Mental Illness Stigma and Devaluation of the Relational Self
Abigail Gosselin
Presentation to Philosophy, Disability and Social Change 5, December 12, 2024
Mental illness stigma involves making a negative judgment about someone who has mental illness and marking them as bad or inferior in some way. Mental illness stigma devalues and dehumanizes people in many ways. This paper analyzes several ways that mental illness stigma devalues the aspect of self that is relational and social.
Introduction
Stigma has several components, including stereotyping (a cognitive dimension of stigma), prejudice (an affective dimension of stigma), and discrimination (a behavioral dimension of stigma).[1] Stigma also includes labeling, separation (or moral distancing), and status loss (including dehumanization).[2] Mental illness stigma involves labeling someone as having a mental illness, applying negative stereotypes about mental illness to the person, feeling negative reactive attitudes such as disgust and fear toward the person, wanting to distance oneself from the person, believing the person is inferior to oneself (even subhuman) and treating them as such, and preventing them from having access to the same resources and opportunities that others have access to.
Stigma consists of discrediting and devaluing a person based on that person possessing a characteristic that is considered negative to have.[3] Traits such as having mental illness are viewed as negative because they violate social norms about who a person should be and how a person should think, feel, and act in society. Some of the negative stereotypes we have of people with mental illness are that they are incompetent, needy, dependent, out of control, irrational, delusional, overly emotional, unreliable, dangerous, violent, immoral, defective, and incurable.[4] These features are regarded as stigmatizing because they seem to violate social norms of what is required to be a human being functioning in a democratic, capitalistic society.
When people project stigma onto those with mental illness (what is known as public stigma), they devalue the person with mental illness with respect to all aspects of the self, including their identity as a knower, as a moral agent, as a social and relational being, as a being with basic needs, as a unique individual, and even as a human being. When people with mental illness internalize mental illness stigma through self-stigma, they devalue themselves in all these ways as well. This paper examines some of the different ways that the relational self is devalued and how this impacts other aspects of self.
There are many ways that people with mental illness are devalued as knowers and as moral agents, and I do not have the time here to catalogue these. Much has been written about the ways people with mental illness are subject to testimonial and hermeneutical injustices that devalue them as knowers, as well as paternalistic interventions that devalue them as moral agents. I am happy to talk about these forms of devaluation in the Q&A, if people want, but for the sake of time, in this paper I am going to focus on the ways the relational self is devalued.
Aspects of the Relational Self
One aspect of the self that stigma devalues is the relational self, the self as a social being. For the sake of time, I am going to skip the section where I explain the ways in which the self is relational and just summarize this by saying that social interactions and social relationships are crucial for moral identity, moral development, moral and epistemic agency and autonomy, and self-conception. I’ll pick up here where I talk about the value of being part of a community.
Being part of a community is important for many reasons. A community provides a place where members of the community can engage with the epistemic, moral, and social practices required for developing and exercising epistemic and moral agency, as well as autonomy. In enabling epistemic agency and autonomous moral agency, participation in these practices helps with moral development and thus helps shape the moral and personal identity of an individual. Being able to participate in these practices as an equal member of the community compared to others requires that the community views the person as having normative authority and epistemic credibility. When a person is viewed as credible and authoritative, this helps them see themselves that way and provides an anchor to their self-identity that allows them to act as a legitimate moral and epistemic agent who has both the right and the capacity to engage in epistemic and moral practices alongside others in the community.
A community also provides a sense of belonging. Belongingness is important for people to feel accepted, welcomed, and supported, all of which solidify a person’s sense of self.[5] Belongingness allows practices of affirmation, which Tim Johnston describes as an experience that reflects and sustains the self by upholding and valuing some aspect of it; it is thus an important process that helps create the relational self.[6] Members of a community provide affirmation to each other when they accept each other as they are; when they welcome people into their social, moral, and epistemic practices; and when they encourage people to assert their strengths and to exercise virtues and skills in dealing with obstacles. Such practices affirm a person’s worth, personal assets, and belongingness as part of the community, all of which fortify the person’s sense of self and help form their self-identity.
In addition, being part of a community enables a person to receive various kinds of support through that community. Communities can provide differing degrees of nurturing, resources, and support, where some communities are impoverished, neglectful, or even harmful, while others are well-resourced and designed to aid their members.[7] A resourceful and nurturing community can provide various types of support to its members. These include financial support, support in meeting the person’s basic needs and fulfilling their interests, support in helping the person have the autonomy necessary to fulfill their own interests, and the encouragement and moral and emotional support that fortifies a person’s ability to be resilient in the face of obstacles. In these many ways, being part of a community is valuable to a person’s moral development, epistemic and moral agency and autonomy, and self-identity.
An additional way that people are relational beings is the way they are dependent on and vulnerable to social, economic, and political structures that shape what kinds of lives they can live. Such structures condition the ways we can exercise agency and autonomy over our lives by enabling certain options for action and closing off others, in effect creating or disabling pathways that we can choose to follow. This creates the field of what opportunities and resources are available to us, affecting what options we can choose from and thus conditioning what kinds of lives we can live.[8]
As Judith Butler notes, we are dependent on various infrastructures that constitute our physical and social environment because of the way they shape the direction of our lives. This makes us vulnerable to how resourceful or impoverished these are, and to what assets and opportunities they can provide.[9] While we design social structures in part to protect us from our various human vulnerabilities, we are also deeply vulnerable to these social structures, which tend to be imperfect, insufficient, having limited knowledge and limited means of providing support, and are sometimes harmful and unjust.[10] We can’t help being dependent on the social, economic, and political structures that govern our lives; we have to create the best lives for ourselves that we can, given the possibilities they allow us and the constraints they impose upon us.
How Stigma Impacts Social Interactions, Social Relationships, and Community Belonging
Stigma hinders a person’s ability to engage in social interactions, develop social relationships, and be part of a community, thus devaluing the relational self, in several ways. One involves the shunning, avoidance, and social exclusion of people with mental illness. Social exclusion prevents people from having meaningful social interactions with others and impedes people from developing and maintaining valuable social relationships. Social exclusion outcasts people from a community so that they lose a sense of belonging, lose the opportunity for affirmation, and lose the ability to feel accepted, welcomed, and supported. Insofar as the self is relational, this negatively impacts a person’s self-identity.
Lack of community belonging also damages a person’s ability to have the resources and support they need to be able to function in their daily life activities and in society, and to be able to get their needs met and pursue their self-chosen projects. Without a community, a person loses the financial, instrumental, and moral and emotional support that helps them act in ways that further their interests and enhances their wellbeing. People are interdependent and necessarily reliant on others to help them satisfy their needs and to be able to act as agents who can function in daily life and pursue their goals. Without a community, they lose an important source of help and support.
In addition, social exclusion prevents people from having the opportunity to participate in social, epistemic, and moral practices that allow them to develop and exercise their epistemic and moral agency. It also prevents them from having the means to develop and exercise skills and virtues important for both kinds of agency, such as those necessary for autonomy. Without a community, a person lacks the means to engage in the practices necessary for epistemic and moral agency, thus impairing these.
Other aspects of stigma impede epistemic and moral agency and autonomy as well, including the degrading of credibility and authority that accompanies negative stereotypes. When people are viewed as incompetent, dangerous, needy, or dependent, as many people with mental illness are, they are regarded as less credible, and their epistemic contributions are not taken seriously and are more likely to be dismissed and discounted. In this way, they are treated as having less epistemic agency, but in the process they are also given fewer opportunities to exercise and maintain their epistemic agency, so not only are they treated as having less agency, but they often also end up actually losing some of that agency.
When people are viewed as incompetent, dangerous, needy, or dependent, they are also regarded as lacking the normative authority to be able to take actions on their own behalf and to be capable of taking responsibility for their actions, so they are treated as having less moral agency. When a person is seen as not having normative authority, their actions are seen as not coming from them in an important way, or as being the product of forces outside the person’s control rather than as being the result of their own will and effort. For example, the actions of a person with mental illness could be seen as the product of their illness rather than as stemming from a person’s own will. When a person is regarded as lacking normative authority in this way, they are given fewer opportunities to participate in moral practices with others, which reduces their ability to exercise their moral agency. Being viewed as having less normative authority thus not only treats the person as being less of a moral agent but also actually decreases their moral agency as they lose the opportunity to engage in the moral practices required for moral agency.
People further lose epistemic and moral agency when they internalize the conceptions that others have of them and apply those conceptions to their own self-concept. Since the self is relational, how we are regarded and treated by others affects our own sense of self, self-worth, and self-identity. Others’ conception of ourselves helps shape how we see ourselves. When others view a person as lacking epistemic credibility and normative authority, this easily gets internalized so the person views themselves as lacking these, too. When they view themselves in this way, this actually diminishes their epistemic and moral competence, hurting their ability to exercise the skills and virtues required for epistemic and moral agency, further eroding their credibility and normative authority. In a vicious cycle, the internalization of others’ conception of a person as having degraded credibility and normative authority works to further damage these.
In these ways, stigma devalues not only the relational self that is constituted by social relationships and ongoing social interactions, but also the self as an epistemic and moral agent whose agency depends on having a community with which to engage in epistemic and moral practices. Individuals are not only constitutively relational, but also causally relational, in that being part of a community is necessary for them to develop and exercise the skills and virtues involved with epistemic agency, moral agency, and autonomy.
How Stigma Impacts the Relational Self that is Dependent on Social, Economic, and Political Structures
Stigma devalues the relational self in yet another way, by letting many people with mental illness live on the margins of society through endorsing a social, political, and economic structure that excludes some groups of people from certain domains in society. Many people with mental illness are homeless and/or unemployed. Sometimes this is due to active discrimination, but it also occurs through stigmatizing attitudes that prevent people and institutions from developing more inclusive structures that incorporate people with mental illness into places in society such as housing and employment. Relationality is not just about the relationships a person has and the communities they are a member of, but also about the dependency and vulnerability they have to the social, economic, and political structures that shape what kind of life they can live. These structures enable and limit agency in various ways by allowing certain opportunities and putting constraints on others. Both active discrimination and stigmatizing attitudes create significant constraints on people with mental illness, severely limiting what options they have to pursue the kind of life they want to live.
Discrimination against people with mental illness is not uncommon. Many landlords are unwilling to rent to people with known mental illnesses.[11] A HUD (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development) Report found that people with mental illness experience discrimination in being given information about available rental units and having rental units be made available to them.[12] People with mental illness who are stigmatized and discriminated against have less housing stability and higher rates of homelessness.[13] Moreover, many people with mental illness report experiencing employment discrimination.[14] Surveys show that employers are reluctant to interview people with known mental illness, are less likely to hire people with known mental illness, and are more likely to repeal employment offers or fire employees when their illness becomes known.[15] This is typically based on negative stereotypes and beliefs about people with mental illness as fragile and unreliable[16], incompetent and unable to carry out the responsibilities of a job[17], and not capable of competitive employment.[18] People with mental illness who do have jobs are much more likely to have low-skilled jobs than high-skilled jobs.[19]
The effect of housing and employment discrimination is that this gives people with mental illness significantly fewer options in pursuing housing or a job than other people have, or than they would have if they didn’t have mental illness. This reduction in options impairs their agency, where being able to make meaningful choices in directing one’s life requires having multiple good options.[20] When people are discriminated against, their opportunities and resources are reduced, leaving them with fewer options that they can choose from, and sometimes no options at all. Discrimination thus negatively impacts the self as a moral agent, but it also damages the aspect of the relational self that is dependent on social, political, and economic structures for its options for action.
Stigmatizing attitudes also damage the aspect of the relational self that is dependent on social, economic, and political structures for shaping the kind of life one can live. Stigmas against incompetence, neediness, and dependence support neoliberal political and economic structures that are designed to exclude certain groups of people, such as people with mental illness. For example, stigmas against neediness and dependence violate social norms of self-reliance and self-sufficiency that help to uphold neoliberal political and economic structures that individualize problems and privatize solutions. The social norms of self-reliance and self-sufficiency value an individual’s ability to function in society through their own hard work.[21] In this framework, a person earns a job through their qualifications, experience, and expertise which they worked for themselves; a person is able to acquire a house as a result of earning it through their own hard work and savings, where savings are the reward for an ethic of thrift and planning for the future.
If we did not value self-reliance and self-sufficiency so much, we could create political and economic structures that provide assistance to individuals rather than placing all the responsibility for obtaining housing and a job on them. This would respect the ways individuals are sometimes dependent on others for help in functioning in society. Such structures could help place individuals in jobs (such as what is known as supported work) and help individuals to succeed in carrying out the responsibilities of a job; they could do a better job providing and helping to place individuals in safe, permanent housing. But we would have to respect, value, and accommodate neediness and dependency rather than stigmatizing these and outcasting people who are or who are seen as needy and dependent to the margins of society.
Stigmas against neediness and dependence also violate the social norm of taking personal responsibility and accountability for one’s actions and for the direction one’s life takes. The neoliberal state values social norms of personal responsibility and accountability as part of the individualization of action and accomplishment. The neoliberal state views individuals in part as entrepreneurs—individual agents who get things done through their own effort and hard work, and who are able to sell the product of their work, their accomplishments, in the marketplace to rational, self-interested consumers.[22] As entrepreneurs, individuals create products and accomplish goals through their own individual action, and the responsibility for these products and achievements, and the actions that led to them, is located solely in the individual who has worked on them. Moreover, what actions a person takes is seen to be the outcome of choices the person made as a self-interested, rational chooser, for which they are thus responsible and accountable.[23] Consequently, the responsibility for the conditions one finds oneself in is individualized so that individuals are held personally responsible for their choices and actions.[24] Thus, individuals are personally responsible for what they do and achieve, and for the conditions they find themselves in.[25]
Existing social structures create obstacles for people who are unable to achieve their self-chosen goals on their own and be personally responsible for what happens to them. The neoliberal capitalist economic system is set up in such a way as to exclude some people from entering the housing market because it is too expensive, and they do not make enough money from whatever job they have, if they have a job; or they have no other financial means to buy or rent. In addition, some people are excluded from entering the job market because they lack education, qualifications, and training; and they often lack access to these because they cannot afford the price of college, vocational training, and/or licensure; and in some cases they cannot succeed in college or vocational training without assistance, which is not normally provided. In our neoliberal capitalist society, housing and jobs are only available to people conditionally, and if people do not meet the required conditions, they cannot have access to them. If we had different social norms about how a person should succeed, however, other than the neoliberal ideals described above, we could create a society with a stronger social safety net that provides housing and jobs to anyone in need of them, regardless of whether they meet certain conditions; and the systems that provide such housing and jobs could find ways to enable people to meet those conditions through providing aid and assistance.
People who depend on others to help them get their needs met and to help them accomplish tasks and achieve goals violate social norms of personal responsibility and accountability because their dependence on others makes it so that they are unable to take responsibility for their own actions on their own, and unable to be accountable to others for their actions. People with mental illness are thus frequently stigmatized on account of being unable to take personal responsibility for their condition, both for their mental illness and for the social conditions they are in as a result of their illness, and consequently blamed for this.
This individualization of responsibility and blame results in further marginalizing people, such as through the criminalization of homelessness. Homelessness is criminalized in part because it is viewed as a problem of the individual who is homeless rather than as a social problem requiring social response. Homeless people who are arrested for sleeping in public, for example, are held responsible and blamed for their action as if they had control over what they did and as if they had made a choice between options as a self-interested, rational chooser. If we regarded people’s social conditions as a result of structural obstacles instead of as a result of personal choices, we would find ways to give homeless people the social and structural support that they need to exit homelessness as part of our social responsibility. Since we instead view people’s social conditions as the product of personal choices and actions for which they are personally responsible and accountable, however, we hold them responsible in a way that blames them for their actions, such as through the criminalization of homelessness.
Stigmas against incompetence, or what we can think of as difficulties with functioning in various life domains (including mental capacities, social interactions, and tasks of daily living), also place people at the margins of society. Problems with functioning are seen as violating social norms of individualistic autonomous agency, where a person has the capacity to get their own needs met, to set goals for themselves by themselves, and to accomplish their goals through their own action; and of the rational, self-interested chooser who has the competence to assess different options themselves and to select options based on reasons that are personally important to them.[26] When people cannot meet their own needs themselves, when they cannot accurately assess and choose from different options, and when they cannot accomplish their goals without help, they are stigmatized as violating these ideals and excluded from making choices in the marketplace as a way of accomplishing their aims.
If we did not value individualistic autonomous agency and the ability to be a rational, self-interested chooser so much, we could design political and economic structures that support and give more opportunities to people in exercising their agency and their relational autonomy. We could create what Martha Fineman calls a “responsive state” that sees itself as having the obligation to help people function in society and be integrated into various domains of society[27], thus respecting the fact that we are relational selves that need to be part of communities to have agency, autonomy, and a positive self-identity. Instead, we have a neoliberal state that idealizes the atomistic individual and their personal choice, hard work, goal-setting, and accomplishments. Such a state privatizes functioning in society and in daily life as the problem of the individual, where the solution is for the individual to take personal responsibility for their actions and their condition, rather than as a social problem requiring social response.
Devaluing the relational self through stigmas against incompetence, neediness, and dependency also devalues the aspect of self that is a self who has basic needs. As human beings, individuals have basic needs that must be met in order for a person to have basic survival and, ideally, thriving. Basic needs for things such as food, clothing, housing, a job as a means to attain financial security, basic healthcare, and some level of education must be satisfied for a person to be able to survive as a human being; to function in society and be able to participate in the social, moral, epistemic, political, and economic practices of a community; and to have their basic wellbeing fulfilled.[28] However, we cannot usually get our needs met completely on our own.
The social norms of a neoliberal state create expectations that the individual can meet their own basic needs themselves, such as through their own hard work and action. But people are not omnipotent, and most if not all people have various limitations, vulnerabilities, and structural obstacles that prevent them from being able to act in ways that get their needs met all on their own. People are necessarily interdependent on each other, and on society, to satisfy their needs and further their interests. If we respected and appreciated this inherent neediness and interdependence more, we could design a society such as Fineman’s “responsive state” that sees as its obligation to respond to people’s neediness and vulnerability by helping them to get their needs met and thus honoring the aspect of self that has basic needs. Instead, we stigmatize these.
Conclusion
In dishonoring incompetence, neediness, and dependency, stigma relegates people who have these conditions, or who are seen as having these conditions, to the margins of society, excluding them from being able to participate in various domains of social functioning. In this way, stigma devalues various aspects of the relational self, where a person needs to be part of a community to have the opportunities to develop and exercise the capacities required for agency and autonomy, and for functioning in various life domains; to have the sense of belonging so important to self-worth and positive self-conception; and to have the resources and support of a community necessary to aid them in getting their needs met and helping them to further their own interests and wellbeing. Respecting the ways in which the self is relational requires us to eliminate mental illness stigma so that people with mental illness can thrive as relational beings.
[1] Patrick W. Corrigan and Petra Kleinlein, “The Impact of Mental Illness Stigma,” in On the Stigma of Mental Illness: Practical Strategies for Research and Social Change, ed. Patrick W. Corrigan, (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2005), 16-17 11-44.
[2] Link and Phelan identify five components of stigma [labeling, stereotyping, separation (or moral distancing), status loss (including dehumanization), and discrimination)], while Corrigan and Kleinlein (above) identify three components (stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination). My account of stigma combines these two approaches. Bruce G. Link and Jo C. Phelan, “Conceptualizing Stigma,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 367 363-385.
[3] Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 3.
[4] The most dominant stereotypes of people with mental illness are that they are incompetent, needy, dependent, dangerous, or violent. Corrigan and Kleinlein, “The Impact of Mental Illness Stigma,” 16; and Nicolas Rüsch, Matthias C. Angermeyer, and Patrick W. Corrigan, “Mental Illness Stigma: Concepts, Consequences, and Initiatives to Reduce Stigma,” European Psychiatry 20 (2005): 530. 529-539
[5] In contrast, feeling like one does not belong undermines feeling accepted and supported, which diminishes self-worth. Paul H. Benson, “Stereotype Threat, Social Belonging, and Relational Autonomy,” in Personal Autonomy and Social Oppression: Philosophical Perspectives, eds. Marina A. L. Oshana (New York: Routledge, 2015), 124-141.
[6] Tim R. Johnston, Affirmation, Care Ethics, and LGBT Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 15-16.
[7] Abigail Gosselin, Mental Health Resilience: The Social Context of Coping with Mental Illness (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2024), 141-143.
[8] Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 38.
[9] Judith Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” in Vulnerability in Resistance, eds. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 21 12-27.
[10] Bryan S. Turner, Vulnerability and Human Rights (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 26-28.
[11] Corrigan and Kleinlein, “The Impact of Mental Illness Stigma,” 18-20.
[12] U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), “HUD Report Finds People Living with Mental Disabilities Face Significant Rental Housing Discrimination,” HUD Archives: News Releases, 5 September 2017, accessed 22 August 2024, https://archives.hud.gov/news/2017/pr17-070.cfm.
[13] Cilia Mejia-Lancheros, James Lachaud, Julia Woodhall-Melnik, Patricia O’Campo, Stephen W. Hwang, and Vicky Stergiopoulos, “Longitudinal Interrelationships of Mental Health Discrimination and Stigma with Housing and Well-being Outcomes in Adults with Mental Illness and Recent Experience of Homelessness,” Social Science & Medicine 268 (January 2021): 1-14 (Article 113463).
[14] Survey cited in Heather Stuart, “Mental Illness and Employment Discrimination,” Current Opinion in Psychiatry 19 (2006): 523 522-526.
[15] Surveys cited in Corrigan and Kleinlein, “The Impact of Mental Illness Stigma,” 18-20; Ami C. Janda, “Keeping a Productive Labor Market: Crafting Recognition and Rights for Mentally Ill Workers,” Hamline Journal of Public Law & Policy 30, no. 1 (2008): 425 403-445; Heather Stuart, “Mental Illness and Employment Discrimination,” Current Opinion in Psychiatry 19 (2006): 523 522-526; Graham Thornicroft, Shunned: Discrimination Against People with Mental Illness (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 51-52. See also Terry Krupa, Bonnie Kirsh, Lynn Cockburn, and Rebecca Gewurtz, “Understanding the Stigma of Mental Illness in Employment,” Work 33 (2009): 413-425; and Kaja Larsen Østerud, “Mental Illness Stigma and Employer Evaluation in Hiring: Stereotypes, Discrimination and the Role of Experience,” Sociology of Health & Illness 43 (2023): 90-108.
[16] Kaja Larsen Østerud, “Mental Illness Stigma and Employer Evaluation in Hiring: Stereotypes, Discrimination and the Role of Experience,” Sociology of Health & Illness 43 (2023): 90-108.
[17] Terry Krupa, Bonnie Kirsh, Lynn Cockburn, and Rebecca Gewurtz, “Understanding the Stigma of Mental Illness in Employment,” Work 33 (2009): 413-425.
[18] Karen L. Rebeiro Gruhl, Carol Kauppi, Phyllis Montgomery, and Susan James, “Painting Everybody with the Same Brush: Employment Discrimination of Persons with Serious Mental Illness in Rusal Places,” Rural Mental Health (Spring/Summer 2012): 13.
[19] Survey cited in Stuart, “Mental Illness and Employment Discrimination,” 523.
[20] Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 204; Susan Sherwin, “A Relational Approach to Autonomy in Health Care,” in Readings in Health Care Ethics, eds. Elisabeth Boetzkes and Wilfrid J. Waluchow (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000), 79 69-87.
[21] Edward Sampson describes this ideal of self-reliance and self-sufficiency in terms of the “self-contained individual.” Edward E. Sampson, “Psychology and the American Ideal,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35, no. 11 (November 1977): 767-782.
[22] This view of the self as an entrepreneur comes from neoliberalism, which idealizes negative freedom (freedom from constraints), choice, and competition, seeing these as essentially occurring through the marketplace. Joan C. Tronto, Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 37-38.
[23] This view of the self as a self-determined rational chooser is rooted in liberalism (a legacy of Thomas Hobbes’ and John Locke’s philosophy) and more recently neoliberalism (as espoused by Friedrich Hayek). The self-determined rational chooser is an ideal of the neoliberal economic framework that values privatization and commodification of goods, services, and institutions, as well as responsibility and care. Jodi Dean, “Enjoying Neoliberalism,” Cultural Politics 4, no. 1 (2008): 48-49 47-72; and various discussions in Susan Braedley and Meg Luxton, eds., Neoliberalism and Everyday Life (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). See also Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944).
[24] The emphasis on personal responsibility and the responsibilization of choice, actions, and even care, worth, and self-improvement, also comes from neoliberalism. Susan Braedley and Meg Luxton, eds., Neoliberalism and Everyday Life (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010); David Harper and Ewen Speed, “Uncovering Recovery: The Resistible Rise of Recovery and Resilience,” Studies in Social Justice 6, no. 1 (2012): 13-14 9-25; Thomas Lemke, “’The Birth of Bio-Politics’: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality,” Economy and Society 30, no. 2 (2001): 201 190-207.
[25] The personal responsibility people have to succeed at achieving their self-chosen ends involves a faith in the perfectability of man. Rosi Braidotti describes the ideal of the self-regulating man guided by reason who is capable of achieving perfection through their rational autonomous agency as a Humanistic ideal that comes from the Enlightenment. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 13, 37, and 51.
[26] The ideal of the person as a self-determined end-setter originates in Immanuel Kant’s conception of the essence of a human being as having rational autonomy. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, 3rd edition, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993).
[27] Martha Albertson Fineman, “Equality, Autonomy, and the Vulnerable Subject in Law and Politics,” in Vulnerability: Reflections on a New Ethical Foundation for Law and Politics, eds. Martha Albertson Fineman and Anna Grear (Farnham, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 13-27; Martha Albertson Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 20, no. 1 (2008): 1-23; Martha Albertson Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject and the Responsive State,” Emory Law Journal 60 (2010): 251-275.
[28] Sophia Moreau argues that people need basic goods fulfilled in order to be able to participate, and to be seen as being able to participate, equally in the various social practices of society compared to others. Sophia Moreau, Faces of Inequality: A Theory of Wrongful Discrimination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 124-151.
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Abigail Gosselin, a Professor of Philosophy at Regis University in Denver, Colorado, is the author of four books on philosophical issues related to mental illness, including stigma, psychiatric ethics, and resilience. Contact: agosseli@regis.edu
BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 