Here is some additional summer reading/listening for avid fans of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. The essay that appears below is forthcoming as a chapter in Genealogy: A Genealogy, edited by Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson and Daniele Lorenzini. Since my writing on disability is often appropriated without attribution or proper citation to me (not by you, dear fan/reader/listener!), I am disinclined to mention that the final, published version of the chapter, with pagination, should be cited. Apologies for the inconsistent formatting on the blog (i.e., indentation, line spacing, etc.), which stubbornly resists correction.

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Disabling Bioethics: Notes Toward an Abolitionist Genealogy of Bioethics

Conceptual Needs of the Argument to Abolish Bioethics

1. Situating the Argument

In this motivational chapter, I employ Michel Foucault’s ideas about genealogy, power, and the subject to interrogate the subfield of bioethics and advance my argument—an argument situated at the intersection of Foucault studies and philosophy of disability—that this subfield of philosophy is a strategy and mechanism of neoliberal eugenics that must be abolished for philosophy to genuinely promote social justice for disabled people. I contend that the anti-foundationalism of Foucault’s genealogical method, his formulation of power as productive, and his prescient arguments about the contingent character of the subject provide the most philosophically sophisticated tools with which to accomplish this aim. In short, Foucault’s genealogical method is the best approach with which to examine how the subfield of bioethics (1) contributes to the production of the problem of disability (and its naturalized foundation, impairment)—that is, contributes to the production of disability as a problem; and (2) is designed to hasten its elimination, that is, to resolve the problem that the production of disability (and impairment) poses for the (neo)liberal control and management of societies.

A broad range of critically engaged philosophers and theorists attest to the value of Foucault’s genealogical method for social movement and transformation. In Abolition. Feminism. Now., for example, Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie identify Foucault’s genealogical method and claims about subjugated knowledges as among the best critical devices with which to advance an abolition feminism that both refuses naturalized—and hence, ahistorical—assumptions about carceral institutions and eschews reformist approaches to them that advocate for their putative improvement.[1] In this chapter, I rely on the reflections of these abolition feminists both to reinforce my critique of reformist responses to the eugenic impetus of bioethics[2] and to outline the “prefiguration”[3] that requires us to abolish this subfield of philosophy altogether. As Harsha Walia explains: “Prefiguration is the notion that our organizing reflects the society we wish to live in—that the methods we practice, institutions we create, and relationships we facilitate within our movements and communities align with our ideals.”[4] For Walia, decolonization is a framework that exemplifies a “positive and concrete” prefigurative image of the future. I maintain that as we must prefigure a decolonized future for society without prisons or police, so, too, we must prefigure a just and inclusive future for philosophy without bioethics. As Davis and coauthors state, it is crucial that we forge a critical space for “what we have not yet been able to imagine.”[5]

Mainstream bioethicists believe that their task is to dispassionately apply the universalizing and ahistorical principles of deontology, utilitarianism, or virtue ethics to dilemmas and events that arise in biomedical contexts, such as the use of prenatal genetic screening and other genetic technologies. In other words, they presuppose that medical encounters provide opportunities for the expression and application of extant values such as autonomy, well-being, and liberty.[6] Insofar as I endorse Foucault’s insight that power is productive, however, I assume (contra these bioethicists) that the very articulation and so-called application of these values—through, say, the use of genetic technologies and the decision-making procedures that surround them—effectively generates and configures the values.[7]

The conception of disability that predominates within bioethics and philosophy in general construes disability as a philosophically uninteresting and value-neutral biological trait, that is, a self-evidently natural and deleterious characteristic, difference, or property that some people embody or possess. Philosophers who hold this naturalized and individualized understanding of disability take for granted 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 principles can be applied. Thus, the subfield of bioethics has been effectively naturalized as the appropriate philosophical domain within which to consider disability. Nevertheless, a different understanding of disability is available according to which the ontology of disability, the production of the ontological status of disability, and the so-called application of philosophical principles and theoretical frameworks to the phenomena of disability are performative and co-constitutive. On the understanding of disability that I have articulated, the ontological status of disability is always already a contingent political and, hence, value-laden, state of affairs that should be historicized and relativized. Indeed, my politicized understanding of disability construes disability as an apparatus of biopower, which Foucault identified as a relatively recent form of power that operates primarily through productive forms of coercion and control to maximize the conditions conducive to “life:” the life of the species and the life of the individual.[8]

Foucault defined an apparatus (dispositif) as an ensemble of discourses, institutions, scientific statements, laws, and administrative measures directed at a perceived social requirement deemed urgent in a certain historical moment.^[9] My argument is that the urgent requirement to which the apparatus of disability responds in this historical moment is biopolitical normalization of populations and individual subjects to make them cost effective and manageable, thereby facilitating the expansion of neoliberalism as a form of governmental reason. The apparatus of disability is, in other words, a historically specific and dispersed system of force relations that produces and configures practices towards certain strategic political ends. Claims according to which disability is a personal characteristic, biological difference, or property of individuals naturalize and individualize a culturally and historically specific phenomenon, rendering it as an ahistorical and universal fact of the matter rather than a historically contingent and culturally relative artifact of force relations. In short, the naturalized ontological status that philosophers and bioethicists attribute to disability is a political artifact all the way down.

A neoliberal governmentality of security—in support of which the apparatus of disability and other apparatuses of (for instance) racialized and gendered force relations have amalgamated—undergirds the academic field of bioethics and has facilitated its emergence and expansion, including the incessant production within some areas of the field of questions and concerns about impairment and the refinement of positions that rationalize its prevention and elimination. In this regard, Foucault’s remarks about the three major forms that technologies of government take in their development and history can serve as an apt characterization of the emergence of bioethics as a biopolitical subfield of philosophy. Foucault argued: first, a given technology of government takes the form of a principled dream or utopia; then, the dream of the technology of government develops into actual practices or rules to be used in real institutions; finally, the practices and rules of the technology of government become consolidated in the form of an academic discipline.^[10]

A genealogy of how the academic subdiscipline of bioethics has functioned as a strategy and mechanism of eugenics would trace the emergence and consolidation of this subdiscipline through a range of relatively recent notions that biopower has generated and on which bioethics depends, including normality, quality of life, risk, statistical knowledge, and probability.[11] Note that all of these biopolitical constructs have played a constitutive role in the government of disability.[12] Bioethics is, in other words, an institutionalized vehicle for the biopolitics of our time; it is a technology of government that provides intellectual resources designed to facilitate the “strengthening” (fitness) of a certain population and the elimination of others. In Canada, for instance, bioethicists have incrementally created a eugenic culture in Canadian philosophy and Canadian society more widely through their concerted production of arguments that uphold individual autonomy as means to rationalize medically assisted suicide and euthanasia (“MAiD”).[13]

Hence, bioethics—a product of biopower—implicates the discipline and profession of philosophy in the apparatus of disability and the social and political subordination of disabled people in more ways than, and to a greater degree than, any other subfield of the discipline of philosophy, although cognitive science and its cognates have, in recent years, gained considerable ground in this regard. In short, the implicit and explicit governmental tenor of bioethical discourses and the naturalized and individualized conception of disability on which these discourses rely contribute substantially to the hostile environment that disabled philosophers confront in philosophy, where intransigent beliefs persist according to which disabled people are suboptimal, defective, and unreliable, and hence, not viable colleagues. Indeed, bioethicists serve as gatekeepers, guarding the discipline from the incursion of critical philosophical work on disability and shielding the profession from an influx of disabled philosophers. Exceptions to this exclusion are of course admissible and serve to legitimize both the subfield of bioethics and the discipline of philosophy in general, typifying the polymorphism of the (neo)liberal governmentality from which the subfield of bioethics has emerged and enabling philosophy to proceed under the guise of political neutrality, objectivity, and disinterest.

A case in point is the foray into public philosophy that a popular feminist bioethicist made in 2024 by publishing an article whose thesis pathologizes certain acts and behaviors to which autistic people typically refer in their self-descriptions, a thesis that revolves around pernicious assumptions and claims about “theory of mind” that these acts and behaviors allegedly confirm.[14] As autistic philosophers and theorists repeatedly argue, these assumptions and claims—which are regarded as representative of state-of-the-art work in philosophy of mind, moral psychology, and cognitive science—demean autistic people insofar as they variously combine to postulate that (1) the capacity to hold a theory of mind and thus attribute mental states to others is a uniquely human characteristic, that is, contributes to what uniquely defines the human; and (2) autistic people “lack” a theory of mind, that is, are unable to conceive of other minds (and thus are less than human) and therefore “lack” the capacity to (among other things) empathize with other people. While autistic authors in particular have vigorously disputed both hypotheses and their combination,[15] disabled philosophers more generally have pointed out that the drive to identify allegedly prediscursive and inherent characteristics and capacities that supposedly signify the distinctiveness of the human being are speciesist, as well as ableist, and license the mistreatment and subordination of nonhuman animals, as well as of disabled people in general.[16]

2. Method and Fit

Insofar as I wish to employ Foucault’s methodology and tools for the project to abolish bioethics, my argument runs counter to the claims of philosophers of disability and theorists in disability studies who disparage the use of Foucault for critical analyses of disability. The various charges that these authors have hitherto made of Foucault can be summed up thus: Because Foucault disregarded personal experiences, denied the foundational subject and its agency, and obscured the body and its materiality, his work is counter-intuitive and inappropriate for disability theory and research that ought to attend to the lived experiences and knowledges of disabled people, including their experiences and knowledges of their own embodiment;[17] furthermore, Foucault’s genealogies offer few (if any) resources with which to articulate social critique and instigate the social change that disabled people seek.[18]

           A straightforward general response to these charges against Foucault is that they misunderstand his work on genealogy, power, the subject, and the materiality of the body; that is, Foucault’s genealogical approach to abnormality, subjectivity, identity, experience, race, sexuality, and the material body has greater explanatory power and transgressive potential for critical examination of disability than his critics in philosophy and theory of disability have thus far recognized. In a retort to the charge that Foucault denies the materiality and subjective experience of embodiment, Ladelle McWhorter explains the subversive potential of his genealogical approach in this way:

Foucault the Nietzschean genealogist never says there is no body; he simply looks at the historical record to see how the concept “the body” has functioned in relation to the political, social, and economic forces in which it appeared. Nietzsche never found a time before evil; Foucault does not find a time before the body, but he does discover that the concept has altered a great deal over the centuries and has functioned very differently in different contexts. This fact … tends to upset the notion that the body exists somehow beneath language as a biological given, but it does not refute it. What it does do is undermine claims to definitive knowledge of the body by creating awareness—some might say a suspicion—that the current claims are no more “untainted” by power relations than the claims of previous generations and that they, too, may pass away.[19]

           This chapter is primarily designed to indicate how Foucault’s genealogical approach can facilitate recognition and explanation of the eugenic impetus that animates the field of bioethics. In what follows, therefore, I revisit the aforementioned charges against Foucault only to the extent that doing so enables me to survey the conceptual needs of the project to abolish bioethics. My central aim is to show how genealogy—the technique of investigation that Friedrich Nietzsche famously employed in his work on the descent of Western morals and that Foucault took up and adapted in his own work on, for instance, the history of sexuality and the history of the modern prison—provides historically astute and culturally engaged analyses with which to engage in this endeavor; that is, genealogy offers philosophers of disability the best tools of analysis and engagement that they can use to dismantle (or at least seriously compromise) the field of bioethics.

Insofar as bioethics is generally conceived as a domain that developed to provide normative guidance to medical practitioners in their clinical decision-making, their interactions with patients and families of patients, and their use of emerging technologies, it might seem that Foucault’s genealogical work is irrelevant to bioethical discourse and therefore unlikely to significantly unmask the deceptive role that this discourse serves in academia and society more generally. In a well-known criticism of Foucault, Nancy Fraser has argued, for example, that Foucault cannot on his own terms distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable forms of power; thus, his work is “normatively confused.”[20] Melinda Hall has responded to Fraser’s critique by asserting that “this feature of Foucault’s work is precisely what recommends it.” As Hall explains, Foucault’s refusal to engage in a particular kind of normative inquiry and to advance explicit directives for human actions “allows one to see what has been obfuscated—for example, power’s productive functions—and thus reframe ethics by overthrowing previous normative presuppositions.”[21] In a famous interview conducted in 1980, Foucault articulated his position in this way: “In a sense, I am a moralist, insofar as I believe that one of the tasks, one of the meanings of human existence—the source of human freedom—is never to accept anything as definitive, untouchable, obvious, or immobile.”[22] Foucault’s critical approach requires that we ask how the field of bioethics emerged and is reproduced through power relations that it variously obscures or purports to merely describe and adjudicate, as well as ask about the values and motivational assumptions of the field.

          In Foucault’s genealogical studies of abnormality, madness, perversion, deviance, and sexuality, he was concerned with the “problematization” of phenomena, that is, was concerned to show how these phenomena became thinkable as problems to which solutions came to be sought. In an explanation of this work that has not yet been suitably acknowledged, Foucault stated that a “conditional imperative”[23] underpins each of his genealogical inquiries, for he recognized that every theoretical or analytical discourse is in some way reliant upon or permeated by something like an imperative discourse. Foucault characterized the imperatives that underpin his restrained genealogical inquiries in this way: “If you want to struggle, here are some key points, here are some lines of force, here are some constrictions and blockages.”[24] In other words, Foucault maintained that the conditional imperatives on which his genealogical work relied were “no more than tactical pointers” to “tactically effective analysis” in “the circle of struggle and truth, that is to say, precisely, philosophical practice.”[25] The conditional imperatives (or imperative discourses) that support Foucault’s genealogies are contingent strategies to understand given phenomena in particular ways and to make the phenomena be understood as such. Thus, Foucault’s remarks about conditionally imperative discourses and their tactical efficacy provide additional ways in which to address the sort of criticism that Fraser and others have made of Foucault according to which his genealogical approach lacks normative instruction, challenges, or repudiation.

Indeed, Foucault described genealogy as “the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today.”^[26] For Foucault, genealogies are histories of the present. Genealogies, he pointed out, are not positivistic returns to a form of science that more accurately represents phenomena. Genealogies are, rather, antisciences. What characterizes genealogies as a form of critique is not that they reject knowledge, or appeal to or celebrate some immediate experience that knowledge has yet to capture. “That,” Foucault stressed, “is not what they are about.” Rather, genealogies, he explained, “are about the insurrection of knowledges. […] [A]n insurrection against the centralizing power effects that are bound up with the institutionalization and workings of any scientific discourse organized in a society such as ours.”^[27] Genealogy is an “attempt to desubjugate historical knowledges […] to enable them to oppose and struggle against the coercion of a unitary, formal, and scientific theoretical discourse.”^[28] Thus, genealogies require the excavation and articulation of subjugated knowledges, which are knowledges that “have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naїve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity.”^[29] Criticism performs its work, Foucault stated, by uncovering and restoring these subjugated, unqualified, and even explicitly disqualified knowledges.

  Genealogies are, therefore, historical ontologies that exhume subjugated knowledges, obsolete and even archaic discourses, events, and institutional practices in order that the historically contingent character of the self-understandings and self-perceptions that we hold in the present can be discerned. My genealogical critique of bioethics comprises a historical ontology meant to motivate an insurrection against the centralizing power effects of this subfield of philosophy and its coercive discursive mechanisms, including the notions of personal autonomy, self-determination, and informed consent. In other words, a philosophy of disability that traces a genealogical critique of bioethics comprises a historical knowledge of struggles even as, in effect, it is itself a subjugated knowledge.

As historical ontologies of ourselves, Foucault’s genealogies are concerned with questions about how our current ways of thinking and acting came into being rather than questions about why we think and act as we do. This distinctive orientation is important, for “why” questions usually seek answers about why we think and act as we do by appealing to a discourse that takes subjectivity as a given, that is, assumes subjectivity from the outset. For Foucault, phenomenology and psychoanalysis were exemplars of such “transcendental,” ahistorical discourse. By contrast, the genealogist asks: “In what is given to us as universal, necessary, and obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints?”^[30] A critical ontology of ourselves, Foucault explained, must not be considered as a theory, doctrine, or permanent body of knowledge but rather as a “limit-attitude,” or ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at the same time the historical analysis of the limits imposed on us.^[31] In short, the questions with which an abolitionist genealogy of bioethics concerns itself are “how” questions that aim to identify the historically contingent practices, encounters, events, and accidents that have enabled the emergence of bioethical modes of thinking and acting and the limits that they impose.

3. Politicizing the Subject

McWhorter has remarked that genealogies help us “to make sense of how we are now, in this historical moment, by looking at how we got here and how this, here, now, is historically possible.”^[32] Subjectivities—that is, specific types of identity and active and affective possibility—are, in other words, secondary phenomena whose historical emergence and descent genealogy is designed to trace. A genealogical analysis of subjectivities aims to reveal the networks of power relations in which subjects find themselves, as well as the formations and transformations of these relations, their strengths, and their vulnerabilities. Hence, genealogies of disabled subjectivity and the experience of disability as a phenomenon can enable us to recognize the historical conditions of possibility for the emergence of the bioethical subject of disability: How has bioethics made us subjects of disability, that is, subjects of the apparatus of disability of which bioethics is a mechanism?  

We can gain insight into the contingent, constitutive status of the disabled subject of bioethics and of subjectivity in general—how subjects are “made up,”[33] to borrow Ian Hacking’s phrase—by considering Foucault’s writing about the subject of sexuality. Foucault’s genealogy of sexuality affirmed the existence of various forms of sexual subjectivity, while showing how the very phenomenon of sexual subjectivity as an apparatus arose within a specific historical context, grew out of disparate administrative and bureaucratic projects, was produced through certain institutional and individual preoccupations, emerged in coordination with the birth of the human sciences, and complemented socioeconomic shifts. Although Foucault held that sexual subjectivity, including gay subjectivity, is real, he nevertheless showed that it is neither timeless nor unchanging, but rather has taken shape through the action of certain historical and political forces and, without them, would cease to exist or would be transformed into a different way in which to organize the social and procreative world.^[34]

In other words, Foucault’s conception of the subject does not continue in the tradition of modern philosophy’s cogito, which gives primacy to subjectivity. The subject, for Foucault, is not a sovereign or self-constituting point of origin from which knowledge and truth-claims emanate. The subject is rather an effect of force relations continuously constituted and reconstituted through concrete and institutional practices and discourses over the course of its lifetime. Thus, although Foucault claimed that subjectivity is a secondary phenomenon, that the subject is an effect of the nexus of power-knowledge, he did not deny that the individuation of its agency and the lived character of its experiences are real, as much of his later work shows. Nevertheless, he endeavored to point out that such constituents of the subject are contingent and historically specific, not inherent to subjects, nor historically continuous. Subjectivity itself, that is, subjectivity as a property that the subject possesses, was, for Foucault, neither eternal, nor fixed; nor, furthermore, are freewill and autonomy—concepts on which the field of bioethics relies—inherent and immutable. Indeed, Foucault’s genealogical work on the subject aimed to show that none of these concepts—experience, subjectivity, free will, agency, and autonomy—is a historical constant. Instead, each of these putatively inherent and foundational properties or attributes of the subject has come into being through certain historically contingent practices, accidents, events, and interests. Thus, each of them has its own history and the task of genealogy is to chart these histories.^[35]

Foucault argued that analyses of subjection should not attempt to identify some centralized and overarching font of subjecting power, but rather “should try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects.”^[36] In another, earlier context, Foucault had remarked that he had been trying to render evident the “constant articulation of power on knowledge and of knowledge on power,” especially with respect to the experiences of the subject. Foucault was keenly aware of how the coalescence and emergence of disciplines such as bioethics are mutually constitutive with forms of power. The exercise of power, he argued, perpetually creates knowledge and knowledge constantly induces effects of power.^[37] Indeed, Foucault was especially concerned to show how the emergence of the human sciences (of which bioethics is one) over the last two centuries has been entwined in the problems and practices of biopower and the social management, or government, of subjects.

Thus, Foucault’s remarks on biopower, the subject, and government in his later work on (neo)liberalism instruct theorists to discern the multifarious ways that “subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, desires, thoughts, [and so on].”^[38]Although Foucault’s work is commonly characterized as centrally concerned with power, he stated in a number of his writings that inquiry into the complicated constitution of subjects (how humans are made subject) was the crux of his theoretical endeavors. He was concerned to show that despite the fact that modern governmental force relations appear to regulate political life in purely negative—that is, repressive—terms by prohibiting and controlling the subject, their logic is far more byzantine than these traditional conceptions of juridical power represent: (neo)liberal force relations actually govern subjects by guiding, influencing, and limiting their actions in ways that accord with the exercise of their agency and freedom. Autonomy is an instrument of power rather than a principle of resistance to it or its adversary. In short, autonomy is a trap: the autonomous subject of bioethics is thoroughly within the grip of power.

Indeed, Foucault maintained that the most effective exercise of modern power relations consists in guiding the possible conduct of free and autonomous subjects and influencing the possible outcomes of their actions by putting in place the possible courses of action from which they may choose; that is, relations of governmentality enable subjects to act in ways that also constrain them by influencing, shaping, and limiting their actions in accordance with the capacity to choose from a highly circumscribed set of possible actions. By virtue of their subjection to governmental force relations, subjects are in effect formed, defined, and reproduced in accordance with what these relations of power require. Furthermore, the production of these practices—these limits of possible conduct from which subjects choose their acts and hence are self-constituting—goes hand-in-hand with their concealment, allowing the naturalization and legitimation of the discursive formation in which they circulate.^[39]

          Foucault observed that modern force relations are constitutive of the subject in a distinctively liberal fashion. The importance of this observation must not be underestimated in a project to motivate the abolition of bioethics. For Foucault regarded liberalism as an art of government, that is, as a principle for the rationalization and exercise of government based on a conception of autonomous legal subjects endowed with individual rights and freedoms.[40] Hence, the individualistic arguments that condition bioethics—in which primacy is given to the autonomy of the informed subject who is endowed with the inherent liberty to choose—have a discernible lineage that genealogy is apt to trace, that is, are a salient element of a historical ontology that would potentially offer answers to questions such as these: How did we become the individualized autonomous subjects “with disabilities” that the field of bioethics produces and upon whom it depends? How does the constitution of the autonomous subject with a natural disadvantage fulfill the requirements of (neo)liberal eugenics? Insofar as a historical ontology of the autonomous disabled subject of bioethics would supply answers to these questions, it would also enable the development of tactics with which to resist this subjectivation.

Bioethics and Its Discontents

 Bioethicists increasingly influence research agendas, clinical protocols, and policy decisions that both directly and indirectly affect disabled people’s lives; hence, disabled people pay close attention to what bioethicists say and what actions they take. Due to the nature of arguments about disability and disabled people that many bioethicists advance, the subfield of bioethics is held in considerable disdain within corners of the interdisciplinary field of disability studies and, more generally, within the disabled people’s movement internationally. Disability studies scholars and disabled activists are acutely aware that the field of bioethics, and certain bioethicists in particular, provide substantial rhetorical justification for social biases and prejudices that compromise and threaten disabled people’s lives. For example, in response to both the upsurge of new reproductive technologies that aim to prevent and control “prenatal impairments” and the proliferation of bioethical arguments designed to promote the technologies, Disabled People’s International-Europe once issued a statement in which its authors asserted that “congenital impairments” are not intrinsic flaws or deficits that demand to be corrected or eliminated, as many bioethicists claim, but rather are neutral characteristics integral to the species gene pool.[41]

Many philosophers of disability and disabled critics of bioethics point out that most bioethicists advance arguments about disability at some distance from disabled people without the empirical evidence required to substantiate them, including immediate experience of the social, political, and economic disadvantages that accrue to disabled people or interaction and communication with them that would supplement this lack of lived experience. Hence, disabled theorists and activists have for quite some time argued that bioethicists must attend to the viewpoints of disabled people and involve them in the formulation of policies that affect their lives, consult them for their expertise on issues that concern them, and respect the situated knowledges that accrue to them.

In recent years, some bioethicists, especially some feminist bioethicists, have sought collaboration with philosophers and theorists of disability. Philosophers of disability and disability theorists—many of whom themselves identify as bioethicists—now regularly participate on panels at bioethics conferences, join bioethics associations, work at bioethics institutes, and publish books on disability and bioethics. These “disability bioethicists,” as some of them refer to themselves, believe that their work will serve to educate mainstream bioethicists about the circumstances of disabled people’s lives, improve the message about disability that the field of bioethics conveys to other philosophers and the public at large, broaden the range of materials that bioethicists teach their students about disability, and shift the focus of research on disability that bioethicists (and other philosophers) develop and promote. The assumption that underlies these efforts is that the field of bioethics is not itself a technology of government. On the contrary, although they are critical of the arguments about disability that some practitioners of bioethics advance, these disability bioethicists aspire to reform the field by correcting and eliminating the biases and discriminatory assumptions that they perceive to currently condition it. For disability bioethicists, in other words, the governmental character of bioethics with respect to disability and disabled people is an accidental feature of the enterprise of bioethics at present rather than the impetus for its very existence.

  Consider, for example, the insistence of disability bioethicists and (most) feminist bioethicists that bioethicist Peter Singer’s arguments about disabled people are morally reprehensible and culturally harmful. Although they are very critical of Singer’s arguments, these disability bioethicists and feminist bioethicists share the same (neo)liberal assumptions about power, choice, and autonomy that he, as well as other mainstream bioethicists, promote.[42] Indeed, this allegiance to the notions of individual choice and autonomy entails that many bioethicists—including disability bioethicists and feminist bioethicists—promote requests for MAiD as legitimate expressions and exercises of the subject’s autonomous decision-making (a point that I reiterate below) and as viable and cost-effective means of harm reduction—that is, reduction of the harm that accrues to disabled people due to poverty, unemployment,  inaccessibility, and other forms of social suffering.[43] Yet these defenses of so-called autonomous decision-making fail to understand the disciplinary constraints of the constitution of disabled subjectivities under the oppressive conditions of the prevailing neoliberal regime. In short, although disability bioethicists (and feminist bioethicists) are very critical of Singer’s arguments, their critiques do not encompass the neoliberal subfield of bioethics itself. On the contrary, disability bioethicists generally regard the field of bioethics as a progressive or potentially progressive domain within which one can selectively adopt a neutral stance on specific bioethical issues. In this view, ableism is a problem within bioethics that can be rectified with the development of better approaches to bioethical inquiry. Disability (and feminist) bioethicists thus continue to frame the relation between power and the subfield of bioethics with reference to the unsavory arguments of certain bioethicists, the eugenic implications of certain practices and technologies, and the misapplication of certain ethical concepts—such as autonomy, well-being, informed consent, and quality of life—in ways that both conceal the historical legacy of eugenics that motivates bioethics and individualize the institutional and structural social injustices that make bioethics possible.

Although Singer’s arguments about disability are repeatedly condemned in the field of bioethics and the philosophical community more generally, the systemic and structural character of the eugenic ableism that precipitated these arguments has gone virtually unaddressed and flourishes unabated. Condemnation of Singer’s views about disability is advanced exclusively as the ethical response to egregious claims of an individual philosopher, effectively obscuring and deflecting attention away from the historical conditions of possibility for his claims and the comparatively pernicious ableism that other bioethicists produce. Thus, 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, especially insofar as these statements (and the motivational assumptions from which they arise) are routinely reiterated in introductory bioethics classes that are considered standard “service” courses and hence a lucrative and integral part of philosophy department curricula and university infrastructure. In short, Peter Singer did not create the eugenic impetus of bioethics; the eugenic impetus of bioethics created Peter Singer.

  Within the discipline of philosophy, the dominant medicalized representation of disability as an inherently disadvantageous personal characteristic and the eugenic impetus of bioethics that is co-constitutive with this depoliticized representation—an impetus according to which the appropriate responses to disability are thereby prevention and cure—contribute considerably to the antagonistic environment that disabled philosophers confront in philosophy, reproducing both our exclusion from the profession and the marginalization of our critical philosophical work on disability from the discipline. Indeed, I contend that the subfield of bioethics operates as an arena of philosophy whose guiding assumptions and discursive practices are tremendous obstacles to both acknowledgement that the questions which the apparatus of disability raises are genuinely philosophical and recognition that disabled philosophers who investigate these questions are credible philosophers and worthy colleagues. Disabled philosophers of disability confront a wave of epistemic injustice and ridicule if they criticize bioethics too loudly, especially if they do so in ways that (1) contest the consolidation and status of the subfield itself in order to expose its eugenic impetus and gatekeeping; and (2) interrogate how the subfield is grounded in and revolves around constructions of personal responsibility, autonomy, and self-determination that implicate it in neoliberal social and economic projects.

Bioethics is also a profession onto itself beyond the academic discipline of philosophy. Hence, many bioethicists are both employees of universities and paid consultants to governments, pharmaceutical companies, TV shows, hospitals, the nursing home-industrial complex, and so on. Insofar as bioethicists are members of the bioethics profession, they are deeply attentive to the preservation and maintenance of the norms that guide this profession, including norms that—through processes of structural gaslighting and mystification—involve attribution to the profession of unique expertise and ethical authority, thus policing the borders of the profession and reinforcing them internally.^[44] As members of the profession of bioethics, that is, a primary allegiance of bioethicists—including disability bioethicists—is to other members of the profession, in addition to the commitment of bioethicists to raise the status and prestige of the profession itself. In these ways (and others), bioethics is quintessentially an entrepreneurial neoliberal-capitalist enterprise, both individualizing and totalizing.

Canadian bioethicist Udo Schüklenk, one of two co-editors of Bioethics, the flagship journal of the profession/subfield of bioethics, is the most prominent proponent of medically assisted suicide/euthanasia (euphemistically known as medical assistance in dying, or MAiD) in Canadian philosophy, a state of affairs that significantly conditions the contents of the journal and the shape of philosophy in Canada and worldwide. Some disability bioethicists (and feminist bioethicists) publish their work in Bioethics or aspire to do so, given its formal and informal ranking amongst philosophy journals.[45] In this regard, note that the status and prestige of the profession of bioethics have looping effects that confer recognition and expertise upon disability bioethicists themselves, improving their odds of employment, publication, funding, and promotion, as well as improving the odds that the universities that employ them will be successful in securing corporate sponsorships, philanthropic endowments, and government grants. By contrast, philosophers of disability, especially disabled philosophers of disability, continue to be largely excluded from employment in the profession and their critical philosophical work on disability remains largely ignored.

In other words, the professional norms of bioethics induce bioethicists—including disability bioethicists and feminist bioethicists—to comply with the apparatus of disability and the neoliberal eugenics that impels it. Disability (and feminist) bioethicists have, for example, seemed indifferent about the grievous arguments to promote MAiD that Schüklenk and other high-profile bioethicists articulate, or they defend the right of these proponents of MAiD to do so. As I detail in another context, for instance, some feminist bioethicists have repeatedly provided the leading exponent of MAiD in Canada, feminist law professor Jocelyn Downie, with opportunities to publish her misrepresentations of MAiD as the fulfillment of individual choice enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.[46] I want to point out, however, that insofar as Schüklenk, Downie, and their fellow supporters of MAiD conceive of power, freedom, and autonomy in terms of negative liberty, they obscure and thereby advance the successful normalization of (neo)liberal 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.

What proponents of MAiD refuse to acknowledge is the constitutive nature of force relations under neoliberal governmentality, which includes the constitution of neoliberal subjects whose management and modification of their biological life, through exercise of their supposedly prediscursive autonomy and freedom, is fundamental to their notions of selfhood and responsible citizenship. Modern relations of power have already conspired to put in place the options from which one may “autonomously choose.” Indeed, the arguments of leading proponents of MAiD rely on outmoded ideas about the self-originating character of the (neo)liberal subject’s freedom and autonomy that are integral to this juridical conception of power. The autonomous, informed, and consenting individual in whose name biopolitical arguments that promote MAiD are advanced is a historically and culturally specific artifact of discourse rather than a prediscursive being/self endowed with intrinsic liberties and freedoms.

In “Colonial Genealogies of National Self-Determination,” Torsten Menge uses a genealogical approach to show that the seemingly progressive idea of self-determination has a sordid past. By drawing on the work of Adom Getachew, Radhika Mongia, and Nandita Sharma, Menge points out how, throughout the twentieth century, the principle of self-determination was used as means to justify and consolidate imperialism. On a national level, Menge writes, aspects of the liberal notion of self-determination—especially with respect to population and immigration control and regulation—emerged in response to white fears about the migration of certain racialized groups; as Menge explains, ”the appeal to self-determination [has promised] a distinctly liberal justification for a right to exclude because it appears to be an expression of the foundational liberal idea that legitimate political authority derives from the people.”^[47] This revelation about the notorious uses to which authorities have put the liberal idea of self-determination, notes Menge, “raise[s] serious questions about the meaning and emancipatory force of the principle of self-determination itself.”^[48]   

My argument is in part designed to problematize uncritical attachment to the (neo)liberal notions of self-determination and autonomy, among others. I maintain that the subfield of bioethics is an additional context in which the notion of self-determination and its conceptual cohort of autonomy, freedom, and choice operate in the service of power rather than as antidotes to it. Hence, I want to underscore (again) that my antipathy with the subfield of bioethics sharply contrasts with the reformist critiques of bioethics that disability bioethicists and feminist bioethicists produce. For my argument is that bioethics (including disability bioethics and feminist bioethics)―as a concerted enterprise―is a neoliberal mechanism and technology of biopower whose increasing institutionalization and legitimation in the university, in the discipline of philosophy, in law, and in public policy (among other contexts) consolidate and conceal the purposes that this field of inquiry serves in biopolitical strategies of normalization and hence the government of populations and individuals.

    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; 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 stem cell research and, in doing so, contributes to the constitution of impairment (among other so-called natural anomalies) through the very identification, evaluation, assessment, classification, and categorization of it, thereby enlarging the purview of the apparatus of disability and extending its reach. Bioethics comprises a set of strategic discursive practices (i.e., tactics) that work in the service of normalization and the government of conduct to eliminate impairments that medical, juridical, and administrative discourses allege to discover and manage, while enabling these discourses to enlarge the scope of the broad outlines of the category of impairment itself. In this and other ways, bioethics is what Foucault calls a technology of racism against the abnormal—it is a modern form of race science concerned with the defense and purification of the human race. Thus, efforts to decolonize philosophy must take account of how bioethics is instrumental to the persistence of colonialism within philosophy, within the university, in medicine, in law, and in public policy. For philosophy to advance justice for disabled people (among others), bioethics—as a mechanism and technology of the apparatus of disability—must be abolished.[49]

Conclusion: Prefiguring the Abolition of Bioethics

Historians of the subfield of bioethics generally place its emergence around the early 1960s. A combination of cultural events precipitated this development, it is claimed, one of which was the Doctors’ Trial that took place in Nuremberg immediately following World War II. In that twentieth-century trial, Nazi doctors who had performed grisly experiments on disabled, Jewish, Roma, and gay people (among others) in Nazi concentration camps were tried and convicted of crimes against humanity. As evidence presented at the trial made abundantly clear, medical and scientific practices, as well as the medical and scientific personnel who perform them, can be put in the service of ghastly political ends, even in societies with so-called highly developed intellectual communities. The verdict read at the Doctors’ Trial included ten ethical principles—now known as the “Nuremberg Code”—that the jurists maintained should subsequently govern research on human subjects internationally.[50] In fact, the principles of the Nuremberg Code are widely regarded as precursors to the growth of the fields of research ethics, medical ethics, and bioethics, especially the first principle of the Code, which requires the informed consent of research subjects and, by association, respect for their autonomy. Historians of bioethics and bioethicists themselves acknowledge, nevertheless, that throughout the twentieth century the principles of the Nuremberg Code were repeatedly breached as scientists, doctors, and bioethicists engaged in practices that demonstrate that science, medicine, and the subfield of bioethics itself are politically interested domains and by no means value neutral. That the principle of informed consent is itself a technology of government has thus far remained largely unexamined.

With the high-profile exposure of scientific and institutional abuses and the rise of feminism and the women’s health movement in the mid-twentieth century, as well as other sociopolitical trends, the authoritarian tradition that had at one time conditioned interactions between doctors and their patients has to some extent been undermined, augmenting the production of neoliberal forms of self-management and self-governance in medical contexts. The narrative that historians of bioethics and bioethicists themselves tell is that their academic discipline emerged in part as a safeguard against abuses of the past and a rejection of paternalism in favor of patients’ rights, framed (as I have indicated) as respect for the principle of autonomy embodied in the doctrine of informed consent.[51] By contrast, I understand the emergence of bioethics and the doctrine of informed consent as historically specific institutional responses to the demands of (neo)liberal subjectivity, that is, as institutional responses to the relatively recent social and cultural production of a new kind of individual who is self-directed and self-legislating, endowed with the capacity to make autonomous choices that can be put in the service of power to advance certain political ends. Power is neither external to the subject’s autonomy and freedom nor antithetical to these values, but rather contributes to their constitution and operates through them.

Critically astute prefiguration (to use Walia’s term) of a just society for disabled people identifies bioethics as an agent of institutionalized ableism rather than a field of inquiry in which instances of systemic ableism occasionally occur. Hence, a prefigurative philosophy of disability aims to unmask the mystique of bioethics that facilitates the persistence and veneration of this subfield and its discursive instruments. The term mystique of bioethics refers 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—social and political problems are constituted as natural, individual, and medical in origin, or at least, most appropriately studied in the domains of medicine and science.[52]

Critical prefiguration of a just society for disabled people eschews reformist approaches to the subfield of bioethics that bolster this mystique. As Davis and coauthors point out, the history of the prison and the police illustrate that “reforms sold as ‘progressive’ all too often function to mask expanding mandates, logics, and budget lines.”[53] In this context, I want to point out that the MAiD regime‒which the Liberal Government of Canada (and the Canadian bioethicists to whom it defers and appeals) claims to champion because it purportedly upholds individual autonomy and self-determination‒is projected to save the Canadian federal government an estimated $34.7 million to $136.8 million annually in health-care spending. Thus, an abolitionist prefiguration of a just society for disabled people would aim to incorporate a full-blown genealogy of the eugenic impetus of bioethics and its material effects, a genealogy that shows how the naturalization, individualization, and medicalization of the apparatus of disability, which this mystification facilitates, occur across a broad range of historical, economic, social, and cultural contexts through an array of technologies of normalization, disciplinary techniques, and discursive practices—including the artifactual distinction between theoretical philosophy and applied philosophy. This discursive and institutional artifact and the asymmetry of status in the profession of philosophy and academia that it prescribes have contributed to the concealment of the eugenic motivation for bioethics and provide the methodological rationale for and rationalization of the very existence of this subfield. Hence, a prefigurative discipline of philosophy that is genuinely committed to justice for disabled people would be grounded in an understanding that philosophy is not external to the history of eugenic normalization but rather is structured and conditioned by the legacy of these operations of power and enables their reproduction.

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[1] Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie, Abolition. Feminism. Now. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022).

[2] I elaborate this argument in various contexts, including in Shelley L. Tremain, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017) and Shelley Lynn Tremain, “Disaster Ableism, Epistemologies of Crisis, and the Mystique of Bioethics,” in The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability, ed. Shelley Lynn Tremain (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), 19-48.

[3] Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2013).

[4] Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism.

[5] Davis et al., Abolition. Feminism. Now., 26.

[6] For example, Tom Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Bioethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

[7] See also Melinda Hall, “Continental Approaches in Bioethics,” Philosophy Compass 10, no. 3 (2015): 166–69; Melinda Hall, The Bioethics of Enhancement: Transhumanism, Disability, Bioethics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield).

[8] See Shelley L. Tremain, “This is What a Historicist and Relativist Feminist Philosophy of Disability Looks Like.” Foucault Studies 19 (2015): 7–42; Tremain, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability.

^[9] Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 194.

^[10] Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 145–62. See also Hall, “Continental Approaches in Bioethics,” 166–69; Hall, The Bioethics of Enhancement: Transhumanism, Disability, Bioethics.

[11] See Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999); Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press); Ian Hacking, “How Should We Do the History of Statistics?” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 181-195.

[12] Tremain, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability.

[13] See Tremain, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability; Shelley Lynn Tremain, “Disaster Ableism, Epistemologies of Crisis, and the Mystique of Bioethics.” In The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability, edited by Shelley Lynn Tremain (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024), 19-48.

[14] Anna Gotlib, “Main Character Syndrome,” in AEON, September 27, 2024.  https://aeon.co/essays//why-main-character-syndrome-is-philosophically-dangerous? utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=05c565a09b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_09_27&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-69b28dd3d9-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

[15] For instance, Remi [formerly Melanie] Yergeau, “Clinically Significant Disturbance: On Theorists Who Theorize Theory of Mind,” Disability Studies Quarterly 33 (4), 2013. https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v33i4.3876; Remi [formerly Melanie] Yergeau and Bryce Huebner, “Minding Theory of Mind,” Journal of Social Philosophy 48 (3), 2017, 273-296. https://doi.org/10.1111/josp.12191

[16] For instance, Stephanie Jenkins, “Inclusive Ethics: A Precautionary Principle,” in The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability, 456-470; Shelley Lynn Tremain, “When Moral Responsibility Theory Met My Philosophy of Disability,” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 10 (1/2), 2024, Article 3.

[17] For example, Bill Hughes and Kevin Patterson, “The Social Model of Disability and the Disappearing Body: Towards a Sociology of Impairment,” Disability and Society 12, 1997, 325-40; Jackie Leach Scully, Disability Bioethics: Moral Bodies, Moral Differences (Lantham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008); Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); Bill Hughes, “What Can a Foucauldian Analysis Contribute to Disability Theory?” In Foucault and the Government of Disability, second ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015); Joel Michael Reynolds, The Life Worth Lliving: Disability, Pain, and Morality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022); David Wasserman and Sean Aas, “Disability: Definitions and Models” in Zalta, E. (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer edition, 2022. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/disability/

[18] Joel Michael Reynolds, The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022); David Wasserman and Sean Aas, “Disability: Definitions and Models” in Zalta, E. (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer edition, 2022. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/disability/

[19] Ladelle McWhorter, “In Perpetual Disintegration,” in this volume.

[20] Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 31, 33.

[21] Hall, “Continental Approaches in Bioethics, 162.

[22] Michel Foucault, “Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual,” History of the Present 4, 1, (1988), in Hall, “Continental Approaches in Bioethics,” 162.

[23] Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 3.

[24] Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, 3.

[25] Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, 3.

^[26] Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge, 83.

^[27] Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 9.

^[28] Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”, 9.

^[29] Foucault, “Two Lectures,” 82.

^[30] Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 319.

^[31] Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” 319.

^[32] Ladelle McWhorter and Shelley Tremain, “Normalization and Its Discontents: An Interview with Ladelle McWhorter,” Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Practice 11 (2010).

[33] Ian Hacking, “Making Up People,”’ in Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy, edited by Edward Stein (New York: Routledge, 1992).

^[34] Ladelle McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 30.

^[35] Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 153.

^[36] Foucault, “Two Lectures,” 97.

^[37] Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge, 52.

^[38] Foucault, “Two Lectures,” 97.

^[39] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999).

[40] Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, ed. Michael Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, “Introduction: Foucault Today,” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Selections from 1954-1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 2003).

[41] Disabled Peoples’ International Europe, “Disabled People Speak on the New Genetics,” DPI Europe Position Statement on Bioethics and Human Rights, 2000. http://www.dpi-europe.org/bioethics_issues/bioethics_issues/

[42] For instance, Joseph A. Stramondo, “How Disability Activism Advances Disability Bioethics,” Ethical Theory and Practice 25, 335-49; various essays in Joel Michael Reynolds and Christine Wieseler, eds. The Disability Bioethics Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 2022).

[43] For instance, Kayla Wiebe and Amy Mullin, “Choosing Death in Unjust Conditions: Hope, Autonomy, and Harm Reduction.” Journal of Medical Ethics. Online first, April 26, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1136/jme-2022-108871

^[44] On the professionalization of philosophy, see Alison Jaggar, “Philosophy as a Profession,” Metaphilosophy 6, no. 1 (1975), 100–16.

[45] For example, Mathias Schütz and Harold Braswell, “Ethicizing History. Bioethical Representations of Nazi Medicine,” Bioethics 37, no. 6 (2023), 581-90. https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.13168 . Given Braswell’s notoriety amongst scholars of disability as a leading critic of assisted suicide and euthanasia and the accolades that he has received for this work,  it seems problematic that these co-authors would publish their article in the journal that a leading proponent of assisted suicide and euthanasia co-edits and in which MAiD is routinely promoted, conferring legitimacy on the journal  by doing so.

[46] Shelley Lynn Tremain, “Disaster Ableism, Epistemologies of Crisis, and the Mystique of Bioethics,” The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability, edited by Shelley Lynn Tremain (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), 36-7.

^[47] Torsten Menge, “Colonial Genealogies of National Self-Determination,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9, no. 4 (2023):705–6.

^[48] Menge, “Colonial Genealogies of National Self-Determination,” 705.

[49] In another context, Robin D. G. Kelley, referencing the lessons of various disabled authors, has also argued that disability justice embraces a framework of abolitionism: “disability justice,” Kelley writes, “demands nothing less than the overthrow of ableism and all the structures that undergird it.” Robin D.G. Kelley, “Twenty Years of Freedom Dreams,” Boston Review, August 2022, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/twenty-years-of-freedom-dreams. Emphasis in the original.

[50] George J. Annas and Michael A. Grodin, The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995; The Hastings Center Bioethics Timeline Committee, “The Hastings Center Bioethics Timeline,” The Hastings Center (blog). https://www.thehastingscenter.org/bioethics-timeline/

[51] For example, Alicia Ouellette, Bioethics and Disability: Toward a Disability-Conscious Bioethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). See Tremain, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, especially chapter 5.

[52] Tremain, “Disaster Ableism, Epistemologies of Crisis, and the Mystique of Bioethics,” 22.

[53] Davis et al. Abolition. Feminism. Now, 59-60.