Table Of ContentBiopolitics After Neuroscience
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Biopolitics After Neuroscience
Morality and the Economy of Virtue
Jeffrey P. Bishop, M. Therese Lysaught and
Andrew A. Michel
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in Great Britain 2022
Copyright © Jeffrey P. Bishop, M. Therese Lysaught and Andrew A. Michel, 2022
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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.
