In a recent post on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, Mich Ciurria wrote:

To regard race, animality, and disability as “intersecting” oppressions rather than one and the same oppression is, on [Aph] Ko’s view, politically and epistemically harmful, because it sows divisions, precludes solidarity, and obscures a deeper understanding of domination. “Animal,” she clarifies, “is a label. It’s a social construct the dominant class created to mark certain bodies as disposable without even a second thought. Animal as a term does not exist on its own… it’s relational. It only makes sense in relation to the [nondisabled] white human” (2019, 40). Shelley Tremain, too, argues that disability and animality co-exist in a “mutually constitutive and reinforcing” relationship, meaning that they are not “fundamentally” ontologically distinct. Therefore, to view animality and disability as distinct natural kinds is a category mistake and an epistemic injustice. Capitalism relies on obfuscating scientific taxonomies to prevent zoological subjects from effectively mobilizing.

To this understanding of how power coalesces and operates, we can add gender, sexuality, class, age, and other subjecting apparatuses. Given my own philosophical predilections and preoccupations, I associate this understanding of social power relations with Michel Foucault’s (often maligned and misunderstood) insights with respect to what he called “racism against the abnormal.” In Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, I unfold Foucault’s idea of racism against the abnormal by explicating Ladelle McWhorter’s use of it in Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy in this way:

Insofar as McWhorter adopts Foucault’s thesis that modern racism is “racism against the abnormal” (Foucault 2003; see also Tremain 2012, 2013)—as he referred to this dispositif (apparatus)—racism, in McWhorter’s analysis, is much more comprehensive than most other contemporary academic or popular conceptions assume it to be. For Foucault, the networks of power that constitute what in the present day is aptly called racism aim to eliminate, contain, manage, or exploit abnormality in ways that threaten, harm, and oppress the people who come to be classified as abnormal. Thus, McWhorter’s genealogy of modern racism renders evident the artifactual and interactive character of current racist, sexist, ableist, antisemitic, classist, ableist, and homophobic practices by unearthing their conjoined descent through the practices that precipitated them and the power relations through which they have been mutually constitutive and reinforcing. …

…McWhorter follows the descent of the notion of one race—the Race—constituted by and through mechanisms and strategies of biopower from the early eighteenth century to the present and the inextricable linkage between that heritage and the emergence of sexuality in biopolitical and eugenic discourses on the family and the scientific management of sexualized populations (2009, 139– 40, 12–13). To chart this heritage of modern racism, McWhorter weaves together insights drawn from erudite academic and archival material, articles in the popular press, and the subjugated knowledges of community organizers, neighbors, and activists. Foucault (1978, 26) noted that the forms of observation and campaigns with respect to sex and sexual conduct that emerged in the eighteenth century around the concept of population became the basis for links between sex and varieties of racism from the nineteenth century on: (im)purity of bloodlines and lineage, the birth of “monsters” and other oddities, polluted women, miscegenation, and so on (see also Stoler 1995; Roberts 1998; Shildrick 2001). As he explained it,

“Evolutionism, understood in the broad sense—or in other words, not so much Darwin’s theory itself as a set, a bundle, of notions (such as: the hierarchy of species that grow from a common evolutionary tree, the struggle for existence among species, the selection that eliminates the less fit)—naturally became within a few years during the nineteenth century not simply a way of transcribing a political discourse into biological terms, and not simply a way of dressing up a political discourse in scientific clothing, but a real way of thinking about the relations between colonization, the necessity for wars, criminality, the phenomena of madness and illness, the history of societies with their different classes, and so on.” (2003, 256–57)

Foucault argued that social relations that operate in the mode of biopower—that is, social relations that aim to strengthen and enhance life—require the theme of evolutionism to justify that fact that they kill people, kill populations, and kill civilizations. Modern societies that operate in the mode of biopower, Foucault wrote, appeal to evolutionism as a form of racism to justify war and other forms of state-sanctioned killing (Foucault 2003, 254–58). “If the power of normalization wished to exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist,” Foucault (256) stated. In the normalizing societies of biopower, racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable. Within societies that operate in the mode of biopower, “killing,” Foucault noted, must be understood to include indirect forms of murder in addition to direct forms of murder: exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, political death, expulsion, and so on. He pointed out, furthermore, that within societies that operate in the mode of biopower, racism makes possible the establishment of a relationship between one’s own life and the death of the other, a relationship that takes biology as its reference point. He explained this biological dyad thus:

“The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more I—as species rather than individual—can live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate.” The fact that the other dies does not mean simply that I live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer.” (2003, 255)

For Foucault, in short, modern racism is a set of power relations that produces effects referred to as “anti-semitism” and “white supremacy”; however, what is at issue in modern racist regimes of power is not religion, culture, or skin color per se, but rather whether one is normal or abnormal. In his lecture course at the Collège de France in 1975–76, Foucault (2003) described racism against the abnormal as a racism preoccupied not with attacking members of another race, but rather with protecting the boundaries of the race, the only race that matters, the human race embodied in its “highest” representatives (see McWhorter 2009, 139–40). Within modern racist regimes of power, nonwhite skin and non-Christian religious and cultural affiliation are marked as abnormal, but so too are (for example) low IQ test scores, seizures, cleft palates, intersex, trans identity, and same-gender coupling. Modern racism, McWhorter notes, is neither identical with, nor exhausted by, attitudes and actions that harm people of color or Jewish people, as is generally supposed: although modern racism encompasses these phenomena, it also exceeds them (McWhorter 2009, 34).

As Ciurria points out, drawing on Ko, feminist, anti-racist, and anti-speciesist analyses of power that represent oppression in its various guises as “intersectional” rather than co-constitutive are counterproductive, compromise solidarity, and reproduce a shallow understanding of domination. This sort of limited representation of power is one of the flaws that conditions discussion of disability and well-being in a recent entry to The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). In other posts at BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, I have pointed out the lousy coverage of the apparatus of disability and of philosophy of disability in SEP. This new SEP entry can be added to the heap of outdated and misguided material on disability in philosophy insofar as it recycles old concerns and outmoded responses to them. That the entry (like most of the other recent SEP entries on disability) was written by white men is patently evident throughout the entry. Consider this excerpt of the entry:

Even now, with greater recognition of those socially mediated disadvantages, it is widely assumed that disabled people would be badly off even in the absence of ableism or disability-based discrimination. This highlights a noteworthy contrast between the disability rights movement and other civil rights movements, as well as between the philosophy of disability and the philosophy of race, gender, and sexual orientation. Despite various similarities and parallels between different socially disadvantaged groups, there is one difference on which all sides can agree [??!!]: the disability rights movement and disability scholarship have devoted more time and energy than their counterparts to arguing against the assumption that their group is badly off. Advocates for other socially disadvantaged groups rarely deny that their members are as badly off as commonly assumed; indeed, advocates for those groups often challenge complacent views about how well members of those groups are now doing, compared to some past time. Disability advocates also point to the appalling social conditions in which many people with disabilities find themselves—excluded, unemployed, and institutionalized. But, in addition, they often argue against the assumption that disabled people lead far worse lives just because of their disabilities.

I hope that philosophers of disability recognize the problematic assumptions and constructions that run throughout this excerpt. After having read the passage several times, I remain unsure whether the odd nature of the assertions herein is due to the quality of the writing in which the ideas were conveyed or whether the range of reading material and experiential knowledge of social and cultural events from which the authors individually and collectively draw is narrow.

This BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY post is too long already, but let me end by pointing that this SEP entry relies on an understanding of power that an increasing number of philosophers, including philosophers of disability and feminist philosophers, have relinquished. Both the conception(s) of disability and the conception(s) of well-being that this entry of SEP deems worthy of consideration rely upon this out-of-date construal of power, an understanding of power as primarily repressive and centralized that Foucault laboured to subvert, especially in The History of Sexuality, volume one and Discipline and Punish; The Birth of the Modern Prison. Consider how the authors of the SEP entry describe and define the latter, that is, well-being:

[Like disability] Well-being is …a philosophically contested concept. When psychologists talk of well-being, they usually have in mind a psychological phenomenon, such as positive affect or life-satisfaction (Rodogno 2015; Alexandrova 2017; Brown and Potter 2024). When philosophers use the term well-being, they typically have in mind an evaluative or normative concept (entry on Well-Being; Fletcher 2016). It refers to how well a person is doing or faring, or how well their life is going for them. It often goes by other names, such as prudential value, self-interest, welfare, quality of life, or flourishing. Some things positively impact our well-being; in other words, they are good for us, benefit us, make us better off, or have prudential value. Other things or events negatively impact our well-being; they are bad for us, harm us, make us worse off, or are prudentially bad. Well-being is widely agreed to be something that we have reason to promote for ourselves and for others (Heathwood 2010; Campbell 2016; Lin 2022a).

Although there is disagreement about the “currency” of well-being (pleasurable experience, fulfilled desires, valuable capacities and activities, etc.), there is a broad consensus on some important sources of well-being, such as happiness, rewarding relationships, knowledge, and achievement (Hurka 2011; Hooker 2015). One strategy for investigating disability’s impact on well-being focuses on such paradigmatic goods and bads of life, without focusing on how these goods and bads relate to different theories of well-being. An alternative strategy, explored in Section 5, involves explicitly evaluating the significance of disability in terms of one or more theories of well-being.

For the authors of the SEP entry, it makes sense to think of well-being (and apparently all of us do) as something that is universal in character, that is, it makes sense to think that there exists some thing, some entity, a real something, that may not be equal across populations or between and within populations but in the terms of which the life of every member of every population can be similarly judged. Notice that although the authors of the SEP entry write that well-being is a “normative” concept,” they fail to understand its fundamentally disciplinary character; that is, because the authors do not understand power as primarily productive (rather than merely repressive), they do not understand that the construct of well-being has been implanted as an allegedly measurable characteristic of humans in order to serve certain governmental aims.

Foucault, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, elaborated an argument according to which psychiatry and medicine invented the notion of perversions–he called it “the perverse implantation”–that bolstered the idea that everyone has a natural sexuality, that sexuality is an inherent human trait, where perversions are, in a strong sense, implanted deviations from normal, innate sexuality.

Just as the disciplinary construct of sexuality as a natural human faculty was produced through its very problematization, so, too, the universalizing and regulative construct of well-being (regardless of metric) as a measurable and classificatory element of human life (even if subjectively evaluated) has been problematized/produced/implanted through a host of medical, administrative, juridical, pedagogical, and other regulatory practices, regimes, and instruments. It turns out that the notion of well-being is fundamentally ableist, designed for the measurement of required improvement.

You won’t find this sort of argument in the new SEP entry on well-being and disability which, by and large, revolves around the self-fulfilling arguments in analytic philosophy and especially bioethics (and hence liberalism) of predominantly straight white philosophers. Indeed, the very composition of the entry–who gets cited, how, and why–should be embarrassing to its authors, insofar as it upholds and reproduces white supremacy in philosophy and evinces a regression for philosophy of disability in particular.

You will, however, find representation of well-being as an instrument of social power in Foucault (whose work lies outside of and beyond the purview of the authors of this SEP entry), who made repeated references to the eighteenth-century emergence of well-being as an administrative technology of biopower designed to advance the productive life of the population. In short, the technology of well-being has operated in the service of capitalism and of social control and governmentality more generally. In his essay “The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century,” Foucault wrote:

An analysis of idleness–and its conditions and effects–tends to replace the somewhat global sacralization of “the poor.” This analysis has as its practical objective at best to make poverty useful by fixing it to the apparatus of production, at worst to lighten as much as possible the burden it imposes on the rest of society. The problem is to set the “able-bodied” poor to work and transform them into a useful labor force; but it is also to assure the self-financing by the poor themselves of the cost of their sickness and temporary or permanent incapacitation, and further to make profitable in the short or long term the education of orphans or foundlings. Thus, a complete utilitarian decomposition of poverty is marked out, and the specific problem of the sickness of the poor begins to figure on the relationship of the imperatives of labor to the needs of production.

But one must also note another process more general than the first, and more than its simple elaboration: this is the emergence of health and physical well-being of the population in general as one of the essential objectives of political power. Here it is not a matter of offering support to a particularly fragile, troubled, and troublesome margin of the population but of how to raise the level of health of the social body as a whole. Different power apparatuses are called upon to take charge of “bodies,” not simply so as to exact blood service from them or levy dues but to help and if necessary constrain them to ensure their own good health. The imperative of health–at once a duty of each and the objective of all.