The Form that Freedom Takes: Foucault, Ethics, and Governmentality
Dr. Ladelle McWhorter (University of Richmond)

February 12, 2016, 10:30am - 12:00pm
Rock Ethics Institute, Pennsylvania State University

Foster Auditorium
102 Paterno Library
University Park 16802
United States

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When Michel Foucault asserted that “ethics is the considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection,” he was not so much stating a fact as offering a definition. For Foucault, ethics does not necessarily have anything to do with concepts such as “right” or “good” but is, simply, a course of self-aware, self-assessed, contingent conduct. This definition de-individualizes ethics in that nothing in it prohibits the term “ethics” from being applied to the course of conduct of a community, a people, or a nation. It also de-personalizes and, indeed, de-humanizes ethics, allowing one to speak of the ethics apparent in the course of conduct of non-human entities of many sorts. This presentation will consider Foucault’s definition of ethics alongside his descriptions of liberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics as both a consumer and a producer of freedom in order to raise the question of ethics for neoliberalized subjects in the midst of global inequality and an increasingly unstable biosphere.

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