The sixth edition of the Philosophy, Disability, and Social Change conference series that took place this week was outstanding, exceeding the expectations of the organizing team in every aspect.

The presentations were amazing, fascinating, provocative, engaging, creative, insightful, mischievous, daring, insurgent. The Q and As were lively, respectful, committed, and concerned. The Chat conversations were supportive, angry, revolutionary, caring. The roundtable and workshop were honest, transgressive, informative, and unique.

The attendance at the conference doubled from last year!

If you presented or chair/facilitated a session at the conference, check your email inbox. I sent out group emails thanking everyone on behalf of the organizing team. We hope that everyone who participated or attended this year will do so again next year and in future years!

You may recall that I was scheduled to chair a commemorative session on Foucault and the Abnormal. Ultimately, I presented in the session in addition to chairing it because Stephanie Jenkins, one of the scheduled presenters, was unable to attend the conference. I have copied below the excerpt of “Notes for A Feminist Abolitionist Genealogy of Bioethics” (my forthcoming contribution to the special commemorative issue of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly) that I presented in the session. For the purposes of reading, and reading within time constraints, the excerpt does not include citations and has been abridged.

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Content Warning: Discussion of suicide, physical and sexual abuse, residential schools

Conceptual Needs of the Argument to Abolish Bioethics

1. Situating the Argument

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 Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, and Beth 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.

In this article (presentation), I rely on the reflections of these abolition feminists both to reinforce my critique of reformist responses to the eugenic impetus of bioethics and to outline the “prefiguration” 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.” For Walia, decolonization is a framework that exemplifies a “positive and concrete” prefigurative image of the future.

I contend that just as we must prefigure a decolonized future for society without prisons, police, and border patrol, so, too, we must prefigure a decolonized, equitable, and inclusive future for philosophy without bioethics. Yet philosophers, including feminist philosophers, tend to ignore, cast aside, or outright dismiss my call for bioethics to be abolished, variously regarding it as unrealistic, disproportionate, and uncollegial.

They regard the call as unrealistic because bioethics seems indispensable for the resolution of what they construe as a particular type of issue in certain contexts; in addition, they regard the call as disproportionate, if not extreme, because, they argue, reforms of bioethics are frequently advanced now and will continue to be advanced, and even increasingly advanced, in the future; furthermore, they regard the call as uncollegial and unprofessional because, they claim, it constitutes an inappropriately adversarial expression of one’s convictions, an attack on nice people and their work, and a violation of professional norms amongst colleagues.

I want to talk back to (and even undermine) these judgements according to which philosophers should ignore or explicitly dismiss my call for the abolition of bioethics. In another context, I argued that the tacit profession-wide ableist contract to quash the sort of external critique of bioethics that my call for its abolition exemplifies is the most consequential, entrenched, and obfuscated scandal in philosophy with respect to academic freedom. In this context, I want to lend support to that argument. I do so by indicating how a genealogy of bioethics would expose the historical contingency and cultural specificity of “bioethical” styles of reasoning and regimes of truth that self-described bioethicists variously postulate as necessary, rational, objective, and universal, though (paradoxically) caring, compassionate, and concerned. As Foucault wrote:

[W]hat different forms of rationality present as their necessary condition one can perfectly well do the history of, and recover the network of contingencies from which it has emerged; which does not mean however that these forms of rationality were irrational; it means that they rest on a base of human practice and of human history and since these things have been made, they can, provided one knows how they were made, be unmade.

With his “recourse to history,” Foucault showed that our forms of rationality depend on human practices that are neither necessary nor self-evident. By doing so, that is, Foucault opened cognitive and practical space to free us from “a sense of fatalism,” from the belief that our current practices and social arrangements are predestined. When we understand that bioethics reproduces a style of reasoning with a history—namely, the “diagnostic style of reasoning”—that is, when we understand that bioethics is neither indispensable nor inevitable, but rather is a historically specific and contingent practice that functions in the service of power, then we can unmake it.

Ian Hacking has asserted that styles of reasoning bring into being new sentences, new objects, new types of evidence, new types of laws, new ways to be a candidate for true or false, and new types of possibilities. Given that bioethics advances the diagnostic style of reasoning, it brings into being new sentences, new candidates for true or false, and other novelties that fulfill the requirements of this style of reasoning. For, as Hacking argued, styles of reasoning are “self-authenticating”; that is, each style of reasoning is the historically and culturally specific “canon of objectivity” about the phenomena which the style itself brought into being as these types of things.

Hacking (who repeatedly acknowledged his debt to Foucault) argued, furthermore, that “there are neither sentences that are candidates for truth, nor independently identified objects to be correct about, prior to the development of a style of reasoning”. Sentences of the relevant kinds are candidates for truth or falsehood only when a style of reasoning makes them so. “The truth of a sentence (of a kind introduced by a style of reasoning),” Hacking wrote, “is what we find out by reasoning using that style. Styles become standards of objectivity because they get at the truth. But a sentence of that kind is a candidate for truth or falsehood only in the context of the style”.  I rely on these insights from Hacking in order to argue that the new sentences, objects, laws, possibilities, and candidates for true or false that have emerged with the diagnostic style should be deconstructed and discarded to the degree demanded by a genealogical inquiry of their emergence and the role that they serve in the eugenic agenda of bioethics.

Efforts to abolish the police and incarceration, too, are routinely discredited in the aforementioned ways, that is, calls for the abolition of policing and imprisonment are routinely characterized as unrealistic, idealistic, and disrespectful rebukes of authority, the law, and one’s fellow members of society. Hence, abolitionists have responded to these sorts of dismissals.

For example, Anna Terweil, drawing on the abolitionist work of Foucault, Davis, and others responds to the charge that abolition of prisons is unrealistic and moralistic by considering both how criminal legal institutions actually function in practice and the limitations of reformist approaches to them, while “tak[ing] seriously lived experiences of violence, and informal responses to it, improvised by people with varying outcomes and perceptions of success.” Terweil maintains that abolitionist thinking is “attuned to lived experiences of harm and violence while refusing to accept existing punitive practices as necessary, inevitable, or just.” Abolitionists, Terweil writes, confront what prisons actually do and what they do not do, questioning their legitimacy. As Terweil puts it: 

We know that Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people are incarcerated at the highest rates; that incarceration inflicts suffering, shortens lifespans, ruptures family and social ties, and that it typically leads to reincarceration. Abolitionists find these realities intolerable, but theirs is not simply a moral critique that prisons are bad or evil. Importantly, their critique is political. Exactly who or what is served by the deployment of state violence, and at what cost? What racial and economic hierarchies are upheld, what kinds of state power are legitimized, and what kinds of citizenship are affirmed and normalized?

 My argument for the abolition of bioethics is likewise neither speculative nor unrealistic but rather is political and materialist, elaborating a discussion that I introduced in my 2017 monograph on Foucault and feminist philosophy of disability to show how bioethics functions in nonideal practice; how it animates and reproduces ableism within philosophy and beyond; how it detrimentally affects real disabled people (among others); that its end must therefore be imminent; and how we can think about disability otherwise. As Davis and coauthors state, it is crucial that we forge a critical space for “what we have not yet been able to imagine.”

• Identifying The Biopolitics of Bioethics

The growing influence of bioethics and of bioethicists themselves is due to both the persistence of a cluster of beliefs according to which bioethics is a specialist knowledge that bioethicists are uniquely trained to apply and to the naturalized conceptions of normality on which confidence in this cluster of beliefs depends. In particular, the bioethicist’s venerated training includes learning how to apply the allegedly universal principles of deontology, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics to dilemmas and events that arise in current “biomedical” contexts—such as the extent to which genetic screening and other genetic technologies should be researched, developed, and subsequently employed. Thus, bioethicists presuppose that encounters deemed to be “(bio)medical” in nature provide them with distinct opportunities to express and apply extant values such as autonomy, well-being, and liberty.

Nevertheless, when we acknowledge both the significance of Hacking’s claims about the self-authenticating character of styles of reasoning and the import of Foucault’s insight that the most efficient and successful forms of power are productive, we can recognize that this cluster of beliefs (and the conceptions of normality on which it relies) misconstrues the causal relation between bioethical discourse and the values that it is purported to merely apply. For the very articulation and purported application of these values—through, say, the use of genetic technologies and the decision-making practices that surround them—contributes to the constitution and configuration of the values and to the delineation of bio(medical)ethics as the appropriate domain in which to apply them to all manner of predicaments, identities, states of affairs, and situations. In other words, the field of bio(medical)ethics actually produces the “bioethical” problems and issues that it is claimed to merely identify, ameliorate, and resolve.

Within bioethics and philosophy in general, disability is predominantly conceived 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. On this individualized understanding of disability, 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 naturalized as the appropriate philosophical sphere within which to consider disability.

By drawing on Foucault, nevertheless, I have articulated a different understanding of disability according to which the ontology of disability, the production of the ontological status of disability, and the supposed application of philosophical principles and theoretical frameworks to the phenomena of disability are performative and co-constitutive. In the terms of my understanding of disability, the ontological status of disability is always already a contingent political and, hence, value-laden, state of affairs that should be historicized, relativized, and de-medicalized. This understanding of disability politicizes the metaphysics of disability because it reconfigures disability as a product of power—specifically 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. With biopolitics, that is, life is constituted as a problem and an object of government.

The professional norms of bioethics induce 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 Udo Schüklenk and other high-profile bioethicists articulate or they demure about the academic freedom that entitles their bioethics colleagues 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 autonomy and individual choice enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

In short, Schüklenk, Downie, and their fellow (feminist) supporters of MAiD 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. What proponents of MAiD refuse to acknowledge is the constitutive nature of force relations under (neo)liberal governmentality. Under liberal governmentality, that is, subjects are produced 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. As I have argued, these 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 feminist 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. Two examples of recent genealogical work illustrate how the genealogical approach to philosophical and historical inquiry can expose political and ontological commitments that traditional philosophical and historical analyses do not.

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”. 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”.

In Ladelle McWhorter’s genealogy of the violence and vicissitudes that the notion of personhood comprises, she demonstrates why the seemingly timeless and universal character of personhood—which the liberal principles of self-determination and autonomy presuppose—should also be contested. McWhorter underscores, for instance, how evidence indicates that Indigenous North Americans have not understood themselves as modern moral persons in the lineage of John Locke, to whom the notion of personhood is traditionally attributed. The most overwhelming evidence in this regard, McWhorter notes, comes from differences in practices of ownership and concepts of property. Writes McWhorter:

As far as I am able to discern, despite all the variations of culture, language, and religion that existed in North America in the first decades of English colonization, there were very few aboriginal peoples there and then who would have believed that a [quote unquote] “Indian” hunter who killed a deer made that carcass his personal property by way of having mixed his labor with it—or, indeed, by any way at all. Meat was not property; deer were not property; land was not property. Individual human beings were not proprietors.

Insofar as Indigenous people of Turtle Island (North America) have resisted European ideas about proprietorship—in particular, have resisted ideas of individual human beings as proprietors—they have also refused ideas of human beings owning themselves, that is, ideas of humans as autonomous, self-determining persons. Indeed, McWhorter notes that the refusal of North American Indigenous peoples to instantiate personhood, especially in resistance to colonial regimes of criminal justice and property in land, is ongoing. “Attending to this resistance,” she argues, “helps to highlight the fact that modern moral personhood is a product of western Europe that arose and took hold under very particular historical, political, and economic conditions.” Modern moral personhood, McWhorter points out, “is not a universal state or fact about human beings, and there have always been good reasons to question and challenge it.”

One example of this resistance to colonial western notions of personhood, autonomy, and self-ownership is the adamant opposition of many Indigenous leaders of communities in so-called Canada to legislation that supports and advances MAiD. For these Indigenous leaders and their communities—communities in which suicide is rampant due to intergenerational trauma and systemic racism—the increasing availability of “medical assistance in dying” is a new instrument of (cultural) genocide tantamount to their dispossession of language and land, as well as to the operation of residential schools where thousands of Indigenous children died of starvation and disease and endured physical and sexual abuse.

In this regard, therefore, McWhorter’s genealogy of personhood reveals the contingency and historical and cultural specificity of this concept and its cohort, as well as the contingency and historical and cultural specificity of the esteem attributed to these conceptual objects. As McWhorter states, “There have…always been alternatives to [moral personhood] for self-aware human beings and communities, even if we modern moral persons today cannot quite imagine now what those alternatives were or might yet be.”

Indeed, let me point out that disabled advocates of state-sanctioned suicide who draw on a version of Foucault to support their claims fail to appreciate Foucault’s unfortunate inconsistencies and misconstruals on the matter of self-imposed death (as Ian Marsh refers to it); for example, they do not apprehend the inconsistencies between remarks that he makes in favour of self-imposed death and his more comprehensive understanding of the complicated relation between power and the constitution of the subject. On this more comprehensive understanding, the subject is enabled to act in order to be constrained and kinds of subjects—such as the suicidal subject—come into being in accordance with the descriptions available to them under which they may act. Under liberal governmentality, that is, autonomy has emerged as an instrument of power rather than a principle of resistance to it or its adversary.

In short, autonomy, under liberal governmentality, is a trap. The autonomous subject of bioethics—which, as I have argued, is first and foremost a liberal discourse—is thoroughly within the grip of power. As Foucault himself repeatedly argued, the most effective exercise of contemporary power relations consists in guiding the possible conduct of free and autonomous subjects and influencing the outcomes of their actions by putting in place the possible courses of action from which they may choose; that is, relations of liberal 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—including suicidal subjects—are in effect formed, defined, and reproduced in accordance with what these relations of power require.