Biopolitics After Neuroscience: Morality and the Economy of Virtue PDF
Preview Biopolitics After Neuroscience: Morality and the Economy of Virtue
Biopolitics After Neuroscience Also available from Bloomsbury A Philosophy of Comparisons, by Hartmut von Sass Nietzsche’s 'Ecce Homo' and the Revaluation of All Values, by Thomas H. Brobjer The Ethics of Generating Posthumans, edited by Calum MacKellar and Trevor Stammers The Futility of Philosophical Ethics, by James Kirwan Biopolitics After Neuroscience Morality and the Economy of Virtue Jeffrey P. Bishop, M. Therese Lysaught and Andrew A. Michel BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Jeffrey P. Bishop, M. Therese Lysaught and Andrew A. Michel, 2022 Jeffrey P. Bishop, M. Therese Lysaught and Andrew A. Michel have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Neuroscience, Fibre optics carrying data around the brain (© Westend61 GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-8844-7 ePDF: 978-1-3502-8845-4 eBook: 978-1-3502-8846-1 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www .bloomsbury .com and sign up for our newsletters. For Cynthia, Madeleine, Isabel, and Lydia For Bill, Sam, Meg, and Bear For Corinne, Josiah, Miriam, Benjamin, Jesse, and Easton Between the subject and the object there exists a third thing, the community. It is creative like the subject, refractory like the object, and dangerous like an elemen- tal power. ~Ludwik Fleck Contents Acknowledgments viii Introduction: The Age of the Brain 1 Prelude to a Neuroscience of Morality: Of Science and Social Imaginaries 20 Part I The Neuroscientific Narrative of Morality 1 The Neuroscientific Narrative of Vice 31 2 The Neuroscientific Narrative of Virtue 57 3 Popular (Neuro)Science and Other Political Schemes 77 Interlude between Neuroscience and the Economic Imaginary: Of Capitalists and Criminals 100 Part II The Evolution of an Artifactual Being 4 The Neoliberal Narrative of Morality 113 5 Springs of Action and the Political Management of the Poor 142 6 Bacon, Smith, and the End of Virtue 168 Concluding Un(neuro)scientific Postlude: Between Beasts and Angels 196 Notes 215 Selected Bibliography 265 Index 283 Acknowledgments When we began this project in 2010, little did we know that we were embarking on a quest. We began with an original idea that, as with all authentic research and quests, brought us into conversation with unexpected interlocutors, opened new avenues for inquiry, and took us to places we could not have imagined. We set out funded by a grant from the Templeton Foundation’s “Science of Virtue” program administered at the University of Chicago. We intended to examine what we saw as four interrelated questions. First, we were intrigued by the rhetoric around poverty and vice in the United States. Second, we wanted to understand emerging findings around poverty and biology to which, we thought, the neurosciences might add helpful depth and precision. Third, we wanted to press the Western virtue tradition, to begin to tease out the as-yet unexamined ways that virtue/vice, economics, embodiment, and community interact in this tradition. Fourth, we posited that doing so would enable us to trace counter-traditions in Western virtue theory that complicate received wisdom on poverty/vice and wealth/virtue. Having examined these four streams—public rhetoric, neuroscience, virtue theory, and counter-traditions—we planned to articulate a richer understanding of virtue attendant to poverty and wealth in light of what we took to be important neuroscientific findings. What we discovered was quite different than what we expected. We discovered that troubling rhetoric around poverty and vice—rhetoric that surged into public view in new ways over the course of this project—is rooted in a longer history that traces its roots to earlier centuries and other lands. We discovered the presuppositions of this rhetoric embedded within neurobiological research, where we found an entirely new— and entirely strange—discourse on virtue and vice. Tracking the roots of this discourse took us not to the Western virtue tradition but to the history of economics, which opened a door into an entirely different trajectory of the interplay between science, bodies, politics, epistemology, and ultimately, metaphysics. Along the way, our inquiries were deeply shaped by our colleagues and interlocutors. We owe a debt of gratitude to Amy Laura Hall, one of our original co-PIs. Much of the inspiration for the social philosophy of science that shaped the project came from her mantra, “follow the money.” Presaging our discovery of Ludwik Fleck, Amy Laura would note that every active feature that shapes society will shape what the scientist has to say about the object of inquiry. We are grateful for the two years she journeyed with us on this work. We are also grateful for the directors of the Science of Virtue program, Jean Bethke Elshtain and Don Browning. Their guidance during the grant and their gracious and rigorous advice on our project encouraged us to find that which animated the activities of neuroscience, forcing us to dig deeper and to extend our research into domains that are not properly neuroscientific. They also curated an outstanding cohort Acknowle dgments ix of philosophers, political philosophers, theologians, neuroscientists, psychologists, social psychologists, and economists in a conversation that was engrossing, sometimes contentious, but always rich. Wrestling with each other’s nomenclatures, discourses, and methods illuminated many things, not the least of which was the various ways the term “science” functions within the spheres of science, epistemology, and metaphysics. We, along with the fields of philosophy, social theory, theology, and virtue ethics, continue to feel the loss from their deaths in 2013 and 2010. Beyond the project, our queries were aided by a host of colleagues. We are grateful for our various engagements with the late Peter Lawler, Laura Brock, Erin Dufault- Hunter, Jean-Pierre Fortin, Easton Hebert, Kelly Johnson, Warren Kinghorn, Christina McRorie, David Michelson, Cory Mitchell, and Dan Rhodes. A special thank-you to our graduate assistants at Saint Louis University, who helped to track down papers, create annotated bibliographies, fix our footnotes, and search out page numbers for cited texts: Emily Trancik, Boaz Goss, Ysabel Vandenberg, Martin Fitzgerald, and Jordan Mason. Words cannot express our debt to Jade Grogan at Bloomsbury Academic who saw the merit in this project and shepherded us through the final editing process. We are especially thankful to the anonymous reviewers, whose resounding encouragement helped to push us through to completion. We are also thankful to Max Bonilla of the Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI Vatican Foundation, who encouraged us to submit this project, in its yet-to-be-published form, for consideration for The Expanded Reason Awards. We are humbled that we received this Award in 2021. Finally, we would like to thank our spouses—Cynthia Bishop, Bill Riker, and Corinne Michel—who indulged us with their patient and good-humored forbearance for what turned out to be more than a two-year project, and for their support of our fascinations with it. Joining that pit crew were our children, some of whom were in fact children when the project began and are now adults, and some of whom were not yet born. We are born into a world and into projects not of our own choosing, and we are pulled along by others into projects we may or may not understand. It is always good to have those whom we love most and those who love us the most walk alongside us into these unexpected terrains. We are thankful to them for accompanying us on a journey not of their choosing and for their indulgence of our passions. Sine his nihil.
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