relatively recent kind of subjectivity, namely, the self-determining and self-governing individual who is enabled to act in accordance with a narrowly circumscribed set of possible actions. Modern relations of power have already conspired to put in place the options from which one may “autonomously” choose, as my argument in “Reproductive Freedom, Self-regulation, and the Government of Impairment In Utero” was designed to show.

In other words, the charge according to which critics of MAiD invoke fallacious slippery-slope reasoning relies on outmoded ideas about the self-originating character of the neoliberal subject’s freedom and autonomy that are integral to this juridical conception of power.

In short, the autonomous, informed, and consenting individual in whose name biopolitical arguments that promote both MAiD and reproductive technologies are advanced is a historically and culturally specific artifact of discourse rather than a prediscursive being/self endowed with intrinsic liberties and freedoms. Indeed, the self-determining citizen/patient that neoliberal bioethics upholds and claims to dignify through Bill C-7 in particular and medically assisted suicide more generally has a history, and a relatively recent and culturally specific history at that.

Section Three: Against Unprecedented Presents

The arguments that bioethicists, law professors, and politicians advance about Bill C-7, in particular, and the expansion of medically assisted suicide, in general, are typical of the colonialist presentism that, as Whyte notes, is a characteristic feature of epistemologies of crisis.

Recall that Whyte uses the term epistemologies of crisis to refer to colonialist narratives and ways of knowing that characterize certain situations and states of affairs as “unprecedented” and “urgent,” ignoring histories of colonization and traditional teachings of Indigenous communities to do so. Sometimes, Whyte notes, perpetrators of colonialism imagine that their wrongful practices and actions are defensible because the practices and actions are responses to a given crisis, whether perceived or actual, that is, the perpetrators assume that suspension of certain concerns about justice and morality is justified in response to a crisis. In the first half of the twentieth century, for example, Americans constructed dams that flooded the Seneca and Lakota peoples because, as Whyte says, they believed that the United States needed energy and irrigation to lessen the threat of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Thus, although settlers tend to characterize the current situation with respect to climate change as “unprecedented,” Whyte states that “Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island have already passed through human-caused ecological catastrophe at least once in their history.” For Indigenous peoples, Whyte remarks, “the current climate change ordeal is bad, but not unprecedented.” In this regard, Whyte points to the work of Candis Callison who, in reference to Indigenous peoples in the Arctic, suggests that settler analyses of climate change that characterize the current situation as unprecedented fail to recognize what “climate change portends for those who have endured a century of immense cultural, political, and environmental changes.”

Indeed, Whyte remarks that settler colonialism must be understood as inextricably entwined with climate change and responded to as such. Whyte is concerned to point out, furthermore, that the belief according to which acts of colonial oppression are allegedly defensible due to crises is not a relic of the distant past but rather occurs now too. As Whyte puts it, “From scientific reports that provincialise Indigenous knowledge systems to wind power projects that desecrate Indigenous lands, there is no reason to believe that colonialism today is something other than an evolved practice of a familiar form of power.”

Epistemologies of crisis, Whyte states, involve “knowing the world such that a certain present is experienced as new.” In other words, crisis epistemologies are “presentist” in their narrative orientation. A narrative is presentist, Whyte explains, if it assumes a certain conception of the unfolding of time as means to achieve power or protect privilege. Presentist orientations favor experiences of time that presume unprecedentedness and urgency; that is, presentism is an exercise of colonial power that effaces the historical realities and conditions of this colonial power.

Whyte refers, for example, to Audra Simpson who writes that the “purported newness” of the settler colonial present is “revealed as the fiction of the presumed neutrality of time itself, demonstrating the dominance of the present by some over others, and the unequal power to define what matters, who matters, what pasts are alive and when they die.” In this way, Whyte notes, one becomes so preoccupied with the present crisis as new, that one questions neither one’s own perspective nor the social origins from which the perspective may derive. The sense of imminence that accompanies presentism, Whyte says, leads people to obscure or minimize how their actions relate to the persistence of colonialism, capitalism, ableism, racism, and other forms of power.

My argument is that the events, justifications, and rationale surrounding the creation and passage of Bill C-7 have been framed within a presentist eugenic narrative of utilitarianism that erases the histories of genocide in Canada. By framing Bill C-7 as a unique and urgent new procedural corrective, Canadian bioethicists, law professors, journalists, and politicians have, again, reconfigured and obfuscated the incremental normalization of eugenic practices in precisely the way that Whyte describes, that is, according to the presentist orientation of an epistemology of crisis that disregards the genesis and evolution of these practices.

In other words, the incremental normalization of eugenic bioethical practices and the apparatus of disability from which this strategic presentist mechanism derives have their origins in colonialism and the (white) liberal settler state. In the context of MAiD, the presentist orientation, which is characteristic of utilitarian bioethicists and the subfield of bioethics in general, implicitly constructs the notions of personal autonomy and quality of life as existing outside of any temporal location, as ahistorical, as timeless, and as universal. In so doing, this presentist orientation conceals the historically contingent and culturally specific character of these politically motivated ideals, as well as the way that these artifacts emerged from and reproduce the (neo)liberal settler state itself.

Thank you for your attention!

References

Berenstain, Nora (2020), “White Feminist Gaslighting,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 35 (4): 733–58.

Callison, Candis (2014), How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts, Raleigh and Durham: Duke University Press.

Klein, Naomi (2007). The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Random House of Canada.

Klein, Naomi, and Kapua ‘ala Sproat (2023). “Why Was There No Water to Fight the Fire in Maui?” The Guardian, August 17. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/17/hawaii-fires-maui-water-rights-disaster-capitalism

Simpson, Audra (2017), “The Ruse of Consent and the Anatomy of ‘Refusal’: Cases from Indigenous North America and Australia,” Postcolonial Studies 20: 18–33.

Tremain, Shelley (2006). “Reproductive Freedom Self-Regulation, and the Government of Impairment In Utero,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy: 21 (1): 35-53.

Tremain, Shelley L. (2017), Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Whyte, Kyle (2019), “Climate Change: An Unprecedently Old Catastrophe,” BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY (blog), January 16. Available at: Climate Change: An Unprecedentedly Old Catastrophe (Guest Post) – BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.

Whyte, Kyle (2020), “Against Crisis Epistemology,” in Brendan Hokowhitu, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Steve Larkin, and Chris Andersen (eds.), Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, 52–64, New York and London: Routledge.