Below I have copied the text of a presentation that I am giving (via Zoom) to “The Body in Extremis: Fascism, Health, and the Auto-Immune State” Workshop (U of Illinois-Urbana Champaign) today.

In this context, I want to send out the presentation to the tenured liberal Canadian philosophers who—apparently uninformed about ableism and the apparatus of disability—bullied and piled on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY contributor/disabled and unaffiliated Canadian philosopher Mich Curria on Facebook last week.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Bioethics as Eugenic Mechanism: A Précis

Situating the Argument

In the motivational article from which this presentation derives, I employ Michel Foucault’s ideas about genealogy, power, and the subject to provoke a new problematization of the subfield of bioethics. By drawing on challenges that Foucault’s work poses, that is, as well as claims of feminist abolitionists and insights in historical epistemology, I reiterate and expand my earlier argument—an argument situated at the intersection of Foucault studies and (feminist) philosophy of disability—that the field of bioethics is a strategy and mechanism of neoliberal eugenics that must be abolished.

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 abolitionist feminism that both refuses naturalized—and hence, ahistorical—assumptions about carceral institutions and eschews reformist approaches to them that advocate for their putative improvement. I rely on the reflections of these abolitionist feminists 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.

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 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 my call for the abolition of bioethics as disproportionate, if not extreme, because, they argue, effective 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 good 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 lend support to that argument. I do so by indicating how a genealogy of bioethics would expose the historical contingency and 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. Indeed, Foucault’s genealogical approach to philosophical and historical inquiry opened cognitive and practical space to free us from “a sense of fatalism,” that is, from the belief that our current practices and social arrangements are predestined. When we understand that bioethics reproduces a style of reasoning—namely, the “diagnostic style of reasoning”—with a history, 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.

Efforts to abolish the police and incarceration, too, are repeatedly discredited in the aforementioned ways, that is, calls for the abolition of policing and imprisonment are repeatedly 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.” As Terweil argues, 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.

 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: (1) how bioethics functions in nonideal practice; (2) how it animates and reproduces ableism within philosophy and beyond; (3) how it detrimentally affects real disabled people (among others); (4) that its end must therefore be imminent; and (5) 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 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 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 in these contexts.

When, however, we acknowledge the critical 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 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 construed 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 conception of disability, disability is a prediscursive entity, with transhistorical and transcultural properties, that medicine and science can discerningly 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, however, 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 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, life is constituted as a problem and an object of government.

In short, the naturalized ontological status that philosophers and bioethicists attribute to (the apparatus of) disability is a political artifact all the way down, that is, a historically and culturally specific artifact to whose constitution as a detrimental human characteristic the field of bioethics formatively contributes and actively promotes. As Barry Allen has pointed out with respect to impairment, “there can be no notion of impairment without reference to a statistically ‘normal case,’ just as there can be no criminal except by reference to the law.” Allen asserts that “A discourse about biomedical norms, scientific though it may be, is no more true to nature, or physically true, than a discourse about criminals. Any norm is an artifact of the discipline that measures it: it has no physical being or reality apart from that practice.” Allen’s argument about the artifactual character of biomedical norms presupposes Foucault’s nominalism according to which there is no such thing as nature, if nature is posited as independent of historically contingent discourse. Nor does the world come divided into categories that humans must discover; rather, humans themselves organize and classify the world, constructing “facts” about it and subsequently verifying statements about these facts. Identity and structure, like their representation, are artifacts of discourse; are artifacts of a certain regime of true and false; are discursive practices.

A (neo)liberal governmentality—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, precipitated its coalescence, and made possible its expansion, including the incessant production 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, institutionalization, and expansion of bioethics as a governmental subfield of philosophy (which itself is a thoroughly political enterprise). 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. As a technology of government, bioethics emerged to first and foremost resolve the problem that the production of disability poses for the liberal management of societies that aim to foster and improve the exigencies of life.  

A genealogy of how bioethics has functioned as a strategy and mechanism of modern eugenics would thus trace the materialization and consolidation of this subdiscipline through its production of a range of notions that biopower has generated and on which the subdiscipline itself has come to depend, notions such as: normality, autonomy, quality of life, wellbeing, risk, statistical knowledge, informed consent, and probability. Note that all these biopolitical constructs have played a central role in the government of disability. 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.

Bioethicists in Canada have been especially successful in creating and institutionalizing a (neo)liberal eugenic culture in Canadian philosophy and Canadian society more widely through their concerted production and dissemination of arguments that uphold individual autonomy as means to rationalize medically assisted suicide and euthanasia—euphemistically referred to as “medical assistance in dying” or “MAiD.” In Canada, the hallmarks of bioethics discourse with respect to medically assisted suicide and euthanasia—that is, the notions of autonomy, quality of life, death with dignity, life worth living—increasingly seep into everyday parlance, popular culture, and the mainstream press, where MAiD is commonly conflated and confused with palliative care and has incrementally supplanted it, socially, institutionally, legislatively, and distributionally.

Bioethics—a product of biopower and, like biopower, ultimately a product of neoliberalism and capitalism—implicates the discipline 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 philosophy, or, for that matter, any other discipline of the contemporary university, though cognitive science and its cognates have gained considerable ground in this regard. 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. In particular, the implicit and explicit governmental tenor of bioethical discourses and the naturalized, medicalized, and individualized conception of disability that these discourses construct and sustain contribute in formative ways 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.

Where exceptions to this exclusion occur, they serve to legitimize both the subfield of bioethics and the discipline of philosophy in general, typifying the polymorphism of (neo)liberal governmentality from which the subfield of bioethics has emerged by relentlessly integrating opposition to its tactics and enabling philosophy to proceed under the guise of political neutrality, objectivity, and disinterest. Indeed, that prominent commentators on fascism do not consider the vital ideological and performative role that MAiD and the discourse of bioethics serve in the eugenic arm of neoliberal incarnations of fascism and their successes is testament to the effectiveness of the discourse.

Bioethics and Its Discontents

Within the discipline of philosophy, the dominant medicalized representation of disability as an inherently disadvantageous personal characteristic and the eugenic impulse of bioethics that is co-constitutive with this depoliticized representation—an impulse 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. 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 uncover 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 and neocolonial social and economic projects.

As one expression of resistance to neocolonial western notions of personhood, autonomy, and self-ownership, many Indigenous leaders of communities in so-called Canada—communities in which suicide, especially among Indigenous youth, is rampant due to intergenerational trauma and systemic racism—are adamant in their opposition to legislation that supports and advances MAiD. For these Indigenous leaders and their communities, the increasing availability of “medical assistance in dying” is a new instrument of genocidal colonialism tantamount to the dispossession of their language and land and the assimilationist operation of residential schools where thousands of their children died of starvation and disease, as well as endured physical and sexual abuse. In testimony to The Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying (established by the Government of Canada in 2021), Conrad Saulis, the Executive Director of the Wabanaki Council on Disability, vividly articulated how MAiD represented a contemporary instantiation of the eugenic colonial history of Canada:

MAiD is not a readily welcomed concept or term for Indigenous peoples of the Wabanaki lands. We have experienced far too much death in our families–in our communities and in our Nations since first contact. Colonization has brought over 500 years of death, of language and cultural knowledge loss and loss of ancestral lands for our Nations and our people. … We are tired of mourning the losses and deaths of our young people and of persons with disabilities.… We don’t trust that medical people will offer good advice to our peoples when the topic of MAID arises. We don’t trust that options to continue the lives of our youth and persons with disabilities will be explored. I guess it’s extremely hard for us to trust Canadian systems given all of the 500 years of destructive impositions that we endured and continue to endure to this day.

My argument problematizes uncritical attachment to allegedly universal liberal notions such as self-determination, autonomy, and personhood, in addition to the ways that the argument problematizes the subfield of bioethics for which they are foundational. The subfield of (Eurocentric) bioethics, I maintain, 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 eugenic colonial power rather than as antidotes to it. Note that this antipathy with the subfield of bioethics contrasts sharply with reformist critiques of bioethics that variously seek to amplify personal autonomy and “choice”. 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 consolidate and conceal the purposes that this field of inquiry (that is, bioethics) serves in biopolitical strategies of normalization and thus the colonial government of populations and individuals.

In other words, 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 a technology of what Foucault called “racism against the abnormal”: it is a modern form of race science concerned with the defense and purification of the race, the only race that matters, the human race embodied in its highest representatives. Thus, as I have indicated, efforts to decolonize philosophy must take account of how bioethics is instrumental to the persistence of colonialism within philosophy and in society and culture more broadly. If philosophy is to advance justice for disabled people (as well as for nondisabled Indigenous and racialized, trans, and queer people), bioethics—as a mechanism and technology of the apparatus of disability—must be abolished.