Biopolitics 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
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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
 
Acknowledgments 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.

x
 Introduction
The Age of the Brain

Since the turn of the new millennium, popular literature exploring connections
between neuroscience, human identity, and particularly morality has mushroomed.
Consider, for example, Barbara Oakley’s Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose,
Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend, which uses “cutting edge
images of the working brain to . . . shed light not only on dictators far afield, but on
politics at home, as well as business, religion, and everyday life”;1 or Dean Haycock’s
Murderous Minds: Exploring the Criminal Psychopathic Brain: Neurological Imaging
and the Manifestation of Evil, which draws findings from neurological imaging and
behavioral studies to probe the putative biological basis of evil.2 Kent A. Kiehl’s The
Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those without Conscience similarly uses fMRI
studies to show how prisoners’ brains work differently from our own.3 And the list
could continue.4
Evil, theft, sexual liaisons, murder, conscience—these have traditionally been the
purview of moral theory. But where historic moral traditions long understood these
behaviors, capacities, or characteristics as products of social formation, habituation,
and will, contemporary neuroscience straightforwardly locates morality in the brain.
Thus, we find Walter Sinnot-Armstrong’s three-volume series on moral psychology—
recast as biological cognitive neuroscience—with each volume focusing on some
aspect of morality.5 Or Patricia Churchland’s Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us
about Morality6 or Ralph Mecklenburger’s Our Religious Brains: What Cognitive Science
Reveals about Belief, Morality, Community and Our Relationship with God.7 Again the
list could continue.8 Tome after tome promises to tell us who or what we are and why
we do the things we do.
This presumption that morality is a product of brain chemistry is not simply an
artifact of the popular press or mass media. Rather, these popular titles capture a
central thrust of the scientific-industrial-government complex that is contemporary
neuroscience. On April 2, 2013, US president Barack Obama announced the BRAIN
(Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative
(BI), a twelve-year, public–private collaborative that seeks to “revolutioniz[e] our
understanding of the human brain.”9 Aims of the BI range from the ambitious—
mapping the estimated ten billion neurons in the human brain—to more the
preliminary—developing a “functional connectome.”10 Target costs for the BI are
estimated at approximately $4.5 billion solely for the portion of the project earmarked
for the National Institutes of Health (NIH).11
2 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

The BI is the most recent Big Science project, shifting cultural and scientific
momentum away from the Holy Grail of the Human Genome Project (HGP). Where
the second half of the twentieth century has been characterized as the Age of the Gene,
captured in the iconic image of the double-helix, the twenty-first century thus far has
become the Age of the Brain, conveyed in the now-ubiquitous image of the fMRI brain
scan.12 Since the late 1990s, we have witnessed the exponential growth of scientific
journals, popular books, research centers, and more, all focusing on the untapped
potential of the brain.
The BI reprises its predecessor—the HGP—both explicitly and implicitly on a
number of levels. Repeatedly, we hear that the BI has the potential to do for neuroscience
what the HGP did for genomics.13 So tight are the parallels between them that Francis
Collins, NIH director and former director of the HGP, accompanied President Obama
in his April 2013 announcement.14
Eliding the HGP’s rather flat-footed delivery on its initial therapeutic promises,
the BI envisages similarly bold prospects for improving the well-being of millions—
perhaps billions—of human beings globally.15 As Obama declaimed:

But think about what we could do once we do crack this code. Imagine if no family
had to feel helpless watching a loved one disappear behind the mask of Parkinson’s
or struggle in the grip of epilepsy. Imagine if we could reverse traumatic brain
injury or PTSD for our veterans who are coming home. Imagine if someone with
a prosthetic limb can now play the piano or throw a baseball as well as anybody
else, because the wiring from the brain to that prosthetic is direct and triggered by
what’s already happening in the patient’s mind. What if computers could respond
to our thoughts or our language barriers could come tumbling down.16

Where the HGP promised to cure diseases like juvenile diabetes, Parkinson’s, or rare
single-gene disorders, the BI seeks to “uncover the mysteries of brain disorders” that
affect millions of Americans, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, depression, and
traumatic brain injury.17 Like other Big Science projects from the Apollo missions
to stem cell research, the benefits of the Initiative are portrayed as enormous, far
exceeding any monetary price tag.
However, President Obama did not lead off with the medical benefits that the BI
will bring humanity. Rather, the BI was framed primarily as an economic stimulus
package, guided by the directive of the State of the Union address: to invest in things
that power the economy.18 “Ideas,” Obama noted, “are what power our economy.”19
The BI was designed to stimulate and invest in America’s innovators, those “dreamers
and risk-takers” who have made the United States an economic superpower.20 Such
innovation fuels the US economy as a whole.21 Here, again, the BI will reprise the
HGP: “And every dollar we spent to map the human genome has returned 140 dollars
to our economy. One dollar of investment, 140 dollars in return.” In the same way,
via private sector partnerships, encompassing leading companies, foundations, and
research institutions, the BI promises to create new jobs for millions of Americans in
new fields.22 Like Jesus’s parable of the sower, the BI promises to yield 100-fold or more.
The BI was also announced just four months after the European Union announced that
 
Introduction: The Age of the Brain 3

their own Human Brain Project would be funded to the tune of 500 million euros. The
United States must compete in the international marketplace.
Thus, the BI is deeply intertwined not only with US economic interests but with its
national and political interests as well. Alongside the mainstream government centers
of biomedical research—the NIH and the National Science Foundation (NSF)—an
equal partner in the BI is the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA).
Established in 1958 by Dwight D. Eisenhower in response to the Soviet launch of
Sputnik, DARPA sits within the US Department of Defense and explores the usage
of emerging technologies for military purposes; technological inferiority to other
countries is an issue of national defense. Similarly, the HGP—often referred to as “the
Manhattan Project of biology”—was deeply interwoven with questions of national
security.23
A final parallel between the HGP and the BI must also be mentioned. Following
the model established in 1990, the BI earmarks funds for the Presidential Commission
for the Study of Bioethical Issues to explore the now-standard ethical, legal, and social
implications of the Initiative, in order to ensure that the science is done responsibly.24 The
Commission issued two reports, both cutely entitled Gray Matters, and recommended
the tight integration of neuroscience and ethics within research programs.25 It further
targeted three key areas for ethical analysis: “cognitive enhancement, consent capacity,
and neuroscience within the legal system.”26 Like the HGP, brain research raises unique
ethical issues because, in the words of Commission Chair Amy Guttmann, it “strikes at
the very core of who we are.”27 More specifically, “it has the potential to lead to a deeper
understanding of our cognition, emotion, imagination, behavior, memory, learning,
and social interactions.”28
Just as the HGP “gave us the ability, for the first time, to read nature’s complete
genetic blueprint for building a human being,”29 the BRAIN Initiative promises to go
one step further and discover “the very core of who we are.” In doing so, it seeks to find
the biological loci that have, to date, largely eluded genetics, seeking to pinpoint the
source of our thoughts, behavior, and social interaction—in short, our morality—no
longer solely in our genes but now in our brains.
Thus, the popular literature cited earlier is but a megaphone for commitments
built into contemporary neuroscience. But it amplifies more than just a search for the
biological basis of morality. It amplifies particular conceptualizations of morality and
the human person. For it is no accident, we will argue, that the BI was designed to
stimulate the economy and to advance US geopolitical interests. Philosopher Charles
Taylor has identified the economy as one of the dominant social imaginaries of the
twenty-first century.30 Ineluctably, this social imaginary animates contemporary
neuroscience, tacitly infusing the field with philosophical commitments about the
nature of the human person and action. The genesis of this subterranean philosophical
anthropology reaches back 400 years, the most recent chapter in an ongoing project
seeking to link so-called biological foundations of moral behavior to certain theories
of political economy.31
As a result, neuroscientists are less engaged in the act of discovery than in the act
of constructing—of finding in fMRI and PET scans, neurotransmitters, and neural
pathways the regnant projections of late modern Western culture. In other words, we
4 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

see in neuroscience who and what we imagine ourselves to be. As we will argue in this
book, neuroscience maps a certain late modern, Western philosophical anthropology
onto the brain and then claims to have discovered therein the truth about human
morality and human nature. It is a kind of inverse phrenology, in which the source of
certain political and economic behaviors is “found” in the genome, which codes for
brain structure and brain function.
But the aim here is not simply self-knowledge. Rather, if—as the story goes—
morality and political economy emerge via a pathway from the genome to the brain,
once we understand morality’s biological foundations, we will know how to build the
great society. Per certain thinkers like Adrian Raine or Sam Harris, it is only a matter
of time before we discover which kinds of genomes and brains are diagnostic for which
problematic social behaviors. Armed with such knowledge, we will be able to deploy
the innovative neurotechnologies funded by the BI to engineer moral persons and moral
societies. Techno-science will save us from the frailties of biology.
To frame this argument requires some background. In the remainder of this
introduction, we briefly overview the emergence of the field of neuroscience, theorizing
more deeply its recursive formation with its cultural context. We then spotlight a
striking characteristic of both neuroscientific and popular rhetoric on morality, namely,
the ways they are perfused with economic language and concepts. We close by framing
a key aspect of this rhetoric, namely, its laser-like focus on intervening in human
bodies to improve not only individual performance but economic productivity—in
other words, its biopolitics.
This book, then, is about the neuroscience of morality, or, more specifically, it is
about what one has to believe about human morality in order for the findings of the
neuroscience of morality to be true. Put differently, in this book, we will argue that
neoliberal political economy shapes what it is possible to say about the neuroscience
of morality.

Ecce Neuroscience
The term “neuroscience” emerged only in the late 1960s, concurrent with the founding
of the Society for Neuroscience in 1969.32 Despite, or perhaps because of, its recent
advent, the field of neuroscience has sought to establish a longer history, with some
even valiantly tracing its origins to the ancient Egyptians in 4000 BCE.33 These efforts
to establish itself have been wildly successful. Within a short span of fifty years, the
field now boasts some 150 international journals aggregated under this heading,34 a
multibillion-dollar federal initiative with international counterparts, high school
courses, a college major, and has become, as one commentator has called it, “a pop
culture fixation.”35 The “neuro-turn,” as historian Stephen T. Casper calls it, has infused
public consciousness, spawning new subdisciplines—neurohistory, neuroeconomics,
neurocriminology, neuroethics, neurotheology, and so on—in striking succession.
How did the staid American Physiological Society give rise to this new thing—the
neurosciences—in the 1960s, and how do we account for its rapid ascendance as a
cultural trope? The answer lies in the deep symbiosis between scientific projects and
 
Introduction: The Age of the Brain 5

their cultural contexts. This symbiosis is complex. We provide initial sketches of its
pieces in the next three sections, narrating how our own research questions led us to
discover a complex and subterranean nexus of interactions.
We began our study with a question: how is morality conceptualized within the
neurosciences? We quickly ran into a complication: studies published in scientific
journals are very careful to appear morally neutral. With the exception of futuristic
thinkers who call for moral enhancement, rarely are neuroscientific studies so bold as
to define morality.36 Rather, we discovered, most neuroscientific researchers carefully
seek to avoid morally charged language in an attempt to be—or appear—unbiased in
their observations and conclusions. In lieu of putatively archaic terms like “morality”
and “immorality,” or even “virtue” and “vice,” this subfield uses terms that sound more
scientific, such as “empathy” or “sociopathy,” or “prosocial” or “antisocial” attitudes
and behaviors.
Yet, despite this scientific veneer, such terms often serve as proxies for concepts and
traits formerly encompassed within moral theory. They presume much of the content of
traditional moral theory, often without acknowledgment, while melding it with other
social commitments. These social concepts are then operationalized for measurement.
Thus, while seemingly more clinical or “objective” than traditional moral language, the
constructs that neuroscience seeks to study are deeply informed by our cultural context,
and they carry, as we shall show, powerful moral, political, and economic valence.37
Moreover, as the result of their scientific “findings,” neuroscientists of morality presume
and forward particular understandings of morality without recognizing that they are
products of a particular history and social context, a particular political economy, and
a presumed philosophical anthropology.
Subsequently, as we saw at the opening of this chapter, these proxies are frequently
translated back into the commonly understood moral language of the larger social
community, especially via popularized versions of neuroscience. So, the movement
of these neuroscientific terms begins in the larger thought-community of a culture
with a presumed social imaginary (for our study the culture of the late, Modern West);
they are reconceptualized and operationalized by the discipline of neuroscience in
order to become standardized and studied; they are then given back to the community
transmuted into the language of neuroscience, carrying a new social, political, and
moral valence.
For us, this raises two concerns. First, we are concerned that this move from
neuroscience back into communal concepts of morality is made in too facile a
manner. Too often, those speaking from the neuroscientific thought-community
to the larger society proceed as if neuroscientific language is clear, straightforward,
and unproblematic, because, after all, it is (supposedly) morally neutral; it is science.
Yet, second, implicit in the new neuroscientific accounts of morality is a moral
anthropology—a vision of the human person as a new kind of moral being. But this
moral anthropology is not one that is discovered. Rather, it is the moral anthropology
that has animated the political economy of the West for over three centuries. Put
differently, the scientific articulation of neuroscientific facts about morality now reifies
in the brain the political economy and the regnant anthropology of the late modern
West.
6 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

Consider but one example. Over against traditional understandings of the human
person, one of the most challenging neuroscience-based assertions concerns the
erasure of human rationality and human agency in moral behavior. In November
2011, The New York Times published an opinion piece by philosopher Eddy Nahmias
entitled “Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will?”38 The answer, according to several
major thinkers in the neurosciences, was: yes. In an odd mix of science and journalism,
“thought-leaders” like Sam Harris,39 Daniel Wegner,40 and Jerry Coyne,41 along with
“thought-makers” like reporters Jeffrey Rosen42 and Tom Chivers,43 informed the public
of the shaky ground of free will, calling into question fundamental concepts of moral
and legal responsibility. They suggested that our subjective experience of conscious
awareness of world and self are little more than illusions, neurological processes
that can only objectively and accurately be seen or understood from the perspective
of someone standing outside of the moral actor, someone in the scientist’s position;
subjective agency, in other words, is not a causal force in human behavior. Viewed by
those in the know—those with expertise in the neurosciences—there is no free will.
Our legal and moral life is based on the assumption that we have control over, and
thereby responsibility for, our behavior. Thus, if the account proposed by those like
Harris, Wegner, Coyne, Rosen, and Chivers is true, then rational arguments for acting
in accord with legal and moral norms fail. How can we hold people responsible for
behavior they did not choose to enact? How can we exhort others—our children—to
act and live morally if the ability to choose such actions is, in fact, determined by their
neurobiology and is not, in reality, within their power? And more importantly, can
we avoid a machine-like society that would intervene upon the brains of individuals
deemed “antisocial” in order to promote the good of society?
Were such claims confined to lofty, in-house banter between philosophers, the
stakes would be low. Yet such claims enter into popular rhetoric with surprising ease. It
is no coincidence that Rosen’s essay appeared in The New York Times Magazine. As the
titles cited at the opening of this chapter make clear, the popular media—from papers
and news media to high-culture magazines and blogs—feature a steady stream of items
translating the latest finding in the neurosciences into lay terms. Such pieces move
quickly from the science to its possible implications, spinning scenarios of peril and of
promise. With the backing of an unimpeachable “neuroscience” and images of brains
with different regions “lighting up” when a task is done or an idea is thought, these
media products subtly exert a formative power over a public imaginary ready to hear
that we might have no control over our desires to satisfy our impulses. After all, why
fight against “nature” and “natural” urges when one’s agency—one’s ability to choose
one’s actions—is an illusion? Regardless of whether neuroscientists really understand
the neuroscience of morality, the popular rhetoric around such findings is already
affecting behavior. Recent research suggests, for example, that research subjects who
are simply exposed to scientific claims that free will is an illusion make more frequent
decisions to cheat,44 suggesting that there is something subtly yet powerfully formative
about scientific public rhetoric.
How and why did this anthropology come to be? What interests might drive this
erasure of such a long-standing central characteristic of human identity? For that, we
turn to a second question.
 
Introduction: The Age of the Brain 7

Imaging Economics: Whose Virtue? Which Science?

When we embarked on this project, we were not only interested in how the
neurosciences conceptualized morality. We were also struck by a recurrent trope
in popular discourse, linking poverty and vice.45 Media pundit Bill Cunningham
megaphoned the position pointedly:

I cannot say it too often or too many times. Nothing FDR did in the 1930s stopped
or alleviated the Great Depression . . . There’s nothing LBJ did in ‘64, ‘65, and ‘66
that helped the plight of African-Americans; in fact, it hurt them. Almost all their
actions brought about the law of unintended consequences. The goal of model
cities, Section 8 housing, and food stamps was to give the poor people money,
not understanding that poor people were not and are not poor because they lack
money. They’re poor because they lack values, ethics, and morals. All that the mid-
‘60s and ‘70s did to the black community was to pay black fathers money on
condition that they not be involved in the lives of their children and that black
mothers were told that if you married, it would have a painful consequence. If,
on the other hand, you acted irresponsibly by producing children out of wedlock,
you would have a positive consequence, because government would fund bad
behavior.46

Cunningham’s racist rant stands in a tradition that locates the source of economic failure
in individual moral failure. Poor people lack morals, not money. Cunningham’s implicit
definition of “values, ethics, and morals” is clearly economic, racialized, and sexualized.
Virtue, by implication, equals sexual restraint and “responsible” reproduction, which
enables economic production. The wages of such sin is to have no wages, or at least
to have insufficient income to support oneself and the too many children that one
has produced. Importantly, Cunningham elides “the poor” and “African-Americans,”
conveniently obscuring the fact that most of “the poor” in the United States are
Caucasian or Hispanic.47 This racializing of the relationship between poverty and vice
has been a constant dimension of public rhetoric in the United States since the 1960s.
We had originally hypothesized that given emerging studies correlating poverty and
economic inequality with physiological effects—higher levels of cortisol, embedded
traumatic responses, and the growing literature on the social determinants of health—
the neurosciences would provide data for nuancing and complexifying both popular
and scholarly accounts of virtue ethics.48
Yet it did not. Rather, we found ourselves in an unexpected landscape. Echoing
Cunningham, economics was everywhere intertwined with the neurosciences in
overt and subtle ways. In addition to the BI’s unapologetic and explicit linking of
neuroscientific progress to economic boom, three quick examples trace the pattern.
First, we discovered that economics maps the social location of many with neuro-
expertise, imbues study design, and shapes research questions. As Chapter 3 details,
key popularizers of neuroscience find their professional homes in business schools
or claim expertise in newly created fields such as “neuroeconomics.” In recent
neuroscientific studies of morality, economic transactions are used as model for the
8 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

study of moral concepts, like trust. And certain neuroscientists boldly claim Adam
Smith as their intellectual forebear. Yet where Adam Smith’s theory of morality
informed development of his economic thought, now certain theories of economics—
theories that have moved far afield from Adam Smith—shape how neuroscientists
conceptualize morality. “Wealth creation,” as we will see, is posed as the exemplar of
“prosocial behavior” while moral action has become reconfigured as equivalent to an
economic transaction, circularly providing a basis for equating morality with capitalist
economics.49
Second, economic ideas serve as markers for a psychiatric diagnosis. Consider
the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5) definition of
antisocial personality disorder. In defining this mental disorder, the DSM lists the
following “objective” clinical criteria:50

A) A pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others

occurring since age 15 years, as indicated by three (or more) of the following:

1 failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as

indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest;
2 deceitfulness, as indicated by repeatedly lying, use of aliases, or conning
others for personal profit or pleasure;
3 impulsivity or failure to plan ahead;
4 irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or
assaults;
5 reckless disregard for safety of self or others;
6 consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain
consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations;
7 lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having
hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.

Clearly, the “clinical” criteria for this psychological condition are largely moral failings:
lying, greed, imprudence, intemperance, stealing. What might escape casual notice is
the way that the DSM-5 subtly slips into this definition certain forms of economic
behavior—“conning others for profit,” “repeated failure to sustain consistent work
behavior or honor financial obligations,” stealing—as key markers of this condition.
Intriguingly, here in a single space, neuroscience, morality, and economics are
inextricably intertwined.
What is more, this nexus transcends this single definition of antisocial personality
disorder. Across the literature of psychopathology, a key variable that neuroscientists
seek to correlate with antisocial behavior is socioeconomic status (SES). In study
after study, researchers ask repeatedly: what is the effect of “environment” on gene
expression and/or correlated neural signatures and/or behaviors? The scientific proxy
for “environment” here is SES. In other words, built into many neuroscientific study
designs is an assumed relationship between SES—a.k.a., class—and behavior or
morality. Here the neurosciences echo an ongoing argument in the larger, mainstream
community of US culture and its history: does SES (poverty) shape neural pathways so
 
Introduction: The Age of the Brain 9

as to result in “antisocial” behavior (vice), or is it that genetics shapes neural pathways

resulting in behaviors (vice) that lead to low SES (poverty)? The debate is not a new
one.
As we will discuss in Part II of the book, this intertwining of morality and economics
emerges from a long history dating back to the invention of the distinction between
the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor in the mid to late eighteenth century. This
context shaped the trajectory of both moral theory and scientific thinking through
the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. Alasdair MacIntyre, in his landmark
work After Virtue, insightfully notes that “every moral philosophy presupposes
a sociology.”51 His work over the last forty years has illuminated how the Anglo-
American understanding of ethics is the product of a nineteenth-century sociological
phenomenon—namely, the reimagining of ethics no longer as praxis but as an applied
science known as “moral theory.” No longer primarily a tradition of reason-giving,
with the rise of empiricism and the deployment of Humean skepticism, theorizing
about ethics reshaped itself around two scientifically grounded strands—rationalist
(Kantian deontology) and empiricist (utilitarianism). In After Virtue, MacIntyre finds
that Nietzsche’s critique of both Kant and the “English psychologists” (a term Nietzsche
reserves for all of English reflection on morality) is correct. All post-eighteenth-
century moral theory, he concurs, is just a mask for the will to power. However, unlike
Nietzsche, MacIntyre lays the blame not at the feet of Socrates and Greek philosophy,
but with this pseudo-scientific turn. Thus, by the early twentieth century, philosophers
are characterizing moral behaviors as if they are tastes, for which there can be no
accounting, no reason-giving. MacIntyre names this development emotivism.52
While we find his account compelling, he oddly stops short in After Virtue of an
in-depth exploration of emotivism’s sociological roots. He begins to glimpse them
in Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity. Over against Hume’s pretense of empiricist
universality, MacIntyre finds in the Scot and his heirs a lack of honesty about British
culture’s normative role in their thought. As he notes, “the sentiments that Smith
and Hume catalogue and describe with such care and wit are in part not sentiments
shared by all humankind, but sentiments praised and cultivated by eighteenth-century
commercial and mercantile humankind and often enough by their present-day heirs.”53
Likewise, the virtues they extoll are derivative of this same context and not part of the
fabric of being human. In this study, we push MacIntyre’s argument further. For it is
not just that Hume reflects his time; more strikingly, we find that wealth—whether
inherited or gained through commercial activity—assumes a peculiar place in Hume’s
ethics, a role it surprisingly does not play for Smith. Moreover, we find that Hume’s
heirs are deeply shaped by a century-long argument about the English Poor Laws and
the poor. The Poor Laws, which reified the notion of the deserving and undeserving
poor, in concert with Hume’s valorization of wealth through the centering of utility,
inflect a critical mutation in moral anthropology.
In other words, Cunningham’s diatribe reprises the masked economic roots of modern
moral theory, inflected via two of the most powerful social imaginaries in the United
States—neoliberalism and race.54 David Stedman Jones succinctly defines neoliberalism
as “the free market ideology based on individual liberty and limited government that
connected human freedom to the actions of the rational, self-interested actor in the
10 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

competitive marketplace.”55 Neoliberal economics is associated most strongly with

a set of policies implemented around 1980 by the governments of Margaret Thatcher
and Ronald Reagan, often referred to as “The Washington Consensus,” putatively
in response to a series of threatened loan defaults by governments of developing
countries.56 These policies, often referred to as the pillars of Structural Adjustment—
deregulation, liberalization, and privatization—sought to eliminate or limit government
regulation on businesses and the economic activity of individuals; to “liberalize” or “free”
international markets from any “barriers” impeding the free and efficient flow of capital
and trade, through the removal of tariffs, changes in local labor laws and minimum
wage requirements, and so forth; and to privatize government-owned and government-
managed services (e.g., utilities, health care, education), leaving such goods in the hands of
private entrepreneurs or individuals. As neoliberalism evolved throughout the 1990s and
into the twenty-first century, additional commitments emerged, namely financialization;
as well as the givenness—or perhaps necessity—of economic inequality.57
Yet neoliberalism is not simply an economic theory. As pastoral counselor and
theologian Bruce Rogers-Vaughn notes in his important book Caring for Souls in a
Neoliberal Age, it has become “a cultural process” better referred to as “neoliberalization.”
Not only does this term capture the way in which neoliberalism is constantly changing,
adopting “hybridized and mutated forms as it travels around the world.”58 It also
foregrounds how neoliberalism has morphed, in the words of political theorist Wendy
Brown, into:

a normative order of reason developed over three decades into a widely and deeply
disseminated governing rationality [that] transmogrifies every human domain
and endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the
economic . . . [It is a distinctive mode] of the production of subjects, a “conduct
of conduct,” and a scheme of valuation. It names a historically specific economic
and political reaction against Keynesianism and democratic socialism, as well as
a more generalized practice of “economizing” spheres and activities heretofore
governed by other tables of value.59

Brown and others detail how, since the early 1970s, the elements of neoliberal logic
have transformed the social, political, cultural, moral, interpersonal, and psychological
spaces of our lives and culture. Rogers-Vaughn traces how neoliberal commitments
become translated into scientific, academic, and professional principles. Privatization,
for example, underlies a new focus on “methodological individualism”—which seeks
the causes, and therefore, solutions, for all behaviors within individuals rather than
in social structures. Likewise, liberalization grounds society’s increased commitment
to “economic efficiency”—privileging technologically “cost-effective” product-
based interventions that generate profits for corporations rather than practitioners.
Privatization linked with radical individualism also fuels a dismantling of social
institutions; David Harvey cites Margaret Thatcher’s now-infamous phrase:
There was, as she declared “no such thing as society, only individual men
and women”—All forms of social solidarity were to be dissolved in favour of
individualism, private property, personal responsibility, and family values.60
 
Introduction: The Age of the Brain 11

There is no such thing as society; only individuals. The market seems to be the only
community that is possible. Beyond infiltrating all aspects of contemporary culture
with its principles, neoliberalization goes one step further. As Brown succinctly puts
it, now: “All conduct is economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed and
measured by economic terms and metrics, even when those spheres are not directly
monetized.” This pervasive economization of spheres of life previously is, for Brown,

a process of remaking the knowledge, form, content, and conduct appropriate to

these spheres and practices . . . That is, we may (and neoliberalism interpellates
us as subjects who do) think and act like contemporary market subjects where
monetary wealth generation is not the immediate issue, for example, in approaching
one’s education, health, fitness, family life, or neighborhood. To speak of the
relentless and ubiquitous economization of all features of life by neoliberalism is
thus not to claim that neoliberalism literally marketizes all spheres, even as such
marketization is certainly one important effect of neoliberalism. Rather, the point
is that neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains
and activities—even where money is not at issue.61

All domains of human life and human behavior can be examined through the lens
of neoliberal economics, including—we argue in this book—the “discoveries” of the
neurosciences. What one finds in the neurosciences of morality is this neoliberalized
subject—an abstract anthropology of a being at the mercy of its desires and emotions,
which are directed by an omnipresent invisible hand via genes and brains, developing
in an environment imagined in economic terms. Whether this cocktail consigns the
person to antisocial (anti-economic) or prosocial (pro-economic) behavior, either way,
what has been lost is freedom.

Embodying Politics, Scanning for Morality

How convenient, one might note, that at the moment economics discovers free will to
be an illusion—so do the neurosciences. Can this be a coincidence? We think not. In
fact, it is not only that both the neurosciences and morality have been economized; the
neurosciences have assumed two key roles in furthering the neoliberal project. The first
is the project of naturalization. As David Harvey notes, since the 1970s, neoliberalism
has been increasingly perceived “as a necessary, even wholly ‘natural,’ way for the
social order to be regulated.”62 It has become “the air we breathe . . . a necessary part of
the natural world.”63 Neuroscience “naturalizes” neoliberalism in that most solid of
grounds—the human body, the brain. As the DSM makes clear, the characterization of
antisocial personality disorder—like other psychological diagnoses—brings together
violations of morality (lying, stealing), economics (failure to work or honor financial
obligations), and politics (violating others’ rights, disrespecting laws, failure to
conform to social norms). Then, via brain imaging, genetics, and gene-by-environment
studies, neuroscientists seek to find the causative locus of failure to conform to these
socioeconomic norms in the human body. Whether by this via negativa or through
12 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

studies in positive psychology, the neoliberal subject (who we name Homo capitalus)
is discovered as already there in the biological nexus of neural pathways. Once it is
found,64 it is a but a short step to declare free will a myth—rather, we will have no
choice but to agree that human behavior as Homo capitalus—whether a person fulfills
this natural telos or misses the mark—is completely determined by economic laws
grounded in the biology of the human brain.
A second role assumed by a neoliberalized neuroscience is that of governmentality.
A term coined by Michel Foucault, governmentality refers to “the thousand and one
different modalities and possible ways that exist for guiding men, directing their
conduct, constraining their actions and reactions, and so on” that transcend direct
political oversight.65 Here Foucault is referring to the myriad subtle, often invisible,
modalities by which society polices individual behavior, or, more powerfully, creates
mechanisms by which individuals themselves. When these modalities engage with
human bodies to effect their policing function, Foucault refers to them as techniques
of “biopolitics.” They are a form of hegemony that does not look like a hegemony, one
often forwarded under the rhetoric of freedom and liberation “even as [they] shackle
the human soul.”66
Again, these functions for a seemingly apolitical branch of science are not new. Since
the advent of genetics in the early 1900s, the Western mindset has been committed to
the belief that science will provide a clear view of the landscape of human behavior, a
true view where all factors in human behavior will be known, and, in being known, can
be deployed to help the human estate. If we just know where in the body—or now, in
the brain—our moral failings are situated, and the ways in which the brain functions
to produce failed moral behavior, we will have found the material fulcrum by which
to leverage human action into the moral behavior that society needs. If we understand
the “Moral Molecule,” as it is called by one researcher,67 we will be able to not only
understand morality, but moral markets, and that confounding behavior known as
altruism. By assisting those with antisocial traits, we quite optimistically believe that
we can build better and stronger, more economically and politically stable societies. If
we know the origin of economic, moral, and political problems, we will know where
to act to have better political dialogue, or a more moral society, or how to make better
investment or economic decisions—the key moral occupations in Western, educated,
industrial, rich, democratic (WEIRD) societies.
Neuroscientists of morality may object that the point here is not to control behavior,
but instead to relieve suffering, particularly for those burdened with antisocial
personality traits, to treat them for a medical condition. Certainly, most researchers
do want to help people. Certainly, the justification for this research is to relieve the
suffering of patients, or to alleviate the social ills that emerge from antisocial and
immoral behaviors.68 The scientific hope is that by identifying the environmental and
neurobiological determinants of antisocial traits, society might be able to intervene
in order to prevent or disrupt antisocial behaviors, the proxy for vice, or to promote
prosocial behavior, the proxy for virtue.69
In other words, there is a political or moral imperative to intervene to make people
with antisocial traits more moral, or politically safe.70 As we unpack and analyze
these studies, we will elucidate not only the understanding of antisocial or prosocial
 
Introduction: The Age of the Brain 13

behavior held by these researchers but also the moral and political valence of such
endeavors. Neuroscientific research is not only driven by the pursuit of knowledge
for its own sake but also seeks practical outcomes. This pragmatic and immanent
telos seeks interventions, usually aimed at the level of the body or brains of those who
have become pathological—or, perhaps better, who have been made pathological—to
fit into society. Likewise, the study of the neural substrates of virtue—that is to say,
prosocial attitudes and behaviors—seeks to discover the relevant neurotransmitters
and relevant brain areas so as to intervene and to promote virtue.71 If morality—having
evolved through human history as a natural, biologically instantiated mechanism—is
driven by neuromodulators within neural substrates, then neuroscientists can dissect
the functional anatomy underlying the antisocial or prosocial behavior to lay bare the
nature of human morality; or so the story goes.72
Thus, the neuroscientists of morality are chasing after virtue and vice. Their quest
is to master and control morality, particularly the vicious—the antisocial—those
who do not fit easily into the modern-day polis constructed by biopolitical economy.
Some imagine preventing the vicious from coming into being through “genetic virtue”
programs; others imagine medical and technological interventions to curb and
hopefully to master the antisocial, or to set them outside the normal protections of
the polis. This desire is born from a particular kind of culture, born in a particular
sociohistorical moment on a large island in the north Atlantic, translated across an
ocean to find its apogee in North America, where it has transformed the world.

The End of Morality

Is this the story we want to live? If this is the story being told by contemporary
neuroscience, have we reached the end of “morality”? If our analysis is correct,
that may well be the case—we may well have reached the end of the moral theory
derivative from Hume.73 And this, we believe, is all to the good. Reaching the end
of moral theory so construed, however, does not mean we have reached the end of
ethics. Rather recognizing that we have reached the end catalyzes us to re-envisage
new ways of thinking about who we are as persons and what it means to live rightly
and well in communities of human flourishing. We hope this book provides just such
a catalyst.
To do so, however, we need to more carefully understand how we have reached this
point in history. We believe that a careful analysis of the contemporary neuroscience
of morality provides a window into the often-invisible factors that have contributed to
the current understanding of ethics. We mount this critique not only to raise concerns
about the social location of the neurosciences and the broader political economy
in which contemporary scientific research is inextricably enmeshed. We offer this
argument as a lens through which all of us—philosophers, theologians, economists,
scientists, physicians, psychologists, pastors, among others—should critically examine
our own lives, projects and theoretical frameworks and the ways in which our contexts
inchoately inform and shape our own work.
14 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

The overall argument of this book is quite simple: contemporary neuroscience of

morality does not so much discover human morality or human nature so much as it
imagines and enacts what the larger community of society already holds to be true
about nature and human morality. These imaginings and enactments emerge from the
larger social imaginary, which Charles Taylor defines as an inchoate conception “of
the moral order of society.”74 It is a kind of metaphysical moral order that sets the
boundaries on what it is possible for a community to imagine and to think, and thus to
enact. The neuroscience of morality emerges out of this social imaginary.
While this is true of the neuroscientific research enterprise as a whole, in this book,
we focus one subset of the enterprise, what we name the neuroscientific narrative
of morality. It would be impossible to do an exhaustive and detailed survey of this
literature, and such a survey would undoubtedly try our readers’ patience. Thus, in
what follows, we are intentionally selective in our approach, but we believe that we
have selected representative and highly cited studies of neuroscience of morality as our
exemplars. Via these exemplars, we demonstrate not only the tenuous grounding of
what is often presented as fact; we will also trace an historical thread that runs through
the whole of neuroscience, namely, the ways in which this scientific thought-style is
grounded in larger social orders. In other words, in this book, we critically engage
neuroscience.
If one is going to critically engage a particular science, one first must ask: what
counts as a science? This question is more complicated than one might imagine. Ludwik
Fleck, a scientist and philosopher of science, in his book Genesis and Development of
a Scientific Fact, describes four different types of science: popular science, textbook
science, journal science, and vademecum science. Popular science is the science of
nonexperts. It is science as it exists in the culture of generally well-educated adults.75
Textbook science is for beginners, constructed as if there are no controversies, as if
everything is settled.76 It is derived from an untold myriad of journal science findings
put together without eye to how this knowledge emerged. Though Fleck does not say
it, we would argue that textbook science is a creative work of philosophy, because it
is the synthesis of a worldview of the subject treated in the textbook. Journal science
is just as it sounds—the science that has been scrutinized and found to bring novel
insights into relief. These insights must stand in some strong relationship to previous
bodies of knowledge, but other scientists judge whether that relationship with the
larger body of acceptable knowledge is sufficiently strong, whether it confirms or
challenges that previous body of knowledge. Journal science is refined, circumscribed,
and circumspect; it is narrow and pushes into the unknown. Vademecum science is
the messy science of the scientist’s notebook. It is personal knowledge, but it also
carries with it notes of what is previously known on a subject, combined with personal
musings about the subject. It might list the methodologies at the scientists’ fingertips.
It records the novel data generated by the scientist, and brings that data into a very
messy conversation with the previously settled opinion. In some sense, it represents
the messiness of doing science.
Our project will engage both journal science and popular science. However,
circulating in the background is not just formal science in these four forms. Beyond
the messy doing of the science itself, and the messy interchanges between these
 
Introduction: The Age of the Brain 15

types of sciences, neuroscience itself is mish-mash of different sciences interacting

and intersecting. Often referred to in the plural (“the neurosciences”), the work of
neuroscience is interdisciplinary. It attempts to combine and correlate the findings of
several distinct sciences, including psychology, psychiatry, neurology, neuropsychiatry,
sociology, economics, behavioral politics, economic behavior, genetics, and
neurobiology. Each separate domain of science—for example neurobiology and
sociology—has its separate theories, its separate methods, its distinct objects, and its
distinct purposes, all of which combine to give us the results and conclusions of a
particular scientific investigation. Thus, neuroscience is a fusion of several sciences
into a single scientific domain, which is further complexified by being practiced in
popular, textbook, journal, and vademecum forms.
As we describe in the prelude to Part I drawing further on Fleck’s work, these
different scientific subdisciplines that have been concatenated under the domain
“neuroscience” can also be described as different scientific “thought-communities”
(e.g., neurobiological imaging and behavioral economics). What we see is an attempt to
forge a new, neuroscientific thought-community, one that correlates the findings of the
neurobiological thought-community with the findings of the social scientific thought-
communities. We include under social sciences things like sociology, psychology, and
economic science. When these two domains are brought together under the umbrella
of a single experimental protocol, each science has points of contact with the other
but also vast areas that do not overlap. There is significant slippage between the two
domains.
Even greater slippage occurs when one seeks to draw conclusions from experimental
studies about social and moral behavior. This occurs not only in conclusions drawn by
those in the neurosciences about social behaviors and morality, for example, with Peter
Giarnos, Stephen Manuck, Essi Viding, Uta Frith, and Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg
(i.e., journal science), but particularly when one takes up multiple studies where two
or more domains of science are brought together especially in popular works like
those by Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Simon Barron Cohen, Paul Zak, and David
Eagleman (popular science). These works seek to synthesize the findings of science
into philosophies. Thus, in order to critically engage “neuroscience” we will not only
examine journal studies, asking questions of the purpose of study, which we take as
important for understanding the findings of the scientific studies. We will also be
analyzing the works of the popularizers of science, those who want to claim the mantle
of science, but who are more accurately engaged in philosophical endeavors, and who
do so for a myriad of other purposes.
In this book, then, we move between and across disciplinary boundaries and
explore the interstices of the various disciplines and the scientific domains that
generate and synthesize knowledge. We explore both journal science and scientists
and popular science and popularizers. As we move along this study, we point to
the areas of slippage between their domains of knowledge, each with its separate
theories, its separate methods, and its distinct purposes, and thus with its unique
philosophical construction. We then broaden the lens to critically examine the here-
to-fore unacknowledged cultural, political, and economic assumptions that structure
the way these neuroscientific studies are conceived and constructed. Every question
16 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

is already on a quest, emerging from a social location and looking for something for
its own distinct purposes. As we will see in the case of neuroscience, each scientific
study and each synthetic linking between the various findings carries with it its own
moral, political, and economic assumptions, and then reifies them in the brain, or in
the genome, or in the society. For the reasons outlined earlier, we were particularly
intrigued by the implicit assumptions of economic theory that shape the concepts
of virtue and vice that are operative in these neuroscientific studies. We show how
the relationship between economics and virtue in contemporary popular and
neuroscientific discourse presupposes a mutation in the relatively recent construct of
the Homo economicus. Complicating these neurobiological stories are unacknowledged
assumptions about poverty and wealth, and a much more complicated story of the
relationship of economic theories to our concepts of virtue and vice and prosocial and
antisocial behaviors.
In Part I of this book, we explore the neuroscientific narrative of morality. Before
setting off on this journey, we provide more background on the work of Fleck and
his monograph The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, where he provides a
compelling account of the dynamics of the social dimension of scientific knowledge. In
a short essay penned shortly before his death, he concisely states his operative thesis:
“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 elemental
power.”77 This Prelude to a Neuroscience will lay out the relationship of individual
scientists to the community of scientists and how the thought-style of a group of
scientists establishes a thought-community. Moreover, the thought-community of
scientists has a relationship with the larger community, what Fleck calls the exoteric
community of society at large. Fleck’s insights about the flow of knowledge between
these various thought-communities will assist us as our argument develops.
Part I of the book explores the way that vice is pathologized and virtue is prescribed
within the neurosciences. Of course, there are various ways in which virtue and vice
are conceived and operationalized in the various studies. No scientist really wants to
define good and bad, moral and immoral, or virtue and vice per se. Instead, what we
find is that the neurosciences have developed proxies for virtue and vice—prosocial
and antisocial attitudes and behaviors, respectively. In Chapter 1, we examine the
growing body of research at the interface of neuroscience and antisocial behavior.
We explore various studies of brain and environment, or gene and environment in
relation to antisocial behavior. Here “environment” is captured almost exclusively by
economics—be it socioeconomic status or socioeconomic positioning. What is more,
the neurobiological narrative of vice—that is to say, antisocial behavior—is anchored
in the DSM and carries with it the power of the institution of psychiatry. It is a story
that emerges from a very particular thought-community with a particular historical
force in a particular historical moment. Shaped by its historical context, it presumes
that genes make brains and brains make behavior. In doing so, it forwards a particular
anthropology that animates its quest.
Where in Chapter 1 we engage the neuroscientific story of vice, Chapter 2 engages
the neuroscientific story of virtue. Here we explore the discourses on prosocial
attitudes and behaviors, as they are emerging from the much more recent and therefore
 
Introduction: The Age of the Brain 17

more limited literature on both psychopathology and positive psychology. As we shall

show in Chapter 2, the study of the neural substrates of virtue—that is to say, prosocial
attitudes and behaviors—seeks to discover the relevant neurotransmitters and relevant
brain areas so as to intervene and to promote virtue.78 With their counterparts in
Chapter 1, the neuroscientists of virtue tell a specific story: genes beget brains, and
brains beget behaviors. Sometimes those behaviors are antisocial;79 sometimes they
lead to poverty.80 The hope is that, by intervening via medical science at the level of
the brain—through psychopharmacology or selective genetic moral enhancement—
we can improve behavior and performance in the social and economic arenas.81
Occasionally, gene-by-environment studies complicate the neuroscientific story: genes
interacting with the socioeconomic environment beget brains, and genetically and
socioeconomically shaped brains beget behaviors.82
Chapter 3 completes the neuroscientific narrative of morality, as we connect the
neuroscientific research—diagnostic tools, research methodologies, operationalized
inventories—with popularizers of neuroscience who deploy economic game theory in
behavioral research to ground the narratives of vice and virtues more deeply in market
theory. It quickly becomes clear that standing behind the neuroscience of morality
is an anthropology—a late-twentieth-century variant of Homo economicus, that we
will call Homo capitalus, where the human has become and is in service of capital.
This anthropology is biopolitical in two ways. First, it presumes that the bios (genes
and brains) produces the behaviors that shape the polis. As such, the human animal
is incapable of free will and choice. There are several levels at which reformers aim
their interventions to regulate the chaos of malfunctioning genes and brains, through
technology and medicine but also through programs of reform and penal systems. For
this reason, then, the polis must create a social, moral order designed to control the
behavior of those who do not conform as productive members of the contemporary
political economy—to eliminate behavior deemed antisocial and to promote behavior
deemed prosocial.
In order for this popularized story of science to be taken up by the mainstream, it
has to align with a regnant set of assumptions that governs the way people imagine
their social existence, how things fit, move, conform to or challenge expectations—
Taylor’s shared social imaginary.83 But the vector points both ways. Where Part I
traces the neuroscientific narrative of morality as it moves from journal science into
the broader cultural imagination, both Fleck and Taylor point us to the more critical
dynamic: that it is the social imaginary or the imagination of the larger social thought-
community that lies behind the very possibility and parameters of the scientific
quest. The imagination of scientists—and therefore the practice of science—is first
shaped by the broader assumptions of the cultures in which they are embedded. In
Part II, then, we explore the primary social imaginary that has shaped the quest of
the neuroscientific narrative of morality—economics. Part II traces the genealogy of
Homo capitalus from Its roots in the empirical sciences as they developed in a specific
culture, namely, that of late-eighteenth-and nineteenth-century British philosophy
and political economy. It is this social imaginary that has shaped the evolution of
the neurosciences, and this political economy that the neurosciences then reify as a
biopolitics of morality.
18 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

To explore this social imaginary, we trace the genealogy backward. We move from
the present-day situation to the past for several reasons. First, by starting with the
various features operative in the present, we can more accurately trace these backward
to the operative elements in the recent past and then the distant past, which animate
our present neuroscientific questions about morality. Second, and following MacIntyre,
moral theory is intricately tied to the social fabric of society. By tracing it backward, we
are not only following MacIntyre in After Virtue, but we are able to show the further
development of moral theory as it has cashed itself out in economic theory. In other
words, we trace economic theory back to the rise of Mill’s positive science, which is
intricately linked to his and Bentham’s utilitarianism, and which itself emerges out of a
concern for social enterprise. Put differently, by tracing the history backward, we can
more easily illustrate the social milieu out of which the positive science morality and
economics arises.
We begin Chapter 4 with the story of neoliberalism as advanced by the Chicago
School of Economics. The Chicago School marked a shift in political economy from
its nineteenth-century forebears in three key ways. It made its mark by advancing
the concept of economics as a science. This required not only the positing of Homo
economicus as a normative figure. It also required the putatively explicit severing of
economics and ethics. Once severed, we find economics subtly usurping what had
been the domain of ethics. We watch as economics becomes the governing logic of
the state, society, and then “the hidden side of everything.” And we watch how Homo
economicus mutates, in the work of Gary Becker, into the fictive being Homo capitalus,
the human person as at once capital and enterprise unit. The resonance between the
language and concepts of neoliberalism and the neuroscientific narrative of morality
here become transparent.
But this is only half the story. In Chapter 5 we move backward into the nineteenth
century, describing how Homo economicus emerges, not as a discovery of science but
from the development in the philosophy of science, particularly in the work of John
Stuart Mill. Homo economicus is not a reality but is an abstraction, a fictive creation
of economic scientists that conveniently fits into an overarching machinery of an
economized society. We show the relationship of Mill’s economic theory to his science
of ethology and his father’s science of psychology, and how all of that emerges from
Jeremy Bentham’s penchant to imagine social science in the service of social engineering.
Bentham believes that David Hume’s skepticism permitted a novel approach to science,
such that the science would reveal the social physics according to which the “principles
of morals and legislation” can be deployed.84 These emergent principles of morals and
legislation would permit the deployment of the right “springs of action” to be deployed
such that society could become a well-functioning machine.85 We also show how the
social science of David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, inspired by the work of Joseph
Townsend, were informed by a new consciousness of the poor, with the reification of
the notion of the “deserving” poor, who could become free through their industry,
and the undeserving or “beastly” poor. Essentially, we have the prosocial, who become
Homo economicus, and the antisocial, who are a burden to society.
In Chapter 6, we trace the emergence of the concept of economic “man” back to
David Hume and Francis Bacon, not Adam Smith. Just as Mill’s positivist science
 
Introduction: The Age of the Brain 19

contributes to the production of Homo economicus, Hume’s and Bacon’s empirical

science sets the trajectory of WEIRD societies. Bacon’s and Hume’s skepticism
about knowledge of causes called into question regnant cultural notions of moral
anthropology, leaving our imaginings about human nature abstract, simplistic, and
feeble. Hume denatures human nature. We show that Smith, in revisions of his Theory
of Moral Sentiments at the end of his life, was attempting to give a richer and thicker
account of moral anthropology directly as a response to the simplistic and simple-
minded anthropology of Hume. What this means of course is that Homo economicus,
a figment of the imagination of the early twentieth century, does not originate with
Smith, but with Hume and Bacon. And that means that the political economy that is
operative in the north Atlantic from the middle of the eighteenth century to our day
builds a stark and violent lifeworld aimed at grinding “rogues honest, and idle men
industrious.”86 It is this global biopolitical economy that we live in today.
Finally, we conclude un(neuro)scientifically. We claim that we must return to what
Smith attempted to do in challenging Hume’s anthropology. That is not to say that
Smith’s moral anthropology is correct, but he seemed to see Hume’s failings and to
aspire more deeply toward a communal human identity. Even Mill understood that the
human actor cannot be reduced to Homo economicus or Homo capitalus, an abstract
being, a being born in the imagination of economists and mutated into a cog in the
wheel of capital production. While not embracing Smith’s or Mill’s anthropology, we
hope our study contributes to a cultural conversation about the nature of the human,
one not exhausted by scientistic renderings but that rather embraces the nobilities and
beauty of being human, despite all of our failings and frailties, which are opportunities
that necessitate social cohesion and the care of the least of these. In other words, as a
society we must open spaces of non-reductive, philosophical dialogue for the good of
all humans and their thought-communities.
 Prelude to a Neuroscience of Morality
Of Science and Social Imaginaries

Every scientific question is already a quest. When a scientist asks a question, she seeks to
discover something that is unknown. Yet, scientific questions are not asked blindly. The
scope of acceptable questions is defined by a dominant paradigm—a set of concepts,
ideas, theories, and methodological approaches shared by members of a particular
scientific field. Such theories emerge from a worldview committed to particular
assumptions about the fundamental nature of reality. As such, the trajectory of every
scientific quest to discover the not-yet-known is marked by two key characteristics: it is
set within a space delimited by the known, and contra cultural depictions of individual
researchers pursuing their work in lonely labs, it is a deeply social enterprise.
As we move to examine the neuroscientific literature, we want to pause for a moment
to consider this social nature of even the “hard” sciences. As a fusion of two scientific
domains—neurobiology and the social and psychological sciences—neuroscience
seeks to discover the not-yet-known by correlating methods and findings from two
distinct research domains. Yet, we will argue, it has largely failed to recognize the ways
in which each of these research domains is shaped by a more fundamental worldview
that informs the questions asked and delimits what can be discovered. In other words,
neuroscience has a history (a time, so to speak) and it has a social context (a space),
both of which will inevitably shape the kinds of truth claims it makes.
In this prelude to Part I, we point to three different ways that science is a social
endeavor—from the nature of cognition itself to its communal practice and its
embeddedness in a cultural milieu that ineluctably shapes and informs its conceptual
apparatus. To frame this discussion, we draw on the work of Ludwik Fleck, a Polish-
Jewish physician-scientist who developed the first system of historical philosophy
and sociology of science.1 Writing thirty years before Thomas Kuhn’s landmark book
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Fleck’s groundbreaking work The Genesis and
Development of a Scientific Fact gives a compelling account of the social processes
that lie behind the practice of science and generation of scientific knowledge.2 Fleck
provides a powerful framework for illuminating the development of neuroscience,
particularly how history and social context have shaped the objects of its investigations
into human morality.
The primary exemplar Fleck uses to articulate his theory is that of “the carnal
scourge,” which by the end of the fifteenth century had spread to epidemic proportions.
Until the end of the nineteenth century, the “carnal scourge” was perceived as a
single disease. For a number of historically contingent reasons, scientists in the late
 
Prelude to a Neuroscience 21

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began to understand the carnal scourge
as a conglomeration of diseases.3 Eventually, several diseases were disambiguated
from this more global diagnosis and were established as discrete disease entities,
including the entity that we now know as syphilis. In his case study, Fleck traces not
only the social processes by which syphilis was disambiguated from other diseases,
but also how the scientific community succeeded in translating its new ideas to the
widest possible community—society—so that the entire configuration of syphilis as
a medical and scientific phenomenon became culturally taken for granted. In other
words, Fleck describes how syphilis emerged as a medical and scientific “fact.” To be
clear, no one now denies that the spirochete Treponema pallidum is a real thing in the
world. But Fleck demonstrates that the emergence of the spirochete as a new object of
scientific knowledge required a social process of knowledge generation, winnowing,
and articulation.4 He outlines moreover how, given the ways bodies respond to the
spirochete, different aspects of syphilis’s medical presentation resulted in various ways
of imagining the disease and forged the creation of new scientific projects.5
We will focus on three key components of Fleck’s analysis—the nature of cognition,
his notion of thought-collectives (which we will call thought-communities), and the
ways that thought-collectives interact in the development of scientific knowledge. We
begin with cognition. We often imagine thinking to be a solitary activity—captured
so well in Descartes’s depiction of the cogitator discovering his lone self, co-extensive
with his own mind. Fleck upends this Cartesian myth by recognizing that thinking
itself is inescapably social. As he notes:

Cognition is the most socially-conditioned activity of man [sic], and knowledge is

the paramount social creation [Gebilde]. The very structure of language presents a
compelling philosophy characteristic of [a] community, and even a single word can
represent a complex theory. To whom do these philosophies and theories belong?6

In other words, our embeddedness in social realities thoroughly perfuses every

component of thinking—each word, our very linguistic structures, the “philosophies”
that inchoately accompany those linguistic structures, as well as the range of theories
required for scientific discovery. All of these we acquire only from other people.
Fleck is interested not only in the social constructedness of the building blocks
of our cognition. He is in fact more interested in tracing the social dynamics of its
movement, development, and creativity. Unpacking how thought circulates and is
refined, he further asks:

Whose thought is it that continues to circulate? It is one that obviously belongs not
to any single individual but to the collective. Whether an individual constitutes it as
truth or error, understands it correctly or not, a set of findings meanders through
the community, becoming polished, transformed, reinforced, or attenuated, while
influencing other findings, concept formation, opinions, and habits of thought.7

Thus, thoughts, concepts, ideas, and theories circulate through a community of

like-minded persons, who are engaged in a collective process of sharing, shaping,
22 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

developing, affirming, and transmitting this material to others. In other words, a

theory only exists as the set of ideas held by like-minded persons: “What actually
thinks within a person is not the individual himself but his social community.”8 In
this way, even what counts as an object for scientific investigation emerges from the
conceptual work of the community of scientists.
This communal dynamic of scientific inquiry intrigues Fleck the most. He traces the
lively debates about what we now know as syphilis as they ebbed and flowed over four
centuries, from those inclined to differentiate syphilis as early as the fifteenth century
due to responsivity to mercury treatments to those physicians who doubted its existence
altogether. For example, as late as the end of the nineteenth century, Josef Hermann,
a leading researcher, believed that constitutional syphilis did not exist, claiming that,
what we now call syphilis was simply a sequelae of gonorrhoea and chancre and that it
is “simple, local disease which never spread to the human blood, is completely curable,
never leaves permanent effects, and is never propagated by procreation and heredity.”9
It was finally at the turn of the twentieth century, in the early years of the
development of many different scientific techniques, methodologies, and approaches
to biological disorders, that syphilis began to be disambiguated as a scientific fact.
Microbiology, immunology, public health, and practical medical approaches were
at work, all developing different approaches to understanding the carnal scourge,
forwarding approaches that were often at odds with each other.
As Fleck’s account makes clear, scientific endeavors are notoriously conservative.
While the ideas and concepts of a larger, mainstream scientific community are at once
malleable and resilient, science at heart is a conserving discipline. Once ideas and
concepts and theories have gained a foothold, they resist being pushed aside:

Once a structurally complete and closed system of opinions consisting of many

details and relations has been formed, it offers enduring resistance to anything that
contradicts it. A striking example of this tendency is given by our history of the
concept of “carnal scourge” in its prolonged endurance against every new notion.
What we are faced with here is not so much simple passivity or mistrust of new
ideas as an active approach which can be divided into several stages.10

Why do dominant scientific concepts so strongly resist modification or abandonment?

Fleck gives five main reasons for the resistance of conceptual frameworks:

(1) A contradiction to the system appears unthinkable. (2) What does not fit into
the system remains unseen. (3) Alternatively, if it is noticed, either it is kept secret,
or (4) laborious efforts are made to explain an exception in terms that do not
contradict the system. (5) Despite the legitimate claims of contradictory views, one
tends to see, describe, or even illustrate those circumstances which corroborate
current views and thereby give them substance.11

In the end, it takes a lot of data to overthrow an established theory. When new data
arise that do not fit a particular theory, rather than overthrow the theory, it is not
uncommon for scientists to come up with ad hoc hypotheses to save a theory from
 
Prelude to a Neuroscience 23

the discordant data. It is easier to convince the larger community of scientists of an ad

hoc hypothesis than to convince the group that the theory might be wrong. Because of
their social nature, theories are too strong to just overthrow with every novel finding.
In other words, theories circumscribe what can be thought. The novelty of a new
scientific finding is still bounded by older and traditionally accepted truth claims of
the community of scientists.
Fleck refers to this community of scientists as a Denkkollectiv, a thought-collective.
A thought-collective simply is “a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or
maintaining intellectual interaction.”12 Despite the cognitive nomenclature, a thought-
collective has a constant dynamism and a sort of three-dimensionality. As Sady notes:

Members of that collective not only adopt certain ways of perceiving and thinking,
but they also continually transform it—and this transformation does occur not so
much “in their heads” as in their interpersonal space.13

For Fleck, thought-collectives infuse all areas of human interaction. They may be as
fleeting as an individual conversation or last over generations in the form of religious
movements, folk traditions, art, science, and more. As Sady notes, “long-lasting
collectives create social institutions which enable and regulate the method by which
next generations are added to a given collective: educational systems and social rituals
accompanying the admission of new members.”14
Thus, scientific thought-collectives—or as we will refer to them going forward,
thought-communities—are for Fleck one manifestation of the broader category of
thought-communities. They could be as large as the community of scientists or as
small as a community of microbiologists or neurobiologists, or even as small as a
group that specializes in a particular methodological approach within microbiology
or neurobiology. Regardless of size, thought-communities depend on the shared
language, assumptions, and understandings that permit the thought-community to
get on with its work.
What emerges from a thought-community, particularly if it perdures over time,
Fleck names a thought-style. A thought-style is the way in which a thought-collective
thinks together about questions. Sometimes a thought-style emerges from a particular
kind of scientific community, sometimes from a different set of methodologies,
sometimes from a different set of theories, or even from various models of the entity
being studied. It provides a shared set of theories, models, and methodologies within
which one scientist’s ideas are put to the test by other scientists. Of necessity, these
tools shape the kinds of questions asked and the kinds of facts that emerge from their
investigations. A thought-style enables the work of a scientific thought-community to
advance, given what they have already accepted as true.
When a thought-style becomes sufficiently refined and specialized, the thought-
community forms what Fleck calls an “esoteric circle”—a variety of specialists
who gatekeep and advance that particular thought-style. One of the largest groups
within an esoteric scientific community are mainstream scientists, who largely resist
modification and will struggle to maintain the coherency of the concepts generated
by that style of thought in the face of contradictory information, even as the style
24 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

itself incrementally changes over time. Thus, thirty years prior to the publication of
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Fleck described the conservative dimension of
what Thomas Kuhn calls normal science.15 What Kuhn labels “normal science,” Fleck
refers to as the main body of the esoteric scientific community. The normal science
generated by scientists fits within the structure of what it is possible for the group
to think. Anything that does not fit, if it is noticed at all, is unthinkable, not seen,
suppressed, or explained away.
Thus, when scientists begin to question theories, they do so carefully. The thought-
style of a mainstream scientific community defines the space and delimits (and even
constricts) what can be thought. Yet when “laborious efforts” are made over and over
again to explain discordant data that seems to contradict the system—in other words,
to save a particular theory—some scientists become dissatisfied. They are willing to
set aside the theory and to play with new configurations. In doing so, they are often
scorned by their colleagues in the thought-collective who adheres to the regnant theory
of the day. They cordon themselves off into smaller groups that push the boundaries,
hoping to overhaul what the larger community of scientists think they know to be
true. Fleck refers to these outlaws who abandon the circumscribed thinking of the
larger community of mainstream scientists as the vanguard. This vanguard—which
in some way might be seen as an esoteric circle within an esoteric community—share
together a thought-style that they all understand, however small this circle might be.
In challenging the thought-style of the larger thought-community, their ideas are often
considered unpredictable, radical, or even dangerous.
Vanguard scientific thought-communities arise all the time, especially in moments
where data are discordant with extant theories or when science is in crisis.16 Sometimes
these creative, small, thought-communities will find no novel insights; and at other
times, they will give birth to innovative approaches to their questions or to break
through theoretical insights, as when, in the history of physics, quantum physics began
to push against the limitations of Newtonian physics. While a successful vanguard
community begins small, it imagines the possibilities in ways that the mainstream
scientific community could not have done. The creative scientist will throw caution to
the wind and imagine hitherto unthought of solutions to the questions and puzzling
data, and possibly even imagine other questions that the dominant thought-community
could not. But until the vanguard circle produces data, they will be thought foolish,
or at times utterly ridiculous. The constriction of the mainstream scientific thought-
community’s thinking results in a kind of irrational conservatism that resists the
evidence produced by the smaller group of radicals.
As such, thought-styles not only define an intellectual identity for a coterie of
scientists; they also provide a marker by which a particular scientific community
demarcates itself from others. Depending on the proximity of shared thought-styles,
scientists from different thought-communities may be able to communicate with
each other and with non-specialist communities to varying degrees. Sometimes a
thought-community is very esoteric, comprising only a small number of people. But
if it is successful, its ideas begin to percolate into ever-widening circles of different
thought-communities. Fleck calls these exoteric communities—those who “are under
the influence of the [thought] style but do not play an active role in its formation.”17
 
Prelude to a Neuroscience 25

The largest exoteric community is society itself. What had been accepted as the “carnal
scourge” by the larger community became a question in the esoteric community of
scientists, until more and more knowledge came to light, calling the accepted fact into
question in a way that only the esoteric thought-community could understand. Then
over time the facts about syphilis move back into the larger exoteric community, where
it remains today for us, a fact.
Put differently, the vector is not unidirectional; influence does not move simply
from the esoteric community to the exoteric community. While often invisible, the
exoteric community recursively forms and informs esoteric scientific communities. At
times this influence drives scientific conservativism. As Fleck narrates in vivid detail,
throughout its history, the medical-scientific conceptualizations of syphilis were deeply
interwoven with ethical-religious-mystical frames. Notions of “a change in blood”
intertwined with convictions that “the disease [was] a punishment for sinful lust,” sent
by “God, Who has sent it because He wants Mankind to shun the sin of fornication.”18
Such religious—and even astrological—beliefs inhibited mainstream scientists from
thinking differently about the disease.19
At other times, however, it is the exoteric community that enables radical innovations
or new ways of seeing within a particular scientific discipline. As Sady notes:

Sometimes new ideas come from unexpected directions and without any relation
to science itself. This is how Fleck explains the discovery of spermatozoon which
happened together with the fall of political absolutism and popularization of the
idea of individual freedom understood mainly as freedom of personal movement.
One could not discover spermatozoon just looking through a microscope.
However, someone, who thought about a free person, could notice freely
moving—so “free”—spermatozoa. This was the influence of environment which
created a restless mood necessary for searching for something new. And a new
mode of thinking created in a different domain of life allowed one to perceive,
distinguish, and describe it in a way which would stimulate reflections of others—
those participating in revolutionary social changes as well.20

In other words, often the spark behind novel scientific insights comes from new ways
of thinking—social, religious, philosophical, artistic, and more—derived from the
broader social contexts in which both science and scientists are immersed.21
This larger exoteric community might also be referred to as possessing a social
imaginary. Sociologist John Thompson coined the term “social imaginary,” defining
it as the “creative and symbolic dimension of the social world, the dimension
through which human beings create their ways of living together and their ways of
representing their collective life.”22 Philosopher Charles Taylor, in his book Modern
Social Imaginaries, further fleshes out the idea of a social imaginary as “the ways
people ‘imagine’ their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things
go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the
deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.”23 Thus, social
imaginaries are rather inchoate and squishy. They can be carried in “images, stories,
and legends.”24 Larger communities, cultures, and societies hold to these imaginaries
26 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

and make possible common practices. Standing behind them is a kind of metaphysical
moral order that is often imprecisely defined but nonetheless present.
Taylor notes that scientific theories are informed by social imaginaries even
if a social imaginary is itself not a theory.25 Scientific theories move into the social
imaginary, as Taylor notes, through the activity of elite thinkers in a society. These
popularizers in turn begin to shape the social imaginary of the larger society, while
the social imaginary makes possible the interplay between the scientific community
and the mainstream community.26 A social imaginary makes it possible for science to
emerge from a society, and it makes it possible for the science to shape society and the
social imaginary itself.
Certainly, reality exists, but how we envisage, conceptualize, and then respond to
that reality emerges within a community of shared understanding. Fleck helps make
clear that science is primarily a social endeavor. Put differently, even the facts of a
real entity, the spirochete Treponema pallidum, for example, emerge through a social
process; that is to say, facts are socially constructed. To say that facts are socially
constructed does not deny the existence of the entity that we call Treponema pallidum,
but it turns our attention to those broader social factors that enable particular “facts”
to gain the status of scientific truth and to, then, reinforce the elements of the social
imaginary that originally made them possible.
But what of the process of establishing facts about those things that exist in a
different way than something like Treponema pallidum, things like “morality” or
“virtue” or “vice” or the “economy”—if they can be called “things” at all? This is a bit
more complicated. These “things” emerge through what Michel Foucault calls regimes
of truth. Fleck, writing at a time when Foucault was a mere child, already anticipates
the problems that Foucault would spend his life trying to understand. How does the
practice of psychiatry establish madness as a thing to be treated and investigated?
What does the medical subject contribute to the objects—diseases—upon which it
gazes? How does criminality emerge as an object of scientific investigation out of the
practices of incarceration? How does knowledge create power that is then leveraged for
the creation of new knowledge?
Apropos to our project that pieces together the thought-communities that make
possible neuroscience, Foucault says of his work in his lectures published as Birth of
Biopolitics:

The point of all these investigations concerning madness, disease, delinquency,

sexuality . . . is to show how the coupling of a set of practices and a regime of
truth form an apparatus of knowledge-power that effectively marks out in reality
that which does not exist and legitimately submits it to the division between
true and false . . . [T]he moment when that which does not exist is inscribed in
reality, and when that which does not exist comes under a legitimate regime of
the true and false, marks the birth of this dissymmetrical biopolarity of politics
and the economy. Politics and the economy are not things that exist, or errors,
or illusions, or ideologies. They are things that do not exist and yet which are
inscribed in reality and fall under a regime of truth dividing the true and the
false.27
 
Prelude to a Neuroscience 27

Put differently, Foucault wants to understand how it is that something that does not
exist in the same way as, say, an entity like Treponema pallidum or a brain, comes
to be thought of as a “thing.” In a way, our task in this book is to try to see how
neurobiological things—genes, amygdala, prefrontal cortex—are correlated to socially
scientifically constructed things—virtue, vice, morality, economy. Only by getting
behind these processes will we discover more precisely how the neuroscience of
morality is engaged in establishing a regime of truth that can then be operationalized
to control human behavior.
Prior to analyzing the discourse on the neuroscience of morality, we first had to ask:
what do we mean then by the term “neuroscience”? Following Fleck, it seems logical
to begin with the esoteric thought-community (the neuroscientific community) that
shares a thought-style. Yet, as quickly became clear, this is a rather difficult task,
insofar as neuroscience is not a distinct discipline as such. Rather, the emergent field
of “the neurosciences” as it has taken shape since the late 1960s is an interdisciplinary
mélange. It attempts to combine and correlate the findings of several distinct sciences,
including psychology, psychiatry, neurology, neuropsychiatry, sociology, economics,
behavioral politics, genetics, and neurobiology.28 Each of these separate domains—for
example neurobiology and sociology—has its separate thought-style, its theories, its
separate methodologies, its experimental models, its distinct objects of inquiry, and
its distinct purposes, all of which combine to give us the results and conclusions of a
particular scientific investigation. Neuroscience is an attempt to bring these distinct
thought-communities together into a single thought-community. Thus, as we proceed,
we will use the term “neuroscience” to indicate this new field that is creating a new
thought-community; it is struggling to find its thought-style, and as we will see in
the course of this book, there are difficulties in doing so not only insofar as they are
attempting to meld a diversity of thought-communities; they are further attempting
to find correlations between two very different sorts of things—biological entities and
human moral behavior.
To be certain, neurobiology deals with things like brains, neurons, and brain
structures such as the amygdala, or the cortex, or the prefrontal cortex—things that
exist independent of our knowledge of them. Yet, we can ask whether a structure like
the amygdala should be thought of as a separate entity, since it is interconnected with
other structures that together perform a function that exceeds what the amygdala
could do alone. Neurobiology also deals with things like genes or brains, which exist
as entities even if we do not know about them. Yet, we can still ask the question about
whether genes that have mutations should be thought of as different things from
“normal” genes, or whether genes should be thought of as a constellation of genes that
qua constellation should be thought of as an entity.
However, as important as these questions are, our task here is to explore how
neuroscience sets for itself the task of correlating neurobiological things with the
psychological and social “things,” specifically “things” like virtue, vice, morality,
and economy. As we will show, these social scientific “things” must be understood
as emerging from thought-communities that have different thought-styles. So, while
there are neurobiological thought-collectives and social scientific thought-collectives,
neuroscience is itself emerging as a community of two different thought-collectives.
28 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

Throughout this book, we will refer to these different thought-collectives adjectivally,

as neurobiological, or social scientific, or neuroscientific thought-styles, thought-
collectives, and thought-communities.
In addition, as Fleck pointed out, these thought-styles do eventually rise to the level
of society as a whole. Insofar as neuroscience has become part of the scientifically
sophisticated culture of the late modern West, it imbues the exoteric lay, mainstream
thought-community. Books like Evil Genes or Murderous Minds, or The Righteous Mind,
or The Moral Landscape, or The Moral Molecule make sense because to some extent
“neuroscience” has made its way into the exoteric community such that neuroscientific
approaches to moral matters can make sense to nonscientific audiences. The reason
that neuroscience can move easily from the neuroscientific thought-community into
the mainstream thinking of Western cultures is because they share something in
common, namely a social imaginary.
Part I of this book describes this process by which scientific ideas move from the
vanguard of the esoteric community to the larger exoteric community. It sets out the
neuroscientific narrative of morality and traces how that narrative moves seamlessly
into our broader social context. Chapters 1 and 2 set out the ways that the thought-
communities make possible the neuroscientific understanding of vices and virtues,
respectively. Chapter 3 describes how neuroscience is popularized and moves into
larger, mainstream culture by what Fleck refers to as general specialists. At the end
of Part I, we will claim that this movement of neuroscientific concepts into the
mainstream community is possible not only because the exoteric community and
neuroscience share a social imaginary. We will claim that this movement is possible
because the shared social imaginary has seeded the matrix of ideas, concepts, and
philosophy that has made the neuroscience of morality possible. Taylor has identified
“the economy” as the dominant way that social imaginary of the twenty-first century
makes itself known.29 Part II of this book will make this social imaginary explicit and
trace how it has come down to us today from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early
twentieth centuries as “economics,” framing our understandings of both science and
morality. This task of establishing this economic social imaginary sets the agenda for
the quest that is neuroscience.
 Part I

The Neuroscientific Narrative

of Morality
30
 1

The Neuroscientific Narrative of Vice

We live in a cultural moment when a mixture of scientific and popular imagination has
created a buzz around neuroscience and moral behavior. With popular titles like The
Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty and The New Evil: Understanding
the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime, our culture seems enraptured with vice.1
Yet this popular literature amplifies a conversation that begins in the specialist,
esoteric thought-community of neuroscience. For example, in a 2006 commentary
titled “Genes for Susceptibility to Violence Lurk in the Brain,” Essi Viding and Uta
Frith, two leading developmental neuropsychologists, summarize findings from a
study by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg et al.2 Here, healthy volunteers with a functional
polymorphism in the promoter region of the monoamine oxidase-A (MAOA) gene
showed smaller and more hyper-responsive amygdalae and less active cingulate
cortexes, brain regions correlated with emotional regulation.3 Viding and Frith
characterize these findings as “exciting” because they seem to show the missing link
between genotypes and impulsive, violent behavior; that missing link is the brain.
Viding and Frith claim that genes (the MAOA gene among others) leave a so-called
neural signature on the brain that predisposes individuals to impulsive aggression—in
other words, “genotype differences show in the brain.”4 They find studies like Meyer-
Lindenberg’s to provide “an important theoretical advance in our knowledge about the
brain basis of reactive violence.”5 Connecting these findings with other studies that have
analyzed genetic factors, Viding and Frith hypothesize that antisocial traits manifest
behaviorally when brains are marked with neural signatures. Put differently, genes
“make” the brain; genes confer “bad” behavior; the source of antisocial behavior—what
was classically referred to as vice—is in the brain.6
Thus, for some in the field of neuroscience, the hunt is on for genetic or neural
“signatures” that indicate a predisposition to socially disadvantageous traits. This chapter
unpacks this literature, examining how the neurosciences theorize vice in relation to
the brain and the environment. If morality—having evolved through human history as
a natural, biologically instantiated mechanism—is driven by neuromodulators within
neural substrates, then neuroscientists can dissect the functional anatomy underlying
antisocial behavior to lay bare the nature of human morality; or so the story goes. This
story we name the neuroscientific narrative of vice.
We noted in the Introduction that it is complicated to track notions of morality
in scientific journals, as they attempt to avoid evaluative moral language in order
to appear morally neutral. Thus, we will argue, within the neurosciences, “immoral
32 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

behavior” or “vice” takes as its proxy “antisocial behavior.” Likewise, we will see in
Chapter 2, “moral behavior” or “virtue” takes as its proxy “prosocial attitudes and
behaviors.” It is not simply that evaluative language is stripped from the neuroscientific
gaze; rather, we argue that neuroscience translates complex moral discourse into terms
that match its objectifying, and arguably thinned, aims. Once neuroscience has recast
moral discourse in its self-serving terms, each of these constructs—antisocial and
prosocial behaviors—is then operationalized, or harnessed, for measurement.
Although seemingly more clinical or objective than more traditional moral
language, these constructs have powerful moral valence.7 They carry with them
tacit social, political, and economic assumptions that inevitably color the science.
Neuroscientific research is driven not only by the pursuit of knowledge for its own
sake, but it also seeks practical outcomes, often couched in terms of helping those
who are suffering from psychopathologies. Neuroscience hopes that by identifying
environmental and neurobiological determinants of antisocial traits, society might be
able to intervene in order to prevent or disrupt antisocial behaviors, the proxy for vice.
These interventions, ideally, would be aimed at the level of the body or the brain of
those who have been pathologized. Humanity, via scientific prowess, can fix itself.
Yet as the very proxies themselves make clear, this conceptualization of morality
itself is not strictly scientific. Thus, in this chapter, we begin to illuminate the
moral, political, and philosophical assumptions that constitute the neuroscientific
narrative of vice. We examine the ways that social scientific concepts are correlated
to neurobiological concepts. The neuroscientific narrative of vice brings together two
distinct scientific thought-communities with distinct thought-styles—the thought-
community of neurobiology and the thought-community of the human sciences.8
As such, the neurosciences run into the challenge faced by all human social sciences,
namely, finding ways of naming their objects. The leading method for defining objects
of inquiry in the human sciences is known as conceptual funneling. We demonstrate
this process by analyzing two key concepts adopted by neuroscience from the human
sciences—namely, socioeconomic status (SES) and antisocial personality disorder
(ASPD). As ASPD has become a proxy for vice, the proxy for “environment” in the
search for neural signatures is operationalized as SES. But the conceptual funnel is
always dependent upon the social context in which it is developed. Thus, we briefly
recount here the broader histories of the concepts of SES and ASPD as well as of the
field of psychiatry in order to demonstrate the ways in which the truth about human
behavior is inevitably politically and morally charged.

The Socioeconomic Brain—a Tale of Two Sciences

The emergent field of the neurosciences seeks to fuse multiple scientific disciplines
typically categorized under the two broad domains of the biological and human sciences.
To illustrate how this works in practice, we begin by describing several neuroscientific
studies carried out by a research group at the University of Pittsburgh. Peter Gianaros, a
neuropsychologist, typically examines the interface between structural and functional
brain anatomy and SES. Stephen Manuck, also a neuropsychologist, typically uses
 
The Neuroscientific Narrative of Vice 33

neurohormonal and neurotransmitter activity to study brain function in relation to

SES.
While the neuroscientific literature is vast, we have selected the work of Gianaros
and Manuck as representative—and, in fact, exemplary—for a number of reasons.
First, through the work of their respective labs, both researchers have compiled a
portfolio of rather careful neuroscientific studies. Their neurobiological work is solid
and well respected, and their use of the human sciences represents well the interests,
objectives, and methods of that domain. Second, their work seeks to discover an
interface between social factors, specifically SES, and the physical and mental health
of individuals; thus, they provide an exemplar of how neuroscience fuses the social
and biological sciences. Third, the types of studies they do exemplify a key focus of
the neurosciences, namely, the relationship of environment-to-brain and brain-to-
environment. For Gianaros and Manuck, the arrow of causation moves from social-
environmental influences to the way that the brain functions, which then might shape
social behaviors. For other neuroscientists, the vector points in the opposite direction,
as they seek to discover the ways that genes shape brains and that brains subsequently
shape behavior, resulting in social context. Finally, their work—separately and
together in collaborative studies—demonstrates how the environment, imagined
as economics and operationalized as SES, has become a primary research variable
posited as causative of behavior.
Before turning to their specific studies, let us provide a brief overview of
neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, as a basic understanding of the neurobiology
of genes, neurotransmitters, and brain structures is required in order to follow the
research we engage in Part I. Some simple conceptions of human brain anatomy, which
will be sufficient for our purposes in this work, conceive of the brain as a tripartite
structure. The brain stem allows for autonomous functions such as breathing and
temperature regulation. Above and surrounding the brainstem, deeper structures of
the cerebral hemispheres, sometimes referred to as the “reptilian” or “limbic” brain,
allow for quick-time (unconscious) reactive processes in response to environmental
demand (such as threat). The outer, so-called cortical areas of the hemispheres are
associated with higher-order cognitive processes like language and cognitive control
(including autobiography, self-awareness, and underlying unconscious response to
threat and/or modulation of emotions generated from limbic areas).
Our work will concentrate on the limbic and cortical areas. These areas work in such
intricate association that it would be difficult to define an exact boundary point between
them, and the areas of research we will elucidate are often focused along this seamless
boundary. In fact, this transitional space is sometimes simply called the corticolimbic
area. Structures associated with the corticolimbic areas of the brain include: the
amygdala, hippocampus, nucleus accumbens, and cingulate gyrus. These are known
to play an important role in emotion and behavioral regulation. The amygdala—
an almond-shaped limbic brain area—is sensitive to affective and contextual cues,
especially those having to do with the response to threat and fear (popularized as the
“fight or flight” response). These regions are intricately connected to the hypothalamic-
pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and regulate the function of peripheral hormones, like
prolactin (PrL), oxytocin, dopamine, adrenaline, and corticosteroids.
34 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

This is the brain structure at a “macro” level. At the “micro” level, neurotransmitters,
as instruments of communication, are vital to that most basic interaction that happens
between one nerve cell and the next. For instance, serotonin (alongside dopamine and
norepinephrine) is one of several dominant neurotransmitters. As will be discussed
later in this chapter, serotonin’s role in emotion and behavior has been followed
closely since investigations in the mid-twentieth century found that its activity and
metabolism played a major role in human physiology and pathophysiology (including
early hypotheses about its implication in the evolution of mood disorders, such
as the early monoamine hypothesis of depression).9 Serotonin is produced in the
raphe nucleus of the brain stem, and from there it is distributed widely to cortical
and especially limbic areas of the brain. Serotonin’s variable metabolism and activity
have been correlated with trait variation in impulsiveness, negative affectivity (or
neuroticism), and aggressive disposition. Serotonin metabolism and brain responsivity
to serotonin figure highly in research focused on depression, anxiety, substance abuse,
impulsive aggression (including criminal violence), as well as ASPD. For example,
persons with histories of attempted or completed suicide show low cerebrospinal
fluid concentrations of 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid (5-HIAA), a metabolite of 5-HT
(serotonin), when compared to control subjects.10
Likewise, outward aggression, especially of an impulsive, unpremeditated nature,
has been associated with poor central nervous system (CNS) serotonin responsivity.11
Variability in CNS serotonergic responsivity is thought to reflect an enduring trait-like
neurobiological dimension of individual differences.12 That is to say, people who are
depressed to the point of suicide and people who are impulsive in anger responses tend
to have lower activity in the HPA axis and thus have lower PrL levels in their blood.
The degree of serotonergic responsivity, researchers suggest, links to psychological
traits like neuroticism (or negative affectivity) and impulsivity. Such traits have been
implicated in the development of various personality disorders, such as antisocial
personality.
But serotonin itself cannot be measured. Thus, to study brain serotonergic
responsivity, neuroscientists often use the neuropharmacological stimulator
fenfluramine. Fenfluramine stimulates serotonin-releasing neurons or neurons
expressing serotonin receptors to increase serotonergic neurotransmission. In persons
with a typically functioning HPA axis, giving fenfluramine will stimulate the HPA axis
and increase the level of PrL secreted; PrL can be measured in blood very easily and thus
serves as a good biomarker for activity in HPA axis. Thus, via a fenfluramine challenge,
neuroscientists can measure the activity of the corticolimbic system and the HPA axis.
As such, the fenfluramine challenge serves as an index for the way the serotonin system
functions physiologically in vivo and for indirectly tracking serotonergic response.
Several studies use the fenfluramine challenge.13 Among these are the work of
Gianaros and Manuck. In a series of studies published between 2004 and 2010,
these neuroscientists—separately and together—explored the relationships between
neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, and SES. Here we see the findings of one thought-
community (neurophysiology and neuroanatomy) correlated with the findings of
another thought-community (social science). Individually, they hypothesized that
prolonged stress of low SES would mark or change the physiological neurotransmitter
 
The Neuroscientific Narrative of Vice 35

response of the HPA axis, rendering it less functional than in those persons living
without the stress of low SES. SES, in other words, would leave a signature on the brain
in both its structure and function. In order to show that the HPA axis is marked in
those living in poverty in a society, they tested the HPA axis of subjects who had grown
up in poverty by giving them a dose of fenfluramine. Low SES, they hypothesized,
should cause a disruption in the working of the HPA axis, which would be indicated by
lower PrL levels when given fenfluramine.
We begin with Manuck. In a 2004 paper, Manuck and colleagues explored
the relationship between SES, serotonergic responsivity, and a polymorphic gene
for serotonin reuptake.14 This study showed that persons living in lower SES—as
measured by educational and income levels—exhibited smaller PrL responses after
a fenfluramine challenge. Other studies have confirmed this relationship of SES and
serotonergic response.15 This study suggests that something about SES shapes the
way that the corticolimbic system and the HPA axis have been trained to respond.
However, in this study, the only subjects that showed this lower level response were
those with a genetic polymorphism of the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTT). A
polymorphic gene is not an abnormal gene; rather, it is a gene that produces a protein
that is functional, but just functions differently than the gene present in most people
in a population. In other words, all people living in lower SES did not have attenuated
activity of the corticolimbic system and the HPA axis. Only those subjects living in
lower SES who also had a genetic variant showed that SES further affected PrL levels.16
To summarize, a gene that appears to produce lower levels of the serotonin transporter,
interacting with an environment of influence (low SES), modulated the expression of a
neurobiological trait, serotonin responsivity, relative to controls.
Behind this hypothesis is the assumption that growing up in poverty affects brain
development and function, which then affects behaviors. As noted earlier, diminished
serotonin responsivity has been associated with negative affectivity, impulsivity, and
antisociality, a point to which we shall return more forcefully later. Manuck et al.
did not, however, show that low SES resulted in negative affectivity, impulsivity, and
antisociality in their study population. Rather, they only showed that those subjects
with a polymorphic gene who lived under conditions of low SES had downregulated PrL
levels. Yet despite the fact that they did not assay the link between this polymorphism,
corticolimbic system/HPA axis responsivity and behavior, Gianaros and Manuck
infer a possible connection to negative behavioral traits. To make this inference, they
draw on the work of other scientists. Some have noted an association between “a
44-bp insertion/deletion polymorphism in the 5_ regulatory region of the serotonin
transporter (5-HTT) gene [and] behavioral phenotypes as diverse as anxiety-related
personality traits, various psychopathologies (e.g., affective disorders, alcoholism,
bulimia nervosa, autism), late onset Alzheimer’s disease, and cardiovascular reactions
to psychological stress cardiovascular reactions to psychological stress.”17 Other labs
have observed lower PrL levels in patients who have attempted suicide relative to non-
suicidal controls following a fenfluramine challenge.18
Manuck and colleagues subsequently conducted a second study in 2005 entitled
“The Socioeconomic Status of Communities Predicts Variation in Brain Serotonergic
Responsivity.”19 This study is unique in its careful probing of SES along lines that
36 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

go beyond typical individual or subjective measures of SES. In this study, Manuck

and colleagues measured a different set of indicators to focus on what they termed
“community SES.” They used census tract data as an index of area-wide SES. Area-
wide data included things like costs of housing, median household income, rates of
poverty and unemployment, as well as indicators of social fragmentation, such as the
number of single-person households, pensioners, or unmarried individuals residing in
a community. In other words, in this study SES is pegged according to nonsubjective
and non-individual measures of SES.20
In this 2005 study, Manuck and colleagues used the same individual measure of SES
as they had used in their 2004 study, but also added different and unique community
measures of SES. Results from the study suggested the following: “When compared
with residents of more advantaged communities, individuals living in census tracts
having a lower median income, higher rates of poverty, unemployment, and public
assistance, higher costs of renting (relative to income), and lower property values
showed diminished CNS serotonergic responsivity, as indicated by a blunted PrL
response to the serotonin agonist, fenfluramine.”21 These effects were in addition to
impacts at the individual level of socioeconomic position (income level and years
of education) from prior studies. Not only were individuals’ serotonin responsivity
blunted by their individual SES, but their serotonin responsivity was additionally
diminished by a unique and separate factor—the SES of the community in which these
individuals resided. This community-based impact on serotonin responsivity was,
however, independent of the serotonin transporter gene polymorphism. Undeterred,
they opine that “it is possible, of course, that genetic variation elsewhere equally
influences the community association with brain serotonergic responsivity.”22
While this fascinating research suggests that one’s census tract (traditionally called
the neighborhood or community) has an impact on an individual’s neural functioning
underpinning the dynamics of emotional and moral life, again Manuck et al. did not show
that people living in communities with lower SES or that individuals with variations
in the 5-HTTLPR (serotonin transporter) gene display more negative affectivity,
impulsivity, or antisociality. Nonetheless, they conclude that “These findings may be
relevant to reported effects of low community SES on the prevalence of psychiatric
disorders or behaviors associated with dysregulated central serotonergic function, such
as depression, impulsive aggression, and suicide.”23 In fact, most of their introduction
to this article outlines these correlations. Moreover, in their discussion, they engage
research correlating community SES with the NEO Personality Inventory, noting that
persons living in less-advantaged communities tended to describe “themselves as less
conscientious on a scale that taps characteristics such as resourcefulness, persistence,
self-discipline, and achievement, motivation.”24 Thus again, despite a lack of direct
causality, this research on the relationship between SES, genes, and neurobiology is set
within a larger project seeking to infer connections between morality, neurobiology,
and economics.
In 2007, Manuck teamed up with Gianaros and other colleagues to take a different
approach. In this study, they examine SES’s structural and functional impact on the
brain here using a different mode of analysis, namely, MRI and fMRI.25 In addition,
rather than an objective measure of SES, this study used a subjective measure of SES,
 
The Neuroscientific Narrative of Vice 37

the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status.26 It asked subjects to mark their own
perceived level of SES.27 The results were mixed. People who reported that they perceived
themselves in a low SES had a smaller volume of gray matter in the anterocingulate
cortex, a part of the corticolimbic system, as well as the HPA axis. However, there
was no correlation between objective individual SES and gray matter volume in the
anterocingulate gyrus, nor between community SES and gray matter volume. In other
words, the studies using MRI and fMRI did not show a robust correlation between SES
and activity of the corticolimbic system.
Nonetheless, Gianaros and Manuck spend most of the discussion section of the
paper speculating on possible alternative mechanisms to correlate these entities and
further with negative behavioral traits. As they conclude:

To build on the present findings, an important next step will be to determine the
social, environmental and possibly genetic factors that characterize individuals
who perceive themselves as holding a low social standing and who exhibit
structural changes in the pACC that may reciprocally relate to maladaptive forms
of behavioral and physiological reactivity to psychosocial stress. More broadly, we
hold that in the context of vulnerability and resilience to psychiatric and other
medical disorders, it is unlikely that the pACC functions independently of other
networked corticolimbic areas, such as the amygdala and hippocampus, whose net
activity mediates complex neurobehavioral processes.28

In other words, in spite of lack of evidence supporting this thesis, the connection
between SES, neurophysiology, and “maladaptive” behaviors continues to be presumed
and pursued.
In 2010, Gianaros and Manuck bring their work together with that of others in a jointly
authored review article entitled “Neurobiological Pathways Linking Socioeconomic
Position and Health.”29 Here they survey a series of neuropharmacological, molecular
genetic, and neuroimaging studies that explore: (1) correlations between SES and the
reactivity of certain brain regions, particularly the corticolimbic system—which, as we
noted earlier, is essential for a person’s engagement with the social environment; and
(2) correlations between SES and the physiological mechanisms of the HPA axis—
which depends on both genetic expression of various neurotransmitters (in this case
serotonin) and the function of those neurotransmitters. Most of the research reviewed
preceded and is presumed by their previous work outlined above, so there is little by
way of new scientific findings.
Here they also acknowledge that the science on SES’s structural impact on the brain
as examined by MRI and fMRI is not very strong. Only Gianaros’s own study, cited
earlier, suggested an effect. But rather than seeing this finding as problematic for their
thesis that SES marks the brain, Gianaros and Manuck conclude that what is needed
is a finer grained objective standard for assessing SES. SES is just not a sufficient
measure. They acknowledge that assaying social determinants of physical and mental
health is not a straightforward matter. They engage in a robust discussion of the
distinctive measures, including objective and subjective measures of SES. Arguing
that multiple factors across a person’s life in time, place, and development across a
38 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

lifespan will shape their brains, they propose reconceptualizing SES as what they now
term “Socioeconomic Position” (SEP).30 In other words, here they suggest that it is
one’s position within the larger community (and not just one’s status) that impacts the
functioning of the brain.
They also note that many genetic and epigenetic phenomena are at work in this
process, pointing specifically to the way that one’s background community SES also
participates in shaping health outcomes, including mental health outcomes, like
depression, impulsivity, and antisocial personality traits. Gianaros and Manuck use
a graphic representation to map the complexity of the interactions of SEP at the
individual level up to the country level, across the life span of the individual, and as
it relates to biological, genetic, psychological, and environmental/social levels, and as
it relates to different subjective vs. objective measures of that position. In the midst of
this representation they place an image of an individual’s brain that is embedded in
“multidimensional, multilevel, and life span considerations.”31
But in the end, Gianaros and Manuck do not let weak data refute their hypothesis.
Over against the fMRI studies cited, they find hope in functional neuroimaging
evidence that points to perhaps the amygdala—another corticolimbic structure
controlled by the anterocingulate gyrus—as the neural locus that may be affected
by childhood socioeconomic factors. Again, moving to inferences beyond their
research, they note that social information processing models in the brain suggest
that people raised in disadvantaged socioeconomic environments seem to develop an
early sensitivity to social threats, leading to dysregulation of emotional processing,
which are the product of the corticolimbic system. In other words, if as a child one
lives in an environment that is insecure, one might have trouble with emotional
processing, resulting in antisocial and other behaviors. They also note that a different
neuroimaging study showed a correlation between subjective perception of parental
SEP and greater amygdala reactivity.32 The amygdala is involved in the automatic
fight or flight mechanism. In other words, people who perceived themselves as
having been raised in lower SEP, had a more reactive amygdala when interpreting
threatening faces. The thesis is that those raised in lower SEP are more likely to
interpret social cues as threatening, and therefore more likely to lash out in impulsive
antisocial ways.
Thus, given that the HPA axis and the function of the corticolimbic system seem
to be involved in emotional regulation, and given that SES seems to have effects on
the brains of people who suffer the stressors of low social status and poverty, there
has been a push to understand the causal direction of these correlations. Gianaros,
Manuck, and their colleagues are not alone in how deeply the larger frame imagining
social functioning impels them to extrapolate from the conclusions of their research
to implications for individual behavior. As we shall see later in this chapter, the
neuroscientific narrative of vice seems to be rooted in the dysregulation of the
corticolimbic system. For Naomi Sadeh and her colleagues, antisocial personality
traits are traced to a function of serotonin uptake receptors and socioeconomic factors.
But as Gianaros and Manuck clearly state: “The conceptual argument adopted here
and elsewhere is that the expression of socioeconomic health disparities depends on the
embodiment by the brain of socially stratified biological, psychological, social, and
 
The Neuroscientific Narrative of Vice 39

environmental factors linked to health and mortality across individuals, particularly in

interaction with predisposing genetic risk and epigenetic plasticity.”33
However, even when researchers are very careful, the ways they posit the
interactions between genetic polymorphisms and socioeconomics, and in turn how
they imagine these polymorphisms and socioeconomic factors to shape brain function
and, therefore, behaviors, present numerous problems. One difficulty lies in defining
SES. Gianaros and Manuck’s shift from SES to SEP illustrates the importance of the
social scientific conceptualization. It also points to the power of the larger, social,
exoteric thought-community. Lacking a correlation between objective measures of
SES and gray matter volume, Gianaros and Manuck conclude not that socioeconomic
dimensions of the environment have no effect on the brain, but that what is needed is
a new and better measure of socioeconomics.34
Additionally, there are difficulties in defining antisocial behavior. As we have
noted, thought-styles in the human and social sciences are very different from
neurobiological thought-styles, creating methodological missteps when researchers
try simply to correlate findings. Different assumptions, theories, methods, and
models animate each science, and they often do not overlap. But of equal concern
is the creation of social scientific concepts themselves. Social scientific concepts
are not easily disentangled from their social and political histories—in fact, such
disentanglement may well be impossible. Yet two social scientific concepts lie at the
heart of these studies—SES and ASPD. In the next section, we unpack the history and
development of these concepts in order to better understand how they complicate
neuroscientific claims.

The Development of Concepts in Human Sciences

To posit a correlation between social environments and neurological functionality
(through examination of the HPA axis or fMRI) requires the development of a
theoretical interface between two distinct scientific domains—the human sciences
and the biological sciences—with their concomitant different thought-styles,
theories, models, and methods. Gianaros, for instance, uses a particular method
of neuroimaging and analysis known as Voxel-based morphometry.35 Utilizing
Voxel-based morphometry to examine gray matter volumes is based on a host of
other foundational physical sciences that suggest that Voxel-based morphometry is
reasonable; it coheres, given what is accepted. Brain physiology and the techniques
used to stimulate the corticolimbic and HPA axis in Manuck’s studies or to image the
functional anatomy in Gianaros’s studies depend on a whole set of more basic scientific
findings that equally derive from a web of foundational scientific theories, models, and
methods, and ultimately a set of foundational assumptions in ontology. The same holds
for foundational social, psychological, and economic scientific measures and concepts.
Here, a distinct set of theories, models, and methods give legitimacy to, for example,
objective or subjective measures of SES as well as discrete behavioral disorders such as
ASPD. What is more, social, psychological, and economic scientific theories, models,
40 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

and methods have their own idiosyncratic histories and are animated by their own
implicit anthropologies, as we shall see in Chapters 4–6.
In other words, neuroscience—in seeking to fuse two domains of science—
presumes that the conceptual apparatus of the physical sciences and the conceptual
apparatus of the human sciences can simply be juxtaposed with one another without
further articulating the theoretical and methodological interface between the two.
This complexity is rendered even more confused by the multiple new modes of
understanding brain science, including systems neuroscience methods that focus on
complex interconnectivity via metaphors to computer program networking. These
multiple and various discourses in the social and neurosciences do not easily correlate
or overlap with one another and sometimes compete or contradict one another.
Consider, for example, the model used for studying serotonergic reactivity that is
related by contemporary neuroscience to a clinical disorder—ASPD. On the one hand,
we have a discourse that grows out of a focus on the micro-level of neurotransmitters
at the level of the neural synapse—serotonin responsivity, which has its origin story in
the catecholamine hypothesis of depression. On the other hand, we have a theorized
psychiatric medical condition—ASPD —which grows out of the tradition and discourse
of clinical psychiatry that is trying to understand an anomalous phenomenon in
human social behavior, a clinical tradition, and explanatory framework that does not
consider neurotransmitters directly. Contemporary neuroscience is then trying to link
these disparate discourses and origin stories in a way that makes them cohere in one
narrative. But does the story ring true? At best, this synthesis between neurobiology
and any particular human science remains conceptually unexplored. Or put differently,
a robust neuroscientific thought-style is only now beginning to emerge.
Thus, in order to situate contemporary research on the interface of neuroscience
and morality, we need to give a brief history of the development of operative notions
like SES and ASPD, both of which arise at the same time as the catecholamine
hypothesis of psychiatric disorders, in the middle to latter half of the twentieth
century. Given the purposes of this book, this history cannot be exhaustive. However,
a brief history will allow us to explain some of the puzzling philosophical features in
the development of any concept in the human sciences, whether SES/SEP or ASPD.
Moreover, given the neurobiology described by Gianaros and by Manuck in their
respective studies, we also must unpack the social history of the development of the
catecholamine hypothesis of affective disorders in conjunction with the development
of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the concept
of ASPD.

The Creation of a Social Scientific Fact: Conceptual Funneling

Social or psychological concepts, like SES or ASPD, do not exist in the world as obviously
as do rocks, or spirochetes, or even brains. As “objects” of the human sciences, they
exist in a very different way compared to objects of the physical or biological sciences.36
Yet, in order to study a given concept X, researchers in the human sciences require a
validated, conceptual definition of X. To generate such definitions, they rely heavily
on a process referred to as conceptual funneling. Earl Babbie, Catherine Marshall,
 
The Neuroscientific Narrative of Vice 41

and Gretchen Rossman provide a helpful overview of how conceptual funneling

works. First, one needs a general conceptual definition—for example, an economic
status.37 Such conceptual definitions can emerge from prior philosophical reflection,
cultural presuppositions, or even folk philosophical commitments—in our case, from
a philosophical claims about the nature of economics (here meaning something like
“means to cover the costs of living”) and status about the hierarchy of the means.
These conceptual definitions are then refined, filling in content, sometimes by appeals
to history or by appeals to ethnographic exploration—for example, by asking actual
people to fill in their folk definitions. This iterative process of specification funnels the
nominal concepts down to something manageable and that seems to “represent some
consensus, or convention, about how a particular term is to be used.”38
Yet a nominal definition is not enough for any concept because one has to establish
a link between the concept and instances of the concept as it manifests in the world.
As such, a second step is needed; the human scientist must create an operational
definition and establish the operations by which the scientist can pick out an instance
of the concept in the world. Operational definitions allow concepts like SES or ASPD
to come into relief. Thus, as Babbie notes, for the social sciences, “conceptualization
is the refinement and specification of abstract concepts, and operationalization is the
development of specific research procedures (operations) that will result in empirical
observations representing those concepts in the real world.”39
The final step in the process is to put the operations to the test, usually by validating
the operational definition by administering the operationalized instrument to
numerous people. Several of the operational items on the instrument might not survive
the process of validation, which is a statistical process complex enough to make sure
the operations are actually related to the conceptual object it hopes to isolate. Thus, as
a first operational definition, something like SES might start out with numerous items
(or operations); but various of these operational items may be dropped because they
do not disambiguate one SES from some other area of social life, or because they do
not capture every instance of the concept in the world. If there is significant enough
discordance between the operational definition and the real-world instances, the
conceptual definition itself might need to change.
Thus, the process goes like this: conceptualization, operationalization, validation,
refinement of the operational or conceptual definition and, in extreme instance,
reconceptualization altogether.40 This looping process is referred to as the conceptual
funnel, a refining process that produces a standard definition, a part of the tradition of
the human sciences. Of course, the circularity of the process could also be conceived
as an epistemological circuit floating independent of anything in the world, a mere
abstraction that has very little to do with the realities that it hoped to pick out, because
it can be infinitely refined.
The concept of SES provides an excellent example of conceptual funneling in action.
Not only does Babbie himself use SES as an example; we have also seen this process
unfold as Gianaros and Manuck shift their language from SES to SEP. While we will
elaborate on both of these examples shortly, we first want to complicate our social
scientists’ accounts. This funneling process, at least per Babbie, Marshall, and Rossman,
is portrayed as somewhat ad hoc, a technique that social scientists use simply to create
42 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

“working definitions” to focus their research. Babbie differentiates nominal definitions

from “real” definitions:

trying to specify the “real” meaning of concepts only leads to a quagmire: It

mistakes a construct for a real entity . . . A nominal definition is one that is simply
assigned to a term without any claim that the definition represents a “real” entity.
Nominal definitions are arbitrary . . . but they can be more or less useful.41

Thus, careful social scientists understand that concepts in the human sciences are
socially constructed, that there is an arbitrariness or bias built into social scientific
concepts, and that there is a distance between concept and reality that ought not be
ignored. Yet critical distance from the esoteric thought-style of the social sciences
seems largely absent as social scientific concepts are appropriated by the emerging
neuroscientific thought-community and by the larger, emerging mainstream thought-
community of society itself.

The History of a Social Scientific Concept: Socioeconomic Status

While Babbie, Marshall, and Rossman accurately and forthrightly articulate the
process by which concepts are specified in the human sciences, their account overlooks
one critically important factor: the historical influences on the development of social
scientific concepts. Fleck makes clear that this process of conceptual funneling is deeply
informed by historical and cultural factors, both intrinsic and extrinsic to particular
thought-communities. Here SES is particularly instructive.
The concept of SES developed out of a renewed interest in the concept of poverty
that began to emerge in the post–Second World War era. As historian Gertrude
Himmelfarb has noted, prior to the mid-eighteenth century, while social, religious,
and political discourse is redolent with concern for the poor, there was no concept of
“poverty.” As we will see in Part II, as the early-nineteenth-century debates about the
British Poor Laws unfold—spurred by the contributions of Jeremy Bentham, Thomas
Malthus, and David Ricardo—individual poor people began to disappear into the
background of the abstraction that is poverty.42 The concept of poverty as an abstract
condition is dependent upon the rise of the statistical sciences and our trust in numbers,
which, as Mary Poovey has noted, depends on the curious way in which numbers come
to be seen as marking out particulars, while at the same time acting as universals.43
Drawing insight from Poovey, we will further explore the history of Malthus and the
Poor Laws, but for now, it is important to note that the concept of “poverty” emerged at
a particular historical time-point as a result of a specific confluence of events in British
politics, the emergence of capitalism, and the advent of the positive human sciences.44
Economist Martin Ravallion marks 1955 as a historical time-point for a second
significant awakening to the notion of poverty in scholarly and popular culture, what
he refers to as a second Poverty Enlightenment.45 Prior to the 1960s, sociologists
had begun to focus on “social problems.”46 But the 1960s saw an “initial sharp rise
of interest [in poverty, which] peaked in the early 1970s.”47 Such attention may have
 
The Neuroscientific Narrative of Vice 43

been catalyzed by Michael Harrington’s 1962 landmark book The Other America that
documented pervasive poverty within postwar United States.48 Harrington’s book is
largely credited for prompting Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty” and the passing
of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. In the years surrounding 1964, numerous
books on poverty were published in the sociological literature.49
In 1965, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan also published his
landmark study of Black families and poverty in the United States, “The Negro Family:
A Case for National Action.”50 Moynihan’s work catapulted the relationships between
social class, social status, race, and poverty more fully into public consciousness,
highlighted by the social upheaval of racial protests and the white-on-Black violence
that rose to the surface with the Civil Rights movement. The moralizing attitudes on
both sides of the political spectrum came into stark relief. A la Bill Cunningham’s
remarks in the Introduction, the right suggested that the putative self-destruction of
the Black family resulted from a Black penchant for vice which resulted in poverty;
those on the left located responsibility for the impoverishment of Black communities
in US social and economic policies.
It was in this milieu that August B. Hollingshead created what has become the most-
used and the most-cited measure to assess SES in the history of sociological research—
the Hollingshead Four Factor Index of Social Status (FFI).51 In his early work at Yale,
Hollingshead strove to develop simple measures of social classification for use in
survey research. His first, a three-factor tool based on area of residence, occupation,
and years of school completed by the head of household, was first deployed to study
social class and mental illness in an urban community.52 Early results from the study
were published in 1953 and, as he recalled, “Shortly afterwards, I began to receive
requests from sociologists, social workers, social psychologists, and a few psychiatrists
for copies of the detailed procedures we had used to stratify the 5 percent sample of
households and the psychiatric patients in the psychiatric census.”53 In response, he
subsequently refined it to a two-factor instrument, dropping area of residence.54
The cultural and social scientific milieu of the 1960s prompted Hollingshead to
conceptualize and operationalize instruments that would better assay social and
economic status. He continued to focus on education and occupation, which was
finessed from an originally somewhat random list to “a detailed list of occupations
based on U.S. Census classifications.”55 These were now complemented by attention to
sex and marital status. In 1975, he wrote a whitepaper introducing the FFI as a measure
of social status. Notably, this whitepaper was never published in a peer-reviewed
journal, but it received immediate acceptance.56 While other instruments measure
SES, none have gained wide acceptance as Hollingshead’s FFI.57 Notably missing from
the FFI is income. Hollingshead did include income in his original white paper with
a table showing the correlation of occupation to income level, and thus concluded
that income was part of his instrument. Notably, Hollingshead, never included in his
instrument a dimension of race.
Over time, Hollingshead’s instrument, which was originally known as the FFI for
Social Status, came to be known as the FFI for SES. A number of points are important
to note here. First, Hollingshead’s work is an excellent example of the conceptual
44 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

funneling process in action over a twenty-five-year period, as he shifts and refines

the operational measures in response to attempts at validation. At the same time, we
see a subtle shift, with enormous ramifications, in the concept itself, as the language
shifts from a focus on “poverty” in the 1960s (see the titles in note 47) to a different
abstraction “socioeconomic status.” Third, Babbie notes that while the funneling
process is an accepted part of social scientific research, there is a certain dimension of
arbitrariness to it:

Wishing to examine socioeconomic status (SES) in a study, for example, we may

simply specify as a combination of income and educational attainment. In this
decision, we rule out other possible aspects of SES: occupational status, money
in the bank, property, lineage, lifestyle, and so forth. Our findings will then be
interesting to the extent that our definition of SES is useful for our purpose.58

In other words, as the popular adage goes, “what you measure is what you get.”
Instruments like the FFI bring certain variables into view, but obscure or render
invisible what they do not measure—such as race. Fourth, the funneling process also
demonstrates Fleck’s account of thought-communities. Nurtured within the esoteric
community of sociologists in the 1950s, Hollingshead’s emergent concept of social
status as a measurable entity is first picked up in the 1960s by the esoteric community
of psychology/psychiatry. But equally, the concept is influenced by its broader,
exoteric context—for example, the new measure of “marital status” channeling the
1960s preoccupation with the brokenness of Black families rather than the effects of
sociopolitical practices like redlining, employment discrimination, Jim Crow, and the
federal highway program on Black communities.59 It carries with it—and reinforces—
these ideological commitments as it expands beyond sociology in exponential fashion
to the entirety of the social sciences, medicine, and society in the 1970s onward.
And, as the human sciences are fused with the biological sciences with the advent
of neuroscience, the accepted facticity of SES continues to expand and—as we saw
with Gianaros and Manuck—the funneling process continues. Oddly enough, most
neuroscientific studies examining SES as a variable do not use validated instruments of
SES, including the 2004–7 studies by Gianaros and Manuck outlined earlier. Yet despite
this fact, Gianaros and Manuck call for a new and more textured understanding of
SES, renamed and reconceptualized as SEP. This more broadly defined concept, they
hope, might show a greater correlation to neurobiological markers, whether through
correlations with studies on the HPA axis or through correlations with fMRI studies.
Yet problems immediately become apparent. First, Gianaros and Manuck seek
to reconceptualize SES not because it insufficiently captures the realities of social
factors like social status and economic power, but because SES does not correlate
with brain findings. They want a social marker that might actually correlate to their
neurobiological findings. Put bluntly, since the measure is not giving them what they
want, they hope to change the measure.
Second, they call for the reconceptualization of SES as SEP (hoping that it will take
into consideration “multidimensional, multilevel, and life span considerations”60)
without ever giving or defending a robust conceptual definition. Nor do they
 
The Neuroscientific Narrative of Vice 45

operationalize their new, supposedly more textured concept of SEP. In fact, they
sampled SES via a questionnaire that asked subjects to report income range; for those
who did not report an income range, Gianaros and Manuck simply inferred income
status from reported educational status.
Third, they extracted census tract data for the locations within which the participants
lived. The tract data for their subjects included:

median household income; proportion of households receiving public assistance;

proportion of households beneath the federally designated poverty level of income;
percentage of individuals in the work force who were unemployed; median value
of owner occupied housing units; median gross rent, as a percentage of household
income; and proportion of residents over age 25 years lacking a high school
diploma.61

In Gianaros’s and Manuck’s studies, each dimension is its own variable. Because each
acts as a variable, they do not come close to capturing anything that could be thought
of as a social scientific object, namely, SEP. Thus, for the work of these neuroscientists,
neither SEP nor SES (as they use the terms) is a concept that captures a holistic reality,
despite the fact that they use these concepts as if they are holistic, robust concepts that
mark something in reality. While we admire the work done by Gianaros and Manuck
(both their separate and combined work), we are concerned that what they call for
increased texture begins to look more and more like conceptual chaos.
Leaving its use in neuroscience aside for the moment, it should be clear by now
that SES or SEP are complex concepts that have their own histories, related to and
developed for research in very specific social and economic contexts, which are
themselves also historically constituted. These concepts developed out of a particularly
troubling time in American history, and may or may not name something, which may
or may not have an impact on the structure and function of the brain, which may or
may not have something to do with antisocial behavior. To be clear, we are not at all
suggesting that the economic or social environs within which a child is reared have
no effects on brain development. Nor are we suggesting that the traumatic conditions
under which many people live do not similarly have neurological and physiological
sequelae. As research on the social determinants of health makes clear, certain social,
political, or economic environments negatively impact the health, wellness and
flourishing of the people who live in those environments. It is plausible that aspects of
these environments might likewise have some effect on brain development and brain
function. It is also plausible that these elements might have some influence on social
behaviors. However, finding the specific social or economic factor or factors that can
be systematically identified and correlated to brain structure, brain function, and—via
the brain—to social behaviors cannot even get off the ground until something like SES
or SEP can be conceptually defined, operationalized, validated, and confirmed. Thus,
we are a long way from drawing robust conclusions on how something akin to SES or
SEP might affect brains and behaviors. And thus, the conclusions that Gianaros and
Manuck and other neuroscientists hope to draw cannot be taken as the fact of the
matter.
46 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

The History of a Social Scientific Fact: Antisocial

Personality Disorder
For the neurosciences, as we have seen for Gianaros and Manuck, the brain serves
as a node connecting two elements: SES and behavior. Most often behavior is
conceptualized as a particular form of mental illness, such as depression, anxiety,
substance abuse, impulsive aggression, criminal violence, and suicide. Yet these
diagnoses are, like SES, concepts of recent vintage, “facts” that have emerged only
recently, and have done so out of a similar—and in fact, correlated—process of
funneling with a specific historical development shaped by their cultural milieu.
Understanding this history is crucial for critically analyzing the neuroscientific
endeavor to locate the cause of behavior in the brain. We narrate it here alongside
the development of what is also thought to be a straightforward scientific
concept—ASPD, which emerges from the psychological and psychiatric thought-
communities.
The story of ASPD begins with the development of the catecholamine hypothesis
in neurobiology. Serotonin, a catecholamine, emerged as a major player with the
rise of the catecholamine hypothesis of affective disorders in the 1940s. In the mid-
twentieth century, several coinciding scientific discoveries began to focus on the major
neurotransmitter-molecules such as glutamate, GABA, serotonin, norepinephrine, and
dopamine as causally related to mental illness. Serotonin was discovered in the 1930s
and noted for its constrictive properties in vascular and gastrointestinal tissues, thus
one aspect of its name that has to do with vascular tone.62 It was in 1948 that serotonin
became recognized as a major neurotransmitter in the brain. In 1951, two researchers
at Sea View Hospital on Staten Island, Irving Selikoff and Edward Robitzek, were
studying two new drugs for the treatment of tuberculosis—isoniazid and iproniazid.63
In addition to anti-tubercular effects, they noted that these antibiotics also induced
“a subtle general stimulation . . . the patients exhibited renewed vigor and indeed
this occasionally served to introduce disciplinary problems.”64 The mood-enhancing
property of these drugs was soon harnessed for clinical trials in the treatment of
clinical depression.65
This serendipitous finding in the context of tuberculosis research served as the
impetus for the so-called psychopharmacological revolution of the 1950s.66 It led to
further investigations into the mechanism of action of the mood-enhancing effects
of these drugs, which seemed to work by inhibiting monoamine oxidase-A (MAOA),
an enzyme responsible for the degradation of major neurotransmitters, including
serotonin and norepinephrine. These investigations culminated in early speculation
about the monoamine hypothesis of depression, as found in Joseph Schildkraut’s
sentinel paper “The Catecholamine Hypothesis of Affective Disorders.”67 Schildkraut,
writing in 1965, associated low levels of neurotransmitters with clinical depression.
While a simple monoamine hypothesis for depression did not hold up to further
rigorous scientific study, this early thesis animated much of the biological revolution
in psychiatry, and the major neurotransmitters remain important in the study of
psychiatric illness, even if relegated to having moderating influence on human
behavior.
 
The Neuroscientific Narrative of Vice 47

Despite increased interest in pharmacological solutions, the dominant approach to

mental illness in mid-century emphasized social factors as the source of psychiatric
problems. This approach, which came to be known as “social psychiatry” flourished
in the 1960s, fueled by the work of major figures such as Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen
Horney, and Erich Fromm.68 It was no accident, therefore, that Hollingshead developed
and tested his initial indices for SES in the context of a ten-year study of mental illness.
Within this framework, successful treatment required not only treating the patient
but “treating” society as well.69 “Community psychology,” embodied in the Kennedy
administration’s support of community health centers as a public health strategy,
prospered.
But then, “suddenly,” as Bruce Rogers-Vaughn notes, “during the 1970s, everything
changed.”70 According to the received narrative, patients and families, alongside
clinicians and researchers, had become somewhat disillusioned with purely humanistic
interpretations—including psychodynamic interpretations—of abnormal human
behavior, especially notions that placed the full onus of responsibility for psychiatric
disorders on developmental concerns, such as the idea of “refrigerator mothers”
causing autism in children. Rogers-Vaughn, however, posits a different thesis, linking
the revolutionary “biological” turn in psychiatry to the ascent of neoliberalism.
In his book Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age, Rogers-Vaughn details the ways
in which neoliberalism underlies the contemporary epidemic of mental illness
growing exponentially across the globe as well as the ways in which it has reshaped
the field of psychiatry in its own image, redefining the conceptual apparatus of
the field and coopting it in support of the expansion of the burgeoning market for
psychopharmacological medications.71 He traces the methodological shifts in the field
of psychiatry beginning in the late 1970s to key neoliberal commitments, namely,
methodological individualism and economic efficiency. Methodological individualism
shifts responsibility for both achievements and problems from social or political
structures to individuals; in the case of psychiatry, this meant a shift from social
problems research to a focus on “biological origins and person-specific treatments.”72
Indeed, once a testable scientific hypothesis for psychiatric disorders had been
posited, there was a push to operationalize definitions that led to the creation of a
neuropsychiatric research paradigm in the 1980s, funded by the National Institutes
for Mental Health (NIMH). This push shifted research commitments toward the
neurosciences beginning in 1980, enhanced when George H. W. Bush designated
the 1990s as “the decade of the brain.” This new field of inquiry was accompanied
by the introduction of the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-III in 1980. Most
interpreters of psychiatric history would say that the DSM-III represents a watershed
moment that shifted psychiatry into a paradigm that located the etiological loci of
mental illness within specific individuals.
It is in the DSM-III, for example, that “major depressive disorder” was officially
defined for the first time, for example. Having defined depression as biologically rather
than socially mediated, psychiatry then needed a biological intervention. Prozac, the
first major SSRI for the treatment of depression, entered the market in 1986, providing
an individually and biologically targeted remedy that largely obviated the need for
slow, time-consuming interventions like psychotherapy. Pills are less costly and more
48 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

efficient. They likewise more quickly restore or enhance individual happiness or desire,
freedom, and personal initiative, all of which are essential for a robust market; “happy
consumers and producers are better consumers and producers. Reducing depression
thus makes the entire system more efficient and profitable.”73 Thus, psychiatry scored
a major political achievement, ensuring its position within the medical-industrial
complex by serving the interests of neoliberal economies.74
It appears to be no accident that since the ascendency of neoliberalism in 1980s,
the incidence of depression—as well as most other categories of mental illness—has
skyrocketed both nationally and internationally.75 Among the conditions on the rise
are personality disorders, including antisocial personality.76 It is in the DSM-III, III-R,
-IV, and -5 that ASPD becomes a “real entity” alongside other psychiatric disorders,
like major depressive disorder and schizophrenia. ASPD, like SES, also required
conceptualization, operationalization, and validation in order to be sure of a robust
standard for this diagnosis. What is more, that is precisely why DSM-III developed: to
conceptualize, operationalize, and validate diagnoses so that new drugs emergent from
the catecholamine hypothesis of affective disorders could be tested.
Yet, as with all of the entries in the DSM, the category of ASPD has a history of
development. In 1980, psychologist Robert Hare developed the Psychopathy Checklist
(PCL), which operationalized early conceptual notions of antisocial behavior as set
forth by psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley in his book The Mask of Sanity.77 Cleckley’s
book, first published in 1941, identifies and describes people who, though appearing
completely reasonable and sane—even charming—turn out to lack a moral sense and
to engage repeatedly in manipulative and destructive behaviors toward others. In Hare’s
operationalization, he lists traits of the disorder as glibness, grandiosity, pathological
lying, absence of remorse or guilt, lack of empathy, callousness, impulsivity, and
irresponsibility—including a persistent violation of social norms. The descriptions
given by Hare and Cleckley are far more clinical than scientific or philosophical.
Eventually these clinical descriptions come to ground a definition of ASPD.
We see the retention of these early concepts in DSM-III, -IV, and -5 in the criteria
for ASPD. As we saw in the Introduction, the DSM conceptualizes ASPD in its most
recent iteration as follows:

A) A pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others

occurring since age 15 years, as indicated by three (or more) of the following:

● failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as

indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest;
● deceitfulness, as indicated by repeatedly lying, use of aliases, or conning
others for personal profit or pleasure;
● impulsivity or failure to plan ahead;
● irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or
assaults;
● reckless disregard for safety of self or others;
● consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain
consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations;
 
The Neuroscientific Narrative of Vice 49

●lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having

hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.
B) The individual is at least age 18 years.
C) There is evidence of conduct disorder with onset before age 15 years.
D) The occurrence of antisocial behavior is not exclusively during the course of
schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.78

Note that this iteration (from DSM-5) has slight distinctions from DSM-IV.
Interestingly, the word “deception” is altered to “deceitfulness” in this latest version.
Also, the diagnosis of ASPD is retained in DSM-5 but is no longer on a separate axis
from other mental disorders, purportedly giving it equal status with more “biological”
diagnoses, like major depressive disorder. These seemingly subtle shifts, unnoticeable
to casual consumers of mental health nomenclature and technologies, are further
evidence that psychiatry is a living tradition in evolution and, at times, in conflict and
contradiction with itself.
In this way, the early notions of psychopathy and sociopathy are folded into the
DSM-III (and beyond) as ASPD. Interestingly, in the lead-up to adoption of the DSM-
5, there were rival systems of conceptualization of personality disorders and much
debate regarding possible more radical changes, which illustrates the shifting nature of
the conceptualization of these disorders.79 Interestingly, DSM-5 now includes a second,
alternative proposed system of diagnoses of personality disorders in a Section III. It
reports the following rationale for this:

The current approach to personality disorders appears in Section II of DSM-5,

and an alternative model developed for DSM-5 is presented here in Section III.
The inclusion of both models in DSM-5 reflects the decision of the APA Board
of Trustees to preserve continuity with current clinical practice, while also
introducing a new approach that aims to address numerous shortcomings of the
current approach to personality disorders.80

So the history of this “conceptual funneling” of ASPD continues into the present.
In sum, then, the serendipitous discovery of mood-enhancing drugs that
function according to the catecholamine hypothesis, alongside emerging hypotheses
about psychopathology and in accord with the development of instruments that
operationalize concepts like ASPD in a sociopolitical context that had radically
shifted to neoliberalism, led to the disorder’s codification in the DSM-III. As already
discussed, the particular diagnosis of ASPD emerged in the context of dynamic
changes in the discipline of psychiatry that ultimately led to a paradigm shift away from
psychodynamic theories of antisocial behavior to the currently regnant biomedical
model of psychiatry. A watershed moment in this history was the adoption in 1980 of
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-III, which laid the foundation for the modern
psychiatric clinical and neuroscientific research enterprise and attempts to define and
operationalize clinical diagnoses in a manner that would enable scientific investigation.
Interestingly, the aspirations of the biological movement in psychiatry, represented
by the DSM-III and beyond, have not been fully realized, calling into question the entire
50 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

enterprise. With the publication of DSM-5 in 2013 a robust dissent arose, including
dissent by many who have called for various reforms or have expressed concern
over the growing elasticity of criteria for psychiatric disorders that encompass the
increasing terrain of the human condition. Serious researchers increasingly hold that
DSM clinical criteria, which developed themselves out of a period of disillusionment
with psychoanalytic models of mental illness, have not enjoyed thoroughgoing
scientific validation. Thus, the foundational paradigms and assumptions of the DSM
tradition are being reconsidered in favor of new, alternative models for making
sense of psychiatric illness. Correlatively, neuroscientific researchers are increasingly
unsatisfied with the DSM enterprise as it has not led to the increasing validity of
underlying concepts. In this context, the NIMH unveiled a new set of standards known
as the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) where the focus is more on endophenotypes
(including imaging findings) as vantage points for further psychiatric research.81 Such
innovative models are increasingly attractive to basic neuroscience researchers who
hope they will be of greater utility and yield findings that conceptualize more clearly
the neuroscientific basis of mental illness.
In other words, the whole process has itself become circular. The purpose of the
DSM enterprise was to establish robust conceptual definitions of various psychological
and social disorders, so that operational criteria for picking out something like ASPD
in the world might be consistent, allowing for correlations to neurobiology to be made,
and allowing for biological targets for therapy to be created. The idea was that once
something like ASPD was consistently identifiable in the world, then we would be able
to find correlations—or better, causal mechanisms—between these antisocial behaviors
and brain physiology, and then create innovative pharmacological technologies to treat
neurobiological targets. Yet, increasingly, researchers are claiming that social scientific
definitions are so slippery that almost anything can be labeled a psychiatric disorder.
In other words, social scientific definitions are so problematic that it almost makes
science impossible. To remedy this situation, the NIMH created the RDoC, seeking
to start with the brain and to move outward toward the behaviors, establishing a set
of criteria that emerge from certainties about the brain. In other words, they want to
start with the brain in order to find differences in brain physiology and hope to then
construct the behaviors as pathological.
The investigative powers of this ongoing and dynamic enterprise have been
enhanced by advances in genetics and neuroimaging technologies, advantages on
which the work of Gianaros and Manuck have capitalized. The neurobiological work
utilized to understand the neurophysiology of the brain seems more real precisely
because we can point to findings in the brain. Yet there is a huge disconnect between
these findings and establishing causation from brain to behavior, without any robust
way of categorizing the behaviors. In other words, the whole enterprise of the DSM had
hoped to secure brain findings by establishing a robust social scientific definition of
ASPD. When this project failed, the RDoC hopes to establish a robust social scientific
definition in the brain, and prior to the brain in the genes that “make” the brain. This
move seeks to get away from the failed circular reasoning of conceptual funneling, but
as we shall see, it presents a whole host of new problems. It is to this work that we now
turn.
 
The Neuroscientific Narrative of Vice 51

From Genes to Brains to Antisocial Behavior82

We turn now to Viding and Frith. As you recall from the beginning of this chapter,
these leading developmental neuropsychologists argue that “Genes for Susceptibility to
Violence Lurk in the Brain.”83 At the center of their argument is a finding by Andreas
Meyer-Lindenberg et al., who noted that a functional polymorphism in the promoter
region of the MAOA gene has been correlated with aggressive behavior and is associated
with observable differences in neural circuitry.84 Where for Gianaros and Manuck, the
arrow of causation moved from social factors interacting with genes to neural changes
resulting in social misbehavior, for Viding and Frith, the vector is different, moving
from gene to brain to social misbehavior.85 They are far from alone in their search
for genetic or neural “signatures” that predispose persons to socially disadvantageous
traits that can be managed pharmacologically.
Let us begin by looking more closely at the study done by Meyer-Lindenberg
et al., entitled “Neural Mechanisms of Genetic Risk for Impulsivity and Violence in
Humans,” in their search for one of the most antisocial of behaviors—violence.86 As
mentioned earlier, MAOA and the gene coding for it are elements of intense interest to
neurobiologists and neuroscientists because of the role of the major neurotransmitters
in emotional regulation. MAOA breaks down the monoamines implicated in
emotional regulation. In some persons, the gene coding for MAOA harbors a genetic
polymorphism in its promoter region; this polymorphism is a common variant in the
human population. It can be easily assayed in human research studies via genotyping.
Typically, the variation is characterized in terms of low-efficiency alleles versus high-
efficiency alleles, and any individual can carry one of several combinations.87 Because
this gene is X-linked, men are hemizygous, meaning that they carry either one low-
efficiency or one high-efficiency allele. Women can carry two low-efficiency alleles,
one low-efficiency allele and one high-efficiency allele (the heterozygous condition),
or two high-efficiency alleles.
Meyer-Lindenberg et al. studied the correlation between individual genotype and
neural structure and function.88 They summarize their findings as follows:

Here, we have studied the impact of a common functional polymorphism in

MAOA on brain structure and function assessed with MRI in a large sample of
healthy human volunteers. We show that the low expression variant, associated
with increased risk of violent behavior, predicted pronounced limbic volume
reductions and hyperresponsive amygdala during emotional arousal, with
diminished reactivity to regulatory prefrontal regions, compared with the high
expression allele.89

In other words, in this study of ninety-seven healthy volunteers, low expression of the
gene encoding for MAOA, which has elsewhere been associated with antisocial traits,
correlates with smaller, but more reactive limbic structures—centers of emotionality.90
In addition, they also noted diminished reactivity of the cingulate cortex, which
modulates emotional arousal. In other words, the corticolimbic system differs in both
structure and function in those who have the polymorphism relative to controls. To
52 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

be specific, healthy volunteers with the functional polymorphism of MAOA showed

smaller and more hyper-responsive amygdalae and a less active cingulate cortex.
Yet, while discrepancies in neurotransmitter levels have been shown to correlate
with behaviors and conditions such as depression, suicidality, aggression, anxiety,
and impulsiveness,91 it seems that we should take seriously the fact that these healthy
volunteers showed no signs of diagnosis of ASPD or trait. The conclusion drawn by
Meyer-Lindenberg et al. that “genotype differences show in the brain,” which certainly
appears to be true, elides the fact that these individuals were healthy, not sociopaths.92
Despite their enthusiasm, Viding and Frith nuance the conclusions drawn by Meyer-
Lindenberg et al., noting that “it is unlikely that genes directly code for violence; rather,
allelic variation is responsible for individual differences in neurocognitive functioning
that, in turn, may determine differential predisposition to violent behavior.”93 Yet they
still posit a correlation.
Yet even this more nuanced conclusion is not warranted by the Meyer-Lindenberg
et al. study, as many other variables are at work. As geneticists have come to understand,
not only do genes encode for protein products, they also interact with a host of other
biological structures, including other genes and their protein products. Moreover,
genes are not merely conduits of information. Genes are also themselves three-
dimensional structures that interact within a biological and physiological milieu. Most
importantly, geneticists increasingly hold that gene expression is influenced not only
by the biological and physiological environment but also by the social environment, as
Gianaros and Manuck have suggested.
Beyond these multiple strains of research endeavor, yet another related body of
research centers on what are known as gene-by-environment studies that seek to
correlate genetic and environmental influences to antisocial behavior, in much the
same way as Gianaros and Manuck. Environment seems to mean here all influences
that are not genetic, but not just the physiological environment of genes and brains,
but also the social environment of human animals. Many other factors beyond SES (or
SEP) have effects; historical life events, often negative ones (such as abuse or neglect)
also leave their mark on behavior.
An oft-cited landmark study in this genre was published in 2002 by Avshalom Caspi
et al., entitled “Role of Genotype in the Cycle of Violence in Maltreated Children.”94
This study correlated environmental influences—abuse or maltreatment—with
a polymorphism in the promoter region of MAOA gene and future diagnosis with
antisocial personality traits. They suggest that environmental differences could
moderate or exacerbate the manifestation of antisocial behavior. This study utilized
the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study where a cohort was
constituted when investigators enrolled 91 percent of consecutive live births in
Dunedin, New Zealand between April 1972 and March 1973, some of whom were later
genotyped at age twenty-six. Those individuals with the low-efficiency polymorphism
in the promoter region of the MAOA gene who had sustained severe maltreatment as
children were more likely to be diagnosed with antisocial traits in adulthood than were
those with the high-efficiency allele.95 In order to quantify maltreatment, researchers
derived a “cumulative exposure index,” which counted the number of “maltreatment
experiences” from ages three to eleven using behavioral observations (including early
 
The Neuroscientific Narrative of Vice 53

mother-child interactions), parental reports (including a “harsh discipline” checklist),

and exposure to child physical and sexual abuse via retrospective reports. According
to this index, 64 percent of the children experienced no maltreatment, 28 percent
experienced one indicator of maltreatment, referred to as “probable maltreatment,”
and 8 percent experienced two or more indicators of maltreatment, referred to as
“severe maltreatment.”
However, individuals with the low-efficiency genotype who had not sustained
childhood maltreatment were no more likely to be diagnosed in adulthood with
antisocial traits than the general population without the polymorphism.96 Caspi et. al.
conclude the following:

Until this study’s findings are replicated, speculation about clinical implications
is premature. Nonetheless, although individuals having the combination of low-
activity MAOA genotype and maltreatment were only 12% of the male birth
cohort, they accounted for 44% of the cohort’s violent convictions, yielding an
attributable risk fraction (11%) comparable to that of the major risk factors
associated with cardiovascular disease. Moreover, 85% of cohort males having a
low-activity MAOA genotype who were severely maltreated developed some form
of antisocial behavior. Both attributable risk and predictive sensitivity indicate
that these findings could inform the development of future pharmacological
treatments.97

Therefore, they suggest that a non-abusive environment moderates the effects of the
low-efficiency alleles. First, it should be noted that gene-effect alone is insufficient to
produce the behavioral outcome, meaning that Meyer-Lindenberg et al.’s finding of
neural signatures may not be as important of a contributor to behavior as Viding, Frith,
and Meyer-Lindenberg et al. suggest. It is the gene in the context of the environment
in formative periods of a person’s life that predisposes that person toward antisocial
behavior. Second, the way that Caspi et al. state their claim seems odd. They claim
that a good (nonviolent) environment has a protective effect, rather than that a bad
(violent) environment had a detrimental effect. This still assumes a robust genetic
ontology, presupposing that the gene is the most important contributor, and if not for
the environment, the patient would be a sociopath. The really important bit is the gene.
Other types of environmental stress, including that of low SES, have been studied
in relationship to neurotransmitters and genetics. For example, in 2010 psychologist
Naomi Sadeh et al. published the results of two studies in a paper in the Journal of
Abnormal Psychology entitled “Serotonin Transporter Gene Associations with
Psychopathic Traits in Youth Vary as a Function of Socioeconomic Resources.”98 These
two studies explored the possibility of a correlation between a gene that coded for a less
effective serotonin transporter protein and future diagnosis of personality disorders
relative to SES. SES was defined by creating a composite score from Hollingshead’s
FFI and the parental income of the subjects. In the results of the first study, Sadeh
et al. write, “Youth with the l/l genotype who lived in low-SES environments exhibited
relatively higher levels of callous-unemotional and narcissism features than did youth
from high-SES environments.”99 The study was replicated in a different demographic
54 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

in a second study performed by Sadeh et al. and suggested again that psychopathic
tendencies in youth, such as narcissistic and callous-unemotional traits, vary as a
function of SES. As before, the corticolimbic system and the theory of serotonergic
responsivity are in the background of Sadeh et al.’s study.100
These are but a few examples of the kinds of studies seeking and positing correlations
between genes and behaviors that develop relative to environments. This kind of
research often portrays itself as merely descriptive. Yet, it is aimed at intervention.
The Meyer-Lindenberg et al. study is a case in point. As they state: “Our data identify
differences in limbic circuitry for emotion regulation and cognitive control that may
be involved in the association of MAOA with impulsive aggression . . . and point
toward potential targets for a biological approach toward violence.”101 Although their
study only identifies correlation between gene and neurological structure/function—a
correlation in a healthy population sample—they draw a directional cause-effect
relation that leads from genes to neural structure, to neural function, and finally
to violent antisocial behavior. They imply that, given the psychopharmacological
revolution, simple therapies for violence or antisocial personality are just around
the corner. Likewise, Viding and Frith introduce their commentary with a moral
imperative for this neurobiological research:

Preventing violence is one of the most important global concerns. The political,
social, or economic causes of violence are well studied, but more recently the
awareness has grown that biological causes, which may explain individual
differences in predisposition to violence, also need to be investigated.102

If we could just better understand the genetic-neurobiology of violence, then we

would have the leverage to do something about it once and for all, by focusing on the
“potential targets for a biological approach toward violence.”103 Where political, social,
and economic interventions have failed, neuroscience can finally succeed by targeting
the defective brains of sociopaths, through techno-scientific control of antisocial
behaviors.

The Neuroscientific Narrative of Vice

Within the neurosciences, then, a significant subset of research seeks to find causal
mechanistic solutions for behaviors deemed problematic, particularly antisocial
personality or impulsive violence. This instrumentalist-therapeutic trope for solving
social problems, which includes socioeconomic problems, can be found much more
widely than the specific studies we have covered in this chapter.104 Terrie Moffitt, a
prominent social psychologist, states, for example: “Behavioral science needs to
achieve a more complete understanding of the causes of antisocial behavior to provide
an evidence base for effectively controlling and preventing it.”105 Adrian Raine, a
neurocriminologist, calls for a massive social campaign to do away with the cancer of
criminality that plagues the body politic.106
 
The Neuroscientific Narrative of Vice 55

Although science claims moral neutrality, the operational definition of ASPD

includes terms like criminality, violence, deception, impulsivity, sloth, grandiosity,
despondency, lack of remorse or guilt, and lack of concern for others, all of which
betray the moral valence that is part of the definition. As the DSM makes clear,
seemingly clinical terms such as ASPD—like other psychological diagnoses—are
simply umbrellas that bring together a range of behaviors traditionally understood
within a moral framework: violations of morality (lying, stealing), economics
(failure to work or honor financial obligations), and politics (violating others’ rights,
disrespecting laws, failure to conform to social norms). Subtly here, traditional moral
categories—located within coherent social and philosophical frameworks—have been
transmuted into neuroscientific categories. Traditionally, such traits were the object
of community-based behavioral interventions theorized around habituation, a telos,
and a particular moral anthropology of the human person. Within the neurosciences,
the primary pathway to behavioral change is instead via intervention on pathological
brains, giving the whole story an urgent imperative.
These interventions, however, equally presume an anthropology, one quite different
from traditional understandings of the human person.107 This masking of vice behind
neuroscientific proxies is embedded in a larger deterministic anthropology that tells
a story of how genes make brains and brains make behavior. Neuroscientists work
backward from biological research findings to hypothesize a causal nexus in the complex
milieu from genes and environment to brains to antisocial behavioral traits. The causal
link between genes-within-environments to behavior is grounded in the brain—in
fact, within the corticolimbic system. As noted, neuroimaging research has shown that
the prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex are involved in inhibiting the
responsivity of the amygdala. A person with a hyper-responsive amygdala—whether
determined by genetics or whether the genetics combined with environmental
factors—might interpret what is typically described as a neutral face as one that is
threatening, and act out violently.108 It is thought that in people with hyper-responsive
amygdalae, the internal response of the brain drives emotion out of proportion to
the environmental threat, thereby potentially catalyzing impulsivity, violence, and
antisocial personality traits. Alternatively, genetic or environmental impairment of
the amygdala might result in the opposite—an absence of fear conditioning, such that
the person does not develop what would have traditionally been called a conscience,
making it easier for the person to violate moral norms. The person is labeled instead as
callous. Conscience understood in the neurobiological narrative of vice is simply the
consistent operation of an underlying neural circuitry, one formed by the conjunction
of genetics and environment, rather than being understood as a higher-level construct,
one that is a crucial aspect of human personhood (in particular, human morality).
The studies we have reviewed—from Gianaros and Manuck to Sadeh et al.—all
employ a metaphor of “bottom-up” causation where the “bottom” (genes/biology
interacting with the environment) produces the “up,” violence or antisocial personality.
For Meyer-Lindenberg et al., the bottom is merely genetics that moves upward to the
brain and then to behavior. For Gianaros and Manuck, as well as for Caspi et al., and
Sadeh et al., the environment (often imagined as SES or SEP) contributes something,
either protection or potentiation, to the way the brain develops, which in turn
56 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

shapes behavior. The model remains one of determinative causation—an efficient

causal mechanism—akin to a physics of human sociobiology where A (genes) plus B
(environment) leads to C (neural structure and function), followed by D (behavior).
Genes and environment interact to form the brain that together “make” behavior. No
one, in this narrative, suggests that cognitive aspects of higher reasoning can work
downward on brains or genes or environments.
In addition, while the neuroscientific narrative of vice has attempted to remove the
overtly moralistic language typically associated with vice, the moral, political, and even
economic dimensions of this new narrative lurk beneath the surface of the scientific
text. These modern studies reproduce the simple trope we noted in our Introduction—
that vice results in poverty, or vice versa, that poverty results in vice. As such, the
anthropology is not only deterministic; it locates economics at the heart of the human
and moral enterprise. So normative has economics become that the neurosciences
are configured as a new regime of behavioral control, through social manipulation,
or perhaps even engineering. The BRAIN Initiative was launched, in the words of
the acronym, to “advance innovative neurotechnologies.” And the purpose of those
neurotechnologies? Gianaros and Manuck sum it up succinctly:
Privilege, power, prestige. How does the brain come to represent these and other
dimensions of socioeconomic position (SEP)? . . . More importantly, could these
representations, in part, beget socially stratified patterns of behavior and biology
that undermine equities in physical health, psychological well-being, and even
longevity across individuals? If so, would this inform the design of brain-based
preventative strategies, interventions, or social policies aimed at reducing the
human cost of chronic medical conditions and psychological disorders that track
a socioeconomic gradient? These questions are neither new nor exhaustive, but
they remain open and pressing, as developing nations and those with economies
of scale confront ever-increasing challenges in allocating limited resources to the
public and widening socioeconomic health disparities that are arguably unjust.109
Here the nexus becomes clear: the intersection of “brain-based preventative strategies”
and social policy.
What we see in the neuroscientific narrative of vice is a story told by bringing
together these two distinct thought-communities of scientists with their distinct
thought-styles—on the one side the thought-community of neurobiology and, on the
other, the thought-community of the human sciences. Yet, the human scientific arm of
neuroscience inevitably runs into the problems that all human sciences have, namely,
finding ways of naming its objects through the process of conceptual funneling.
Because the conceptual funnel is always dependent upon the social circumstances of
its development, finding the truth about human behavior will inevitably be politically
and morally charged. We will make the political and economic dimension of these
thought-communities clearer in Chapters 2 and 3, and then we will turn in Chapter 4
to unpack the way these communities are constituted by the larger social forces of the
social imaginary of the late modern West. But first, let us complete our neuroscientific
narrative of morality by turning to the counterpart of vice, namely, the neuroscientific
narrative of virtue.
 2

The Neuroscientific Narrative of Virtue

As we noted in the Prelude, some innovative scientific approaches, which at first appear
esoteric and bizarre, produce novel and revolutionary insights that transform the entire
scientific thought-community. Other novel approaches flourish for a time and then die
quietly; still others wreak havoc and enter into the lore of scientific triumphalism, only
to have their ideas seep into the unconsciousness of a thought-community. One such
idea is highlighted among “Milestones in Neuroscience Research” on the University of
Washington website: “1808 - Franz Joseph Gall publishes work on phrenology.”1
Although phrenology is now dismissed as a pseudoscience, Gall is hailed by
many as the founder of psychology as a biological science.2 With his colleague
Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, he remains a “seminal figure in psychology, psychiatry,
criminology, education, and even philosophy.”3 Gall theorized that mental functions
and psychological characteristics were localized in discrete brain locations or “organs.”
The prominence of a particular trait in a person, he proposed, was proportional to the
size of the organ, which would be manifest in the shape of the skull. “Hence,” as Donald
Simpson notes, “a large cerebral organ was associated with a cranial protuberance or
bump.”4 By “palpating” a person’s skull and “reading” these protuberances, a trained
professional could diagnose a person’s psychological qualities, assess their intellectual
aptitudes, and predict their character. For example, as John van Wyhe notes, “a
prominent protuberance in the forehead at the position attributed to the organ of
Benevolence was meant to indicate that the individual had a ‘well developed’ organ of
Benevolence and would therefore be expected to exhibit benevolent behavior.”5
Phrenology, as a scientific (and therefore cultural) practice, flourished as one of
the leading psychological theories through the late nineteenth century. By the 1840s,
twenty-eight phrenological societies in London alone boasted over 1,000 members.6 It
became a cross-continental cultural phenomenon, infusing many aspects of popular
culture from cheap street corner pamphlets to royal courts.7 Some advocated using
phrenology to address social and economic problems. Mid-nineteenth-century
employers might “demand a character reference from a local phrenologist to ensure that
a prospective employee was honest and hard-working.”8 It was used as a scientific basis
for justifying racial and gender discrimination, most notably being used by Belgian
colonizers in the 1930s as the basis for asserting the superiority of the Tutsis over the
Hutus in Rwanda.9 It also played a significant role in criminology, often supporting
efforts to study criminality and in support of penal reform by differentiating between
those who could be rehabilitated and those who should never be released.10 Although
58 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

its influence waned in Europe by roughly 1860, it continued to flourish in the United
States through the early part of the twentieth century.
As with Hollingshead, Gall drew largely on psychiatric patients and criminals
to develop his theory. For example, as Simpson notes: “Gall localized the organ of
sexuality in the cerebellum on the basis of case studies, including examination of a
nymphomaniac widow.”11 Thus, the subtle and implicit interweaving of morality,
psychological disorder, and social burden in neuroscientific research traces an even
longer history.
However, phrenology was not only about vice. In fact, some of the twenty-seven
traits Gall localized to various brain regions were virtues, including love of children,
friendship, goodness, moral sense, conscience, and “comparative sagacity.”12 In this
chapter, we focus on this strand of the story, which we name the neuroscientific
narrative of virtue. While the bulk of contemporary research on the neuroscience
of morality has its origins in psychiatry and has historically tended to focus on the
narrative of pathologized vice, more recent work has begun to focus on the arena
of positive psychology. Positive psychology focuses on non-pathological features of
human personality related to human behavior, function, or emotions, such as wisdom
or gratitude or happiness, ideas historically tied to the traditional virtues.
In their now oft-cited 2009 paper, “Neurobiology of Wisdom: A Literature
Overview,” psychiatrists Thomas Meeks and Dilip Jeste describe wisdom as a “unique
psychological trait” and set out to hypothesize its neurobiological basis. Like their
counterparts Viding and Frith, Meeks and Jeste’s work is also driven by a social
motivation and justification. As they note:

Wisdom is considered an important contributor to successful personal and social

functioning. Understanding the neurobiology of wisdom may have considerable
clinical significance. For example, knowledge of the underlying mechanisms could
potentially lead to development of preventive, therapeutic, and rehabilitative
interventions for enhancing wisdom, including those designed for persons with
relevant neuropsychiatric disorders (e.g., frontotemporal dementia).13

Meeks and Jeste are engaged in a project meant to prevent, treat, and rehabilitate
those who are prone to violence and those, who by accident, have been left with
neuropsychiatric disorders.14
They are joined in this project by others. Martin Seligman and Christopher
Peterson, for example, seek to develop a DSM-like manual—the CSV, Character,
Strengths, Virtues: A Handbook and Classification.15 Their book details the positive
aspects of psychology, promoting wisdom/knowledge, courage, humanity, justice,
temperance, and transcendence, while they also attempt to give conceptual definition
to the positive character traits. Positive psychologists are not attempting to articulate
descriptions of pathologies, that is, vices, but virtues, and thus they are “moving
the spotlight from disease to health, from treatment to prevention, and from risk
factors to protective factors.”16 Like their counterparts in Chapter 1, they objectify
normal, virtuous phenomena and behavior, seeking to localize wisdom and the
traits that are its “subcomponents” in the genome and in the brain. Where their
 
The Neuroscientific Narrative of Virtue 59

counterparts in Chapter 1 generally substituted more clinical and neural proxies for
traditional references to vice, those working in positive psychology do both. They
interweave more highly abstracted proxies with traditional virtue language, referring
to “virtue,” “morality,” or “character,” to components of traditional virtue theory
(such as happiness or wisdom), or to particular traditional virtues, such as gratitude,
courage, justice, and temperance. This difference will be important to probe as we
move forward. Notably, while traditional language is retained, traditional definitions
of the virtues are not.
Yet, what exactly are they defining, and what exactly are they operationalizing and
reifying? In the following, we will carefully unpack Meeks and Jeste’s work in order to
elucidate the assumptions that animate their normative claims about wisdom, which
center on behaviors labeled as “prosocial.” We could choose any number of works
from any number of researchers. We choose to analyze Meeks and Jeste in detail for
four main reasons. First, their work is heavily cited in neuroscientific studies. Second,
paralleling Gianaros and Manuck, they attempt to marshal different kinds of studies and
thereby provide a window into the larger landscape of research in this area. Third, they
attempt to formulate a robust conceptual definition of wisdom, which is necessary for
further human scientific study of the “virtues.” Fourth, by seeking to show correlations
between the psychology of wisdom and the science of neurotransmitters, the genome,
and the brain, they demonstrate how the neuroscience of virtue attempts to combine
psychological research on wisdom with neurobiological research, embodying the
pattern we noted in the Introduction by which the new thought-community that is
neuroscience emerges.
In the “Neurobiology of Wisdom,” Meeks and Jeste proceed in a manner much
like their counterparts in Chapter 1. Through a funneling process, they first attempt
to generate a conceptual definition of wisdom and its subcomponent virtues. Once
armed with this conceptual definition, they attempt to show how each subcomponent
maps onto the realities of neurotransmitters and the genetic control of those
neurotransmitters. They then explore structural and functional neuroimaging, looking
for the location of each subcomponent in the brain.
Here again, we draw attention to the political dimensions of the neuroscientific
narrative of morality. As with antisocial traits, we show how the subcomponents of
positive psychology—the virtues if you will—are socially constructed, deeply informed
by the particular cultural context of the late modern West. We show how the literature
moves quickly from “findings” in the brain to calls for social policies and interventions
designed to enhance morality (or, perhaps, eliminate those who pose a threat to social
well-being). And we show how, again, a key aspect of the conceptual framing of this
research endeavor is economic. The literature forwarding this neurobiological narrative
of virtue is of more recent vintage than the narrative for vice (or antisocial behavior);
there has, to date, been less research into how environments of influence might impact
on prosocial behavior in the context of genetic predisposition, though heritability
patterns would suggest a similar relationship between gene and environment as seen
in antisocial behavior. Rather than cross-mapping the virtues and SES, however, we
find in the broader conversation an implicit presumption between virtue and wealth
as well as the emergence of an elision of human agency that aligns, not surprisingly,
60 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

with contemporary developments in economic theory. We then show the way in which
these virtues are mapped onto the genome and onto the brain creates the conditions
for a new kind of phrenology.17 This new science of phrenology draws, not on bumps
in the skull, but on genomic analysis and fMRI studies.

The “Scientific” Construction of Virtue

As noted in Chapter 1, any human scientific study must first develop a conceptual
definition. Conceptual definitions can develop in many ways. They can originate from
philosophical or religious commitments; or they can be discovered in ethnographic
work or in grounded theoretical approaches that attempt to get at folk definitions.
Meeks and Jeste open their survey with a brief review of the philosophical and religious
origins of the concept of wisdom. They note that wisdom is “a unique attribute, rich in
history dating back to the dawn of civilization.” They cite the classical Greek writings
which focused on rationality, Eastern traditions in India and China which stressed
“emotional balance,” and Gall’s trait number 20, “comparative sagacity.”18
Yet oddly, after this rehearsal, these intellectual traditions play no role in their
conceptual definition. Rather, the authors turn primarily to contemporary psychological
research on wisdom in order to identify the definitional subcomponents. That is to say,
their new conceptual definition emerges from their own thought-community. To craft
this definition, they selected ten different works in the social science literature that
propose “a definition or description” of wisdom; the criteria by which these works were
chosen are not provided.19 Each of these publications offers a conceptual definition of
wisdom developed through wildly different processes. Meeks and Jeste take each of
these ten definitions, break them down into subcomponents, and then cross-reference
the subcomponents from one definition with the subcomponents from the other nine,
looking for points of commonality. If any three of the ten definitions shared the same
subcomponent—for instance, emotional homeostasis or prosocial attitudes—then
Meeks and Jeste included that subcomponent as part of their definition of wisdom.
They proffer that this approach provides a “meta”-perspective on the psychology of
wisdom and allows them to propose a slightly broader—and therefore new—definition.
Using this process, Meeks and Jeste distill six subcomponents to constitute their
conceptual definition of “wisdom”:

(1) prosocial attitudes/behaviors,

(2) social decision-making/pragmatic knowledge of life,
(3) emotional homeostasis,
(4) reflection/self-understanding,
(5) value relativism/ tolerance, and
(6) acknowledgment of and dealing effectively with uncertainty/ambiguity.20

Again, they claim that at least three of the ten sources included the above six
subcomponents, though not all ten included all six characteristics.21
 
The Neuroscientific Narrative of Virtue 61

Paralleling the narrative of vice, these subcomponents act as proxies for virtues. For
example, in describing the first subcomponent—prosocial attitudes and behaviors—
they state: “One of the most consistent subcomponents of wisdom, from both the
ancient and modern literature, is the promotion of common good and rising above
self-interests, i.e. exhibiting prosocial attitudes and behaviors, such as empathy,
social cooperation, and altruism.”22 Notably, they do not derive this subcomponent
from ancient literature but solely from contemporary psychological literature. As the
psychiatric literature assumes that antisocial personality traits are roughly equivalent to
vices, it is not surprising that Meeks and Jeste’s definition of wisdom includes prosocial
attitudes and behaviors—a virtue. Further, as with the narrative of vice, here we find
the virtues captured under a putatively more clinical and morally neutral umbrella
category.
However, Meeks and Jeste contribute their own conceptual work to this definition
in part by creating new language to capture what in the ten source definitions is much
more differentiated and nuanced. For example, Meeks and Jeste claim that “prosocial
attitudes and behaviors” constituted part of the definition of wisdom in five of ten
source definitions: (a) Richard Sternberg includes “achievement of a common (social)
good” as one element of his definition;23 (b) P. B. Baltes et al. state that there exists an
“implicit idea that wisdom serves a common good”;24 (c) Scott Brown and Jeffrey Greene
performed a technique called factor analysis to conclude that altruism is a dimension of
wisdom;25 (d) Monika Ardelt notes that affective wisdom includes “positive emotions
and behaviors toward others and absence of indifferent or negative emotions toward
others”;26 and (e) Jason et al. include “warmth” as one of five dimensions of wisdom.27
Notably, then, none of the works mined for the definition of wisdom actually or
explicitly uses the language of “prosocial attitudes and behaviors.” Rather, each of these
five studies names a term—for example, common good, warmth, altruism. Meeks and
Jeste then collapse this variety of specific features into one concept—“prosocial attitudes
and behaviors.” As a result, the concept includes odd-bedfellows (e.g., “warmth” and
“the common good”). Abstracting from the substantive meaning of the terms used in
the actual studies results in a subcomponent with little conceptual coherency, a cipher
that can be filled with multiple meanings.
In order to demonstrate this, let us further unpack each of the five sources on
which Meeks and Jeste draw to ground this notion of prosocial attitudes and behaviors.
Sternberg’s concept is developed in a book that combines implicit theories that are
operative in many psychological studies of wisdom with his own explicit theory of
wisdom. Derived from both conceptual and empirical work, it is not meant to be a
conceptual definition at all, but rather one that takes other operational definitions
and attempts to redefine the original concept. In the process of conceptual funneling,
Sternberg uses validated operational criteria to reflexively redefine the original concept
upon which the operational definitions ride. Thus, Sternberg is not so busy defining
wisdom as he is trying to show that wisdom is:

the application of successful intelligence and creativity as mediated by values toward

the achievement of a common good through a balance among (a) intrapersonal, (b)
interpersonal, and (c) extra-personal interests, over (a) short and (b) long terms,
62 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

in order to achieve a balance among (a) adaptation to existing environments, (b)

shaping of existing environments, and (c) selection of new environments.28

Wisdom then is a time-sensitive balancing of interests directed by and at one’s

environment, with the ultimate telos being the common good. We will return to
this concern for balancing interests in Chapter 4. Thus, where Meeks and Jeste place
prosocial behavior as a mere subcomponent of their definition of wisdom, for Sternberg
the common good is the telos, the end sought by all wise people; it is, for Sternberg, that
for the sake of which all wise people act.
Baltes, Smith, and Staudinger are also cited as including prosociality within their
definition. Meeks and Jeste reference their paper presented in 1991 at the Nebraska
Symposium on Motivation. In addition to this paper, Baltes has had a long and
distinguished career conducting research on wisdom. However, much of the work
done by Baltes and the Max Planck group in Berlin has focused on wisdom as expert
knowledge, as a cognitive human capacity. They distinguish between the cognitive
mechanics and the cognitive pragmatics of wisdom.29 Cognitive mechanics refers
to the hardwired or biological aspects of wisdom, and the cognitive pragmatics of
wisdom refers to the “software,” or wisdom’s cultural and informational aspects. On
this account, wisdom is a kind of intelligence, in both form and content.
The Berlin Group derives their account of altruistic behavior from folk definitions
of wisdom but theorize it in cognitive terms. Wisdom, on their definition, always
seems to be knowledge directed at the good for oneself or others.30 It is “an expertise
in the conduct and meaning of life,”31 particularly in the “fundamental pragmatics of
life.”32 Included in these pragmatics are:

knowledge about the conditions, variability, ontogenetic changes, and historicity

of life development as well as knowledge of life’s obligations and life goals;
understanding of the socially and contextually intertwined nature of human life,
including its finitude, cultural conditioning, and incompleteness; and knowledge
about oneself and the limits of one’s own knowledge and the translation of
knowledge into overt behavior. Equally central to wisdom-related knowledge and
judgment are the “spiritual” incomprehensibilities of life, such as the mind-body
dynamics or the existence of a divine being.33

Without displaying all the background here, we should note that this comprehensive
definition is the result of extensive theoretical work informed by extensive empirical
work in developmental psychology. Baltes and the Berlin Group have done massive
work on the conceptual definition of wisdom, conceptualized first out of implicit or
folk theories about wisdom, and then operationalized and measured empirically, to
create an explicit cognitive theoretical definition of wisdom. The definition appears to
be highly refined and to have evolved over twenty-plus years of psychological work. It
is not clear why Meeks and Jeste cite solely a paper presented in Nebraska, rather than
the vast body of work produced by Baltes and the Berlin Group.
Still, the Berlin definition is not without its critics. In fact, one of these critics is the
researcher Monika Ardelt. Ardelt’s definition of wisdom is also one of Meeks and Jeste’s
 
The Neuroscientific Narrative of Virtue 63

ten sources. Ardelt, a social psychologist, states that, as part of the affective characteristic
of wisdom, one finds “positive emotions and behaviors toward others.”34 However, her
definition stands as a critique of that given by Baltes and the Berlin Group. She is
highly critical of their cognitive focus and their exclusion of personalized definitions.
Her essay unpacks the way that the Berlin Group conceptualized and operationalized
their definition of wisdom.
Ardelt’s critique is astute, but we would argue that she misses a far more critical
point. She notes that the Berlin Group found that clinical psychologists performed
better on an inventory designed to measure wisdom and, in fact, that those who had
the highest scores on their wisdom scale, were indeed psychologists.35 She argues that
by conceptualizing and operationalizing wisdom as expertise, one would find that
those with intellectual training in psychology would do better on a wisdom inventory.
However, we would argue that perhaps the Berlin Group finds psychologists to be
wise precisely because psychologists conceptualized and operationalized a particularly
cognitive psychological definition of wisdom. Thus, it seems that the conceptual
funneling process of the Berlin Group is better described as an epistemological circuit,
a point missed by Ardelt. Suffice it to say that as part of Meeks and Jeste’s ten sources,
the subcomponent of “prosocial attitudes and behaviors” is uncritically derived from
two theoretically opposed and mutually critical research groups.
A fourth definition upon which Meeks and Jeste relied for the subcomponent of
prosocial behavior was that of Scott Brown and Jeffrey Greene. Brown and Greene
are psychologists working in a university setting. They derive their definition from
research on college students. They began with conversations with ten doctoral students
using a qualitative social scientific research method called grounded theory.36 Brown’s
initial work in 2004 is akin to describing the implicit or folk theories of these doctoral
students. In-depth interviews of these students resulted in a definition that Brown
believed to be grounded in the real world. This study attempted to give an overarching
view of how these ten students perceived development across their four years of college
and beyond.
Brown and Greene take the developmental definition described in the 2004 grounded
theory study and operationalize it in their 2008 study. This study, cited by Meeks and
Jeste, was an attempt to validate the operationalized definition using the instrument
developed in the 2004 study.37 Yet in this article, Brown and Greene were simply
developing an inventory test. Their study was not intended to set out a conceptual
definition but to validate an operational definition.
Finally, Meeks and Jeste cite the work of L. A. Jason et al. Like Brown and Greene,
Jason et al., set out first to describe wisdom using grounded theory to uncover a folk
definition. Forty-three people with whom the researchers were acquainted participated
in the initial qualitative study. The subjects were asked to name and describe people
who they thought were wise. It should be noted that one of the forty-three subjects
named herself as the wisest person she knew and another named a “free-roaming
whale.”38 Taking the characteristics of wisdom articulated by these forty-three people,
the researchers were then able to construct a 38-item “scale tapping the construct of
wisdom,” which was then used in a second study.39 In other words, Jason et al. designed
an operational definition from a folk conceptual definition of wisdom.
64 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

In a second study by Jason et al., which set out to validate the operational scale,
242 college students enrolled in introduction to psychology classes at DePaul
University, were given the 38-item scale called The Foundational Value Scale. The
study was primarily one in which a scale was being validated both internally, by
statistical comparison of the thirty-eight items to one another, and externally to five
other psychological and social scales: the Center for Epidemiology Studies Depression
Scale (CES-D), the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), and the Life Orientation Test (LOT),
Interpersonal Support Evaluation List, and the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability
Scale.40 The researchers hypothesized that “wisdom might operate as a protective
factor, leading to enhanced feelings of optimism and support, and reduced stress and
depression.”41 Of the original thirty-eight items, only twenty-three were included in
the factor analysis. Factor analysis demonstrated five items that loaded heavily across
other items. These five components were harmony (nine items), warmth (five items),
intelligence (three items), connecting to nature (four items), and spirituality (two
items). Meeks and Jeste took Jason et al.’s second component (warmth) to be akin to
their notion of prosocial attitudes and behaviors.
This closer analysis of the five sources used by Meeks and Jeste to foreground
“prosocial attitudes and behaviors” as a subcomponent of wisdom makes clear that
this subcomponent may be on somewhat shaky ground. They draw from synthetic
work done by Sternberg, from longitudinal cognitive behavioral work done by the
Berlin Group, from Brown and Greene’s inductively grounded folk definition, and
from Jason et al.’s validation studies. Moreover, Ardelt’s emotive approach is in direct
competition with that of Baltes and the Berlin Group. We could, of course, do a similar
analysis of each of the other five subcomponents of Meeks and Jeste’s meta-definition
of wisdom, such as emotional homeostasis or value tolerance.42 That analysis would
render a similar verdict.
Each of these research groups has a slightly different thought-style, with different
fundamental theories and sometimes conflicting theories at work. Meeks and Jeste
proceed as if one can simply take different concepts and operations that emerge out of
different thought-styles and posit a new conceptual definition. Yet in the neuroscience
of wisdom, the “Neurobiology of Wisdom” remains a landmark paper, advancing the
project of establishing the new thought-community of neuroscience.

Inverted Phrenology
Armed with this conceptual structure, Meeks and Jeste then move to correlate wisdom
with neural structures. They do so by linking specific subcomponents of their definition
with brain structures and functions, as well as associating the human science with genetic
signatures and neurotransmitters. They do not do so by performing empirical studies.
Rather, they turn to the extant empirical literature and attempt to locate something akin
to “emotional homeostasis” or “prosocial attitudes and behaviors” in previous studies
in order to determine which neurotransmitters or brain regions might be implicated.
However, the bulk of empirical neuroscientific work focuses on negative traits and
disease states (the vices). Therefore, rather than citing studies that find a positive
 
The Neuroscientific Narrative of Virtue 65

correlation between a given subcomponent and neurobiology, they instead base their
argument on literature that correlates negative traits with brain structure and function.
Take, for example, the trait of emotional homeostasis.43 As we noted in Chapter
1, the corticolimbic system—particularly a smaller volume amygdala, a hyper-
responsive amygdala, and lack of cingulate gyrus modulation of the amygdala—has
been correlated in emotional impulsivity and violence. Studies of clinical depression
have shown a dysfunction in the neural circuitry connecting the amygdala and the
anterior cingulate such that the amygdala is hyperreactive and the cingulate is under-
reactive.44 Consequently, Meeks and Jeste draw on these findings to hypothesize that
opposite traits—emotional impulsivity rather than emotional homeostasis—will be
located within the same structures but differently configured. The neurobiological
basis of wisdom, in other words, will be located at least in part in brain systems that
inhibit negative emotion (such as anxiety or fear) and promulgate positive ones
(such as gratitude or happiness). They note: “A key overarching concept in emotional
homeostasis is the ability of PFC [prefrontal cortex] to inhibit limbic reactivity.”45
Continuing, they state: “Reframing negative emotional experiences as less aversive
may involve recruitment of PFC regions (lateral, medial, and orbito-frontal) to
dampen amygdala activity.”46 In other words, they are attempting to correlate human
scientific concepts—derived as they were in a haphazard and quasi-systematic way, as
described earlier—with neural substrates. Notably, these correlations are made entirely
via inference, without any direct, empirical data.
Once traits have been correlated with neural structures, the next step is to link
those traits to their genetic substrates. As we saw in Chapter 1, differential amygdala-
cingulate activity has been associated with genetic differences in the serotonin
transporter gene, which is hypothesized to be an important mediator in the causal
pathway leading to emotional impulsivity and antisocial traits.47 Meeks and Jeste,
therefore, theorize that “controlling reactions to aversive stimuli is also related to
optimal monoaminergic functioning, especially variations related to dopamine and
serotonin and genes associated with monoaminergic activity.”48 In other words, they
speculate that those with high-efficiency alleles in the MAOA gene are better able to
maintain emotional homeostasis and to avoid aggressive behavior. Furthermore, they
write: “partly underlying emotional regulation is impulse control, which . . . is also
relevant to decision making.”49 Thus, they take a posited subcomponent—emotional
homeostasis—and find studies, both genomic/neurotransmitter and neuroimaging
studies, that seem to be getting at something akin to emotional impulsivity. Yet, in
order to draw an inference to emotional homeostasis, they have to invert the findings
on emotional impulsivity relative to the dysregulated corticolimbic system. In other
words, the method employed here draws on the social and psychological literature to
create a quasi-systematic definition of emotional homeostasis and then correlates it
to various existing findings of genomic/neurotransmitter and neuroimaging studies
about different characteristics. This method is presented as a plausible way of locating
emotional homeostasis in the genome and the brain. Meeks and Jeste follow these
same steps with each of the other subcomponents of wisdom.
Their main focus, however, is directed at “prosocial attitudes and behaviors,” which
emerge as the most important subcomponent. As they remark, “sociopaths, who may
66 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

exhibit exquisite social cognition and emotional regulation that actually facilitate
their selfish motives, would not be considered wise.”50 To substantiate their claim,
they draw on three areas of research—mirror neurons, the prefrontal cortex, and
neurotransmitters. They begin with the recent discourse surrounding mirror neurons.
Mirror neurons, first discovered in primates and later uncovered in the human inferior
frontal gyrus, are activated when one person observes another doing some action. For
example, if one sees a professional tennis player perform a backhand stroke, mirror
neurons fire in a pattern corresponding to this motor movement in the same way that
they would if the observer were actually performing a backhand stroke. Neurobiologists
have theorized that these neurons represent the rudimentary neurobiological elements
of human empathy—the capacity to intuit another’s experience. Citing a study by
Decety and Jackson, which showed that “persons with greater unconscious somatic
mimicry have higher ratings of self-reported altruism,” Meeks and Jeste suggest that
mirror neurons serve an important role in the underlying neurobiology of prosocial
behavior.51
However, empathy is clearly more than physical mimicry; it is also connected with
intuiting the internal emotional experience of another. Other research, borrowing from
the psychological literature’s notion of “theory of mind,” has correlated the capacity
to take the perspective of another person—their mental and emotional state—with
activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPC).52 Meeks and Jeste take this work on
empathy and the MPC to the next level, linking it with other studies which examine the
MPC and social interactions, specifically a 2004 article by Decety et al., “The Neural
Basis of Cooperation and Competition: An fMRI Investigation.”53
Here Decety et al. examined empathy—what they term “mentalizing”—using
a psychological game paradigm to examine the underlying neurobiology. In this
study, research participants engaged in a computerized game in which each subject
played independently, cooperated with another in playing the game, or were placed
in competition with one another. In the competitive conditions, the researchers found
the MPC to be activated to a statistically significant difference when compared to
other game conditions. They theorize that the competitive stance elicited increased
activity in the MPC because the subject is motivated to understand the intentions
of the other—to “mentalize” the competitor’s stance.54 In contrast, those subjects
involved in cooperative game play showed activation in the orbitofrontal area—an
area associated with reward value. Decety et al. suggest that “the reward value stems
from the psychological satisfaction of reaching a common goal through interaction
with a conspecific [friend or foe in the game].”55 In other words, positive feelings
of reward are stimulated during cooperation whereas brain centers focused on
identifying the intentions of others are activated in competitive interactions. They
conclude that “cooperation provides a social incentive and is associated with right
orbitofrontal involvement, and competition requires additional mentalizing resources
and is associated with an increase in medial prefrontal activity.”56 Put differently, while
cooperation is more pleasurable, competition requires one “to read the mind” of one’s
competitor, to be more empathic with one’s competitor in an odd sense. While this
seems counterintuitive, it is highly compatible with competition-based economies, a
point to which we shall return in Chapters 3 and 4.
 
The Neuroscientific Narrative of Virtue 67

Citing these studies, Meeks and Jeste seek to ground prosocial attitudes and behavior
neurologically. However, they do not critically assess how empathy in this psychological
game may well be less associated with knowing the other for that other’s good than it
is with knowing the other in order to serve one’s interest in winning the game (the
opposite of altruism), a point to which we shall return in future chapters. Furthermore,
if the MPC and orbitofrontal area are correlated with positive social interactions, one
might expect to find opposing brain functionality in those with antisocial traits. In fact,
another study, entitled “Neural Correlates of Social Cooperation and Non-cooperation
as a Function of Psychopathy,” published in Biological Psychiatry, finds that “persons
with high sociopathy ratings showed (relative to comparison subjects) decreased
amygdala response while being uncooperative during social cooperation task and less
orbitofrontal cortex activity while cooperating, suggesting a lack of aversive emotions
while violating social norms and a lack of positive emotions while exhibiting social
cooperation.”57 In other words, sociopaths found competition pleasurable, while
finding cooperation unpleasurable.
Meeks and Jeste draw on this study to suggest that in the pathological state—
sociopathy—orbitofrontal impairment renders positive emotions blunted and
conscious activation impaired, whereas in the prosocial condition, the orbitofrontal
cortex generates positive emotions thereby delivering the reward for virtuous behavior.
Prosociality, enabled by a well-functioning brain, appears to lead to feeling good.
They cite other evidence in the field of neuroeconomics to confirm this hypothesis.
For instance, Moll et al. found that donating money is associated with activation
in reward circuitry, mainly the nucleus accumbens (associated with pleasure). This
reward circuitry is the same neural system thought to go awry in substance use
disorders. Moll et al. suggest that prosocial behavior (and altruism) is connected to
base biological drives toward pleasure.58 Of course, it is no coincidence that we are
speaking of “prosociality” and “antisociality” in terms akin to monetary transaction.
As we shall show in later chapters, there is a tendency to conceive of altruism as a kind
of economic transaction, one that is not really selfless, but instead pays dividends in
making one feel good.
The neurobiological underpinning of prosocial attitudes and behaviors would be
incomplete without linking the circuit from neural function to the underlying genetics
and neurotransmitter mechanisms. As before, various neurotransmitter systems have
been implicated, including those of dopamine and oxytocin—which are thought to
be the “pleasure” hormone and the “altruism” hormone respectively. In a 2005 study
published in Molecular Psychiatry, neuropsychologist Rachel Bachner-Melman and her
colleagues associated a polymorphism in the gene coding for D4 dopamine receptor
with self-reported selflessness—also described as altruism. In this study, 354 non-
clinical families with multiple siblings were genetically tested for a polymorphism in
the gene encoding the D4 receptor and were also asked to complete a Selflessness Scale,
which purportedly measured “the propensity to ignore one’s own needs and serve the
needs of others.”59 Bachner-Melman et al. hypothesized as follows:

We examined two dopaminergic genes in these subjects that we hypothesized

might contribute to prosocial or altruistic traits based on the role a single variant
68 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

of these genes plays in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), often

comorbid with antisocial behavior. Meta-analyses60 show that the dopamine D4
receptor (DRD4) exon III 7 repeat (D4.7) and the DRD5 148 bp microsatellite
variant have both been associated with ADHD in some but not all studies. We
reasoned that if one variant contributes to antisocial traits, then conversely the
absence of this variant or the presence of other variants might contribute to
altruistic behavior.61

The D4 genetic polymorphism is therefore identified because of its relationship to

psychopathology, specifically ADHD, and researchers test the inverse hypothesis that
the alternative genotype (D4.4) will confer prosociality, the flip side of the coin. The
study found that subjects who carry the D4.4 version of the gene versus the D4.7 version
of the gene were more likely to self-report selflessness on psychological inventories
intended to capture altruistic behavior.
The dopamine system is further linked to reward pathways associated with the
mesolimbic system, including the nucleus accumbens and medial prefrontal cortex,
again areas of the brain found to be associated with psychological tests for empathy.
Although they do not test the relationship between D4 genotype and these brain
structures, Bachner-Melman et al. conclude with the following conjecture:

The balanced maintenance of both the D4.4 and D4.7 repeats in human
evolution62 is related to the need for diverse behavioral phenotypes in human
populations partially determined by this gene, altruistic and prosocial (D4.4) vs
a more aggressive, novelty seeking or perhaps even antisocial type (D4.7) . . . We
also suggest the notion that the linkage between reward and altruistic attitudes
provide the neurochemical substrate and “hard wiring” needed to drive acts that
benefit others even at the expense of reducing one’s own fitness. We “feel good”
and rewarded by a dopamine pulse when doing good deeds. Selection for specific
polymorphisms that “reward” altruistic acts via brain dopaminergic pathways is
the grist for the evolutionary mill.63

As in the neurobiological narrative of vice, here the neurochemical explanation for

virtue derives from the material of the gene. It is the gene that “makes” the brain that
manifests empathy (prosocial emotionality) and altruism (prosocial attitudes), which
are emergent behavioral properties.64

Biopolitics and the Social Control of Vice and Virtue

Meeks and Jeste’s six subcomponents of wisdom seem almost uncontroversial. Yet, a
closer look makes clear that these subcomponents carry a moral and even a political
valence in two key ways. First, the subcomponents of wisdom reverberate the political
values of leftist political liberalism—pragmatic decision-making, value tolerance,
ambiguity. These are the political ideals of a particular segment of powerful people
in the West.65 No liberal democrat would disagree with these subcomponents. Yet,
 
The Neuroscientific Narrative of Virtue 69

one can easily imagine the subcomponents of wisdom that a libertarian might posit:
personal responsibility, self-motivation, freedom, suspension of moral judgment. And
yet a different set of virtues would be envisaged by a group of people more concerned
with security than liberty: deference to authority, meekness, the good of the many
outweighs the good of the one; or again in a small tribal community: communitarian
commitment, sharing, constancy, and so forth. Would it not be possible to find the
virtues of different political communities in the neural circuitry and even the genes of
the citizenry?
In other words, the list of virtues in Meeks and Jeste’s definition of wisdom is socially
constructed, characteristics that resonate with the dominant science emerging out of
liberal societies. They have been gleaned from psychological studies drawn from slightly
different, but overlapping, subgroups of the neuroscientific thought-community.
Moreover, these characteristics, more often than not, begin with folk definitions from
people hailing from a very narrow social demographic—largely college-educated,
economically upper-middle to upper-class, likely predominantly white and male
community, in short, those who are socially “successful.” The characteristics of wisdom
or happiness or virtue identified by such a cohort, “refined” via conceptual funneling,
are then redefined as novel virtues, no longer “temperance” but rather “emotional
homeostasis,” no longer “prudence” but variants on “social decision-making/pragmatic
knowledge of life” or “tolerance of ambiguity.” These new, putatively neutral clinical
and scientific trait, prosocial behavior, supposedly shorn of their moral baggage but
derived from the morality of a dominant Western political ideal, are not “found” in
the brain or in the genome. They are political values that are mapped post hoc onto
fMRI studies or onto genetic studies of neurotransmitters. Supposedly located in and
therefore reified in the genome and the brain, neuroscience claims to have discovered
the true biological foundations of a therefore universal morality.
Yet not only does the content of the neuroscience of morality carry political valence;
as we saw in Chapter 1, the leap from identifying particular “loci” associated with a
behavioral trait and calls for sociopolitical programs to intervene at these neural and
genetic sites is almost immediate. In the case of the neuroscience of virtue, the practical
implications lead to the imaginings of technological moral bioenhancement.66 Arguing
against what has been termed the bioconservative position—a position that finds it
morally improper to enhance human biology—philosopher Thomas Douglas argues
for the moral permissibility of morally enhancing oneself.67 He rejects any moral
prohibitions that would prevent one’s brain from being manipulated in order to redirect
one’s psychological motivations for the good. Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu go
much further, arguing that there is a moral imperative to enhance ourselves morally—
now that we can enhance our intellectual capacities, we may create humans who are
capable of destroying the world, and we must have moral capacities that prevent
that from happening.68 Moreover, they claim that without moral bioenhancement—
literally intervening in the brains and genomes of people—we may not have the moral
motivation to change our behaviors that will stop climate change.69
More than one thinker has issued a call to screen for and to select out those genes
that seem to be involved in violent behavior.70 Adrian Raine, as we have pointed out in
Chapter 1, and Sam Harris, as we will show in Chapter 3, both call for active measures
70 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

to weed out those with brain disorders—through various social mechanisms or

technological brain interventions—that may lead to violence. Likewise, Mark Walker
has suggested that, since we morally enhance through socialization and educational
programs, and since we seem constantly to fail to improve, perhaps the problem lies in
our human nature. Thus, he proposes a Genetic Virtue Project anchored in our genes.
According to Walker, nearly all personality traits have some degree of heritability,
implicating genetic factors in that subset of traits identified as virtues.71 He explores
the genetic origins of truthfulness, justice, and caring attitudes. While citing scientific
evidence for each case, none of the studies that he cites are really designed to test
truthfulness, justice, or caring per se. For instance, as with most of the studies we have
reviewed regarding the neuroscience of virtue, his claim about truthfulness is made
indirectly through appeal to literature on antisocial personality disorder, which has
“lying” as one of its component features. He cites papers claiming that there are moral
contracts among primates and that there are “neurological structures . . . for detecting
those who cheat on social contracts.”72
As with truthfulness and justice, Walker does not cite actual genetic studies showing
a genetic link to something akin to care, but points to studies in primates that suggest
something akin to caring.73
Based on these correlations, Walker proposes a pragmatic course of action:

Having identified the relevant genes, the practical execution of the GVP [Genetic
Virtue Project] . . . could proceed in at least two different ways. In the first instance,
preimplantation diagnosis could be used to select those embryos that have profiles
consistent with the potential for learning virtuous behavior. In the second, genetic
engineering techniques could be employed to alter extant embryos to exhibit more
of the desirable genes (and fewer of the undesirable genes).74

Most geneticists would roll their eyes at such grandiose suggestions. Yet Walker believes
that there is no scientific or theoretical reason why his GVP will fail—only practical,
political problems stand in the way. While finding state-mandated virtues problematic,
he opines that states in liberal democracies would be less likely to implement GVP as
they tend to remain neutral on robust conceptions of the good.75 Parents, perhaps,
might like to select for these virtuous personality traits much like they would select for
intelligence or longevity or having robust immune systems.76 However, even here there
will be political problems because parents who have genetically enhanced the virtue of
their children may not want to expose them to the vicious children who have not been
enhanced.
Yet for Walker, the political dimension only becomes important after we (“we”) decide
to implement a particular set of virtues through the genetic manipulation. He ignores
the fact that there is a political dimension inherent in the virtues he wishes to genetically
enhance. Such naïveté with regard to politics also plagues other proposals for moral
enhancement as well those the entire project of the neuroscience of morality. Thus, from
Viding and Frith to Meeks and Jeste, we must conclude that researchers are engaged in a
new inverted and prospective phrenology, this time couched in the powerful rhetoric of
neuroscience. While claiming to discover the roots of our behaviors, they are in reality
 
The Neuroscientific Narrative of Virtue 71

reading that behavior backward into the brains. Now, instead of feeling bumps on the
skull and correlating them with traits mapped onto cerebral anatomy, we read fMRI
scans that “light up,” signaling the presence or lack of socially normative behaviors,
propensities, and potentialities. The ground for this new phrenology is more scientifically
secure and predictive in the way the old phrenologists had hoped their science would
be. All the while, as with their predecessors, the social and political assumptions of these
scientists are enacted into social regimes of control by the new phrenologists.
In the end, whether attempting to translate “neuroscientific findings” into social
policies and programs to find “cancers on the body politic,” as Adrian Raine has called
them,77 or to enhance prosocial correlates, as Walker or Meeks and Jeste hope, we see
that neuroscience is a deeply Baconian project.78 Following the vision of Francis Bacon
for whom the purpose of science was “first and foremost the amelioration of the human
condition and the ‘relief of man’s estate,’” through technological interventions designed to
build a great society where humans can flourish.79 Yet here the vision exceeds even Bacon.
It becomes clear in these proposals that the biological material of the body politic is the
body—the genome and/or the brain—of the individual. That is to say, the social ills that
afflict us are no longer understood to reside in the will of those who perpetrate violence
and vice against the body politic; nor is it thought to be in the political or economic
structures. Instead, the social ills are rather understood as embedded in the “bad” genes
or “bad” brains of those bodies that are the subcomponents of the body politic.
What goes unnoticed is a subtle eugenic and triumphalist thrust that animates these
political and technological imperatives to morally, and thus politically enhance the
citizens; for the story maintains that the demise of society is written in our genes and
in our brains. It becomes imperative to intervene to protect the populace from rogue
antisocial elements whose neural substrates do not promote the common good. The
story asserts that it is for their own good that we should intervene upon these defective
brains. In short, we have a biopolitics, in which the political economy of the dominant
and powerful create new knowledge that further reinforces the dominance of those in
power. Government supports research aimed at curing social ills; neuroscientists tell
us the neurobiological narrative of vice; pharmaceutical and technological research
is directed at curing these defective genes and brains and behaviors, and promoting
social and political harmony; the media pick up these triumphalist stories convincing
the body politic of their truthfulness. Neuroscience aims at techno-scientific control;
it participates in a biopolitics of morality, controlling bios for the sake of the polis. All
the while, we ignore the fact that the so-called common good is a product of those who
have created and who sustain this biopolitics, those in political power, those powerful
enough to tell us stories about genes, and brains, and antisocial behaviors, all aimed at
social behaviors that maintain the political economy.

The Neuroscientific Narrative of Vice and Virtue

From Meyer-Lindenberg et al., to Meeks and Jeste to the vast array of neuroscientific
studies, we find the intertwined fields of neurobiology, psychopathology, and positive
72 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

psychology. Coming together in this powerful new thought-community, they seek

correlations between what the neurobiologist sees in genes and brain structures
with what the psychologists and sociologists see in human behaviors. The result is
a neuroscientific narrative of vice and virtue. This narrative tells the following story.
Certain genes, sometimes combined with environmental factors imagined largely in
economic terms, give rise to neural structures and functional features of brain activity,
typically centered in the amygdala, anterior cingulate, and ventromedial prefrontal
cortex. Neural pathways linking these regions of the brain give rise to psychological
traits, such as empathy or negative affectivity, which in turn, influence behavior,
including moral behavior toward others. Some of these moral behaviors are antisocial—
they are vicious—and others are prosocial—virtuous. The functioning system can
go awry at several steps along the way. One can have polymorphisms at the genetic
level; one can be reared in abusive or impoverished socioeconomic environments.80
Either genes alone, or genes under environmental influences, can lead to small and
hyperreactive amygdalae that are not under the direct control of a hyporesponsive
cingulate gyrus, resulting in emotional lability such that one acts out in an antisocial
manner. Alternatively, a larger amygdala better controlled by the cingulate results
in emotional homeostasis—a prerequisite for the display of wisdom, which is made
manifest in prosocial behaviors.
It does not take much creativity to note the key points of intervention—genes,
neurotransmitters, brain loci (amygdala, cingulate, ventromedial prefrontal cortex),
and neural functioning. To get better impulse control, one simply has to intervene upon
the amygdala or to increase the control of the various regions of the cingulate gyrus
to prevent the impulsive or violent behaviors. Those like Viding and Frith suggest that
if we understand these pathways, we might be able to develop interventions to curb
antisocial behavior and reduce violence. Those like Meeks and Jeste, who imagine a
world where peace and harmony are possible, propose promoting positive prosocial
behaviors by targeting those regions of the brain responsible for prosociality. They
imagine a techno-scientific approach to social control.
Where Meeks and Jeste had to search far and wide to find the neuroscientific
virtues, the vices come ready made. The neuroscientific vices find their ground
in the DSM, which reifies pathologies through its systematic attempts to connect
concepts of antisociality to research regimes. Where Meeks and Jeste’s virtues
are tenuous, the vices seem more secure because they carry the systemization of a
very powerful neuroscientific establishment: psychiatry. The DSM designation of
antisocial personality disorder has been biologized in the catecholamine hypothesis,
operationalized in antisocial personality indexes, and validated on untold numbers of
inmates, among others. In fact, in many states within the United States, one cannot be
paroled if one scores poorly on Hare’s psychopathy test.81
Yet, we must ask: why is this the narrative told by the emerging thought-community
that is neuroscience? After all, alternative narratives are possible. For example, is the
notion of emotional homeostasis as construed by Meeks and Jeste compatible with
righteous anger? In anger, homeostasis gives way to an up-regulation of emotionality
directed at an injustice existing outside the biological parameters of the individual
person. Meeks and Jeste do not distinguish between righteous anger engaged
 
The Neuroscientific Narrative of Virtue 73

passionately against an injustice (prosocial behavior) and an impulsive anger run

amok in destructive rage (antisocial behavior). More subtly, their logic cannot account
for how an individual brain might be disrupted by traumatic experience yet display
wisdom in the face of such brokenness. The experience of PTSD as recounted by
combat veterans, whose neurobiology has apparently been altered by the experiences
of war, may be judged as failing in critical ways, and yet these lives of these persons may
also represent an embodied narrative of the costs of war—perhaps a hidden source of
wisdom, not only for the sufferer but also for society.82
Moreover, it is unclear how the neuroscientific narrative of vice and virtue
can help differentiate between the ways that similar neurological processes might
result in a particular trait—for example, impulsivity or risk-taking—being assessed
differently in different social contexts. For example, how do we distinguish between
the impulsivity required by the soldier who reacts in a combat situation, saving the
lives of his comrades-in-arms—a prosocial action; but when he returns home and
exhibits the same impulsivity toward violence, he is deemed antisocial. Or between
the impulsivity that leads a person to assault someone (again labeled as “antisocial”)
and propensity toward “risk-taking” involved in venture capitalism? And is there not
a kind of emotional regulation needed to carry out a Ponzi scheme, which at least at
the beginning seems to have the appearance of prosociality in its claims to be creating
wealth?
Let us dwell on this point for a moment. For as we saw in Chapter 1, the
neuroscientific narrative of vice has been shaped from its very beginning by a cultural
assumption correlating low SES (i.e., poverty) and pathology or antisociality. Although
less studied by neurobiology, a broad cultural presumption posits the inverse: that
the virtuous—who are self-disciplined, work hard, and control their reproductivity
(though not necessarily their sexual activity)—will prosper economically. Behind this
is a second cultural assumption that sees the act of wealth creation as a virtue. Shortly
after the 2008 economic crash, Lloyd Blankfein, former CEO of Goldman Sachs,
defended the work of the financial industry:

Banks are really serving the greater good. We help companies to grow by helping
them to raise capital . . . Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows
people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle.
We have a social purpose.83

When asked whether one could make too much money, Blankfein replied that he was
“doing God’s work.”84
Yet a series of post-crash studies are beginning to suggest that these “prosocial”
multibillionaires possess many personality traits that outside the context of venture
capitalism are pathologized as antisocial. The entrepreneur—a new character in
the MacIntyrean sense—and the addict, it seems, are hard to distinguish. As Johns
Hopkins neuroscientist David Linden notes:

the psychological profile of a compelling leader—think of tech pioneers such as

Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Steven P. Jobs—is also that of the compulsive risk-
74 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

taker, someone with a high degree of novelty seeking behavior. In short, what we
see in leaders is often the same kind of personality type found in addicts, whether
they are dependent on gambling, alcohol, sex, or drugs.85

Not only do they share similar traits, evidence suggests that many “great men” have in
fact been “addicts.” These traits, which can be harnessed to great business and financial
success, often lead those same successful entrepreneurs to cross the boundaries
between the legal and illegal, not infrequently committing financial and drug crimes
as well. It is as if the “virtue” of making exorbitant amounts of money or launching
highly successful businesses is understood as offsetting what might in others be
deemed vices.
Or consider David Segal’s story, “Just Manic Enough: Seeking Perfect
Entrepreneurs.”86 Segal argues that “a thin line separates the temperament of a
promising entrepreneur from a person who could use, as they say in psychiatry, a little
help.” He describes a young entrepreneur making a pitch to an angel investor. The man,
he notes:

displays many of the symptoms of a person having what psychologists call a

hypomanic episode. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual—the
occupation’s bible of mental disorders—these symptoms include grandiosity, an
elevated and expansive mood, racing thoughts, and little need for sleep.87

As with the addictive personality argument, Segal cites the usual range of local heroes—
Teddy Roosevelt, George Patton, David O. Selznick, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs—as
exhibiting this “hypomanic temperament.”
A third set of studies has looked at the relationship between successful financial
traders and psychopaths. Composite profiles of those drawn to and successful in the
fast-paced, high-pressure environment are found to have parallels with psychopathic
personality, particularly around gregariousness, impulsiveness, dishonesty, and lack
of empathy. Studies cited note that “professional stock traders actually outperform
diagnosed psychopaths when it comes to competitive and risk-taking behavior . . . and
that the traders were surprisingly willing to cause harm to their competitors if they
thought it would bring them an advantage.”88 These studies reprise others that began
emerging in the early 1990s that compared stockbrokers with the seriously mentally ill
and the brain damaged.
Other studies look at other traits. A series of studies have sought to correlate wealth
and compassion. While the presumption is that those who are richer would be less
likely to lie, cheat, and steal, evidence suggests that the opposite is true—that increase
in social status correlates with a decrease in compassion.89 Moreover, one study found
that wealth also changes one’s perspective on virtue itself: “that wealthier people are
more likely to agree with statements that greed is justified, beneficial, and morally
defensible. These attitudes ended up predicting participants’ likelihood of engaging in
unethical behavior.”90 Along the same lines, researchers have found that “Participants
who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on
measures of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness.”91
 
The Neuroscientific Narrative of Virtue 75

Yet for some, the payoff does not mask the fundamental dynamic. Economist
Jeffrey Sachs correlates those addictive, antisocial traits mentioned earlier that make
for success with criminality. As he notes,

The world is drowning in corporate fraud, and the problems are probably greatest
in rich countries—those with supposedly “good governance.” Poor-country
governments probably accept more bribes and commit more offenses, but it is rich
countries that host the global companies that carry out the largest offenses. Money
talks, and it is corrupting politics and markets all over the world.
Hardly a day passes without a new story of malfeasance. Every Wall Street
firm has paid significant fines during the past decade for phony accounting,
insider trading, securities fraud, Ponzi schemes, or outright embezzlement by
CEOs. A massive insider-trading ring is currently on trial in New York, and has
implicated some leading financial-industry figures. And it follows a series of fines
paid by America’s biggest investment banks to settle charges of various securities
violations.92

The moral evaluation of behaviors, prosocial or antisocial, is possible only outside the
story told by neuroscience.
This returns us to our preceding question: why is the narrative we have traced—
this neuroscientific narrative of morality—told by the neuroscience thought-
community? Here we recall Fleck. We have shown, in these first two chapters, how
this new field of neuroscience—a new entity born by forging together two different
sorts of sciences—tells a neuroscientifically shaped, socially constructed story of
moral behavior. This story—that moves from genes (molded in a social environment)
to brains to behavior—is not simply an objective account of scientific fact.
Neuroscientific observations do not begin with genes; neuroscientific observations
do not begin with brains. Neuroscientific observations begin with behaviors that are
already grounded in a socially predetermined relationship between the pathological
and the normal, behaviors that are deemed desirable or undesirable by the larger
social context. In the mode of discovery, one does not in fact start with the genes, nor
with the neurotransmitters, nor with the neural structure or functioning. One begins
with behavior, which is thought independently of science to be bad or good, moral
or immoral, vicious or virtuous, antisocial or prosocial, according to the political
economy of those in power to make such decisions. The conceptual funneling
process begins in the definitions created by a larger, societal thought-community.
Conceptual funneling is in fact an epistemological circuit created by the experts in
neuroscience.
Yet, the vector flows in both directions. Just as neuroscience has been deeply shaped
by its broader cultural context, the findings from this scientific thought-community
(Fleck’s esoteric community) have, from the beginning, moved almost seamlessly into
the elite levels of society. Here, translated into popular language, “the neuro” has ever-
increasing cultural purchase and interpretive power. Without this mutually reinforcing
relationship, neuroscience would be simply another esoteric scientific thought-
community. Yet why, we must ask, has neuroscience and particularly its narrative of
76 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

morality been amplified so readily and resoundingly by the power-brokers of US and

Western culture?
In order to answer that question, we must first demonstrate the extent to which
this narrative has moved into popular culture and how that uptake has further shaped
it. To this task we turn in Chapter 3. At the heart of this story, there are several
contradictions found in the political economy of the late modern West. One is that this
neuroscientific narrative of vice and virtue seems to eliminate a critical component of
the traditional account of the virtues, namely, individual agency. As we noted earlier,
A (genes) + B (social environment) leads to functional neuroanatomy, which leads
to behavior—a mechanism of bottom-up causation. Traditional understandings of
vice and virtue have top-down mechanisms, in which a rational agent, habituated in
the virtues of her society, exercises some degree of top-down control over her own
biological activities, in habituation, for example, but also on her own behaviors. In
contemporary neuroscience, such agency is construed as a convenient illusion,
posited post hoc, giving us a false sense of control. Neuroscience suggests that the
perceived sense of agency, “the feeling that we are the cause of our actions and their
consequences” is generated by the inferior parietal cortex, and that moral rationality is
a post hoc explanation of our actions.93 Thus, our sense of ourselves as acting agents is
ultimately deemed to be an illusion, simply a product of the gene and brain, perhaps
interacting with the environment. Does it make sense to speak of morality (virtues or
vices) without agency? Does neuroscience not have a moral anthropology unto itself?
As noted earlier, the neuroscientific narrative claims not to be engaged in a moral
endeavor. It is in the popular neuroscience that the elision of moral agency comes
most clearly into relief. That which is implicit in the emerging neuroscientific thought-
community becomes explicit in the attempt to translate neuroscience into the broader
thought-community of contemporary society. Here, as we shall see, we are called to
imagine there is no downward control, no rational agency that can push back against
the biological and social influences on behavior. This trend conveniently aligns with
recent developments in our dominant political economy, which has shifted from an
account of persons as free economic agents as motivated by rational self-interest to
those who only act based on what feels good and whose self-interest is predetermined
by the market, which is the new agent of freedom. Popular neuroscience reproduces
these fault lines grounded in the history of Western political economy. We turn now to
the popularizers of neuroscience to complete the narrative.
 3

Popular (Neuro)Science and

Other Political Schemes

According to Scimago Journal Rankings, Nature Reviews Neuroscience was the top
neuroscience journal in 2018 with an H-index of 375 (tied with Nature Neuroscience)
and an average of 32.24 citations per document (two years).1 Yet even in the era of the
internet and open source publishing, few regular people—even few scholars outside
the field of neuroscience—read articles from Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Or, for that
matter, from any of the 149 other neuroscience journals ranked by Scimago. Yet in the
twenty-first century, all things are neuro. One can now find Neuro Coffee that “supports
brain health,” the Neuro line of products from Paul Mitchell that will “revolutionize
how you style your hair with innovative tools,” and Neuro Drinks, hyped by none other
than Kim Kardashian.
fMRI brain images are now as familiar to children and the public at large as the
double-helix. “The neuro” has become the dominant cultural icon of the twenty-first
century. How has this happened? Certainly, federal projects like the BRAIN Initiative
play a role. But findings from the insider discourse of the neuroscience thought-
community do not land in the ordinary citizen’s inbox or Twitter feed unaided. Rather,
as Fleck noted, to become established as a scientific fact, findings must move beyond
the small, scientific thought-community to a wider public. In the first two chapters,
we examined the esoteric discourse of neuroscience and unpacked the neuroscientific
narratives of vice and virtue respectively. In this chapter, we begin to examine the
symbiotic relationship between neuroscience and contemporary culture. In order to
display how neuroscience’s thought-style has infused public consciousness, we turn to
the popularizers of neuroscience of morality.
More specifically, in Chapters 1 and 2, we demonstrated the way that notions of vice
and virtue, which originate in and are deeply embedded in the larger community of
Western culture, have been redefined and transformed into proxies by neuroscience.
Neuroscience reifies these proxies by claiming to find their origin in the genome
and the brain. We also showed how these proxies carry with them a subtle political
valence, particularly in the ways that socioeconomic factors are conceptualized,
operationalized, and then become variables that researchers hope to correlate with
both brain structure/function and behaviors.
In this chapter, we examine the translation of neuroscience from scientific to
popular literature, showing how these redefined and reconstituted vices and virtues
78 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

make their way into the larger, exoteric community. As we move in this chapter
from strictly scientific renderings to those thinkers who popularize neuroscience,
the political and economic dimensions no longer remain implicit but come more
fully into relief. Redolent with claims, terms, and methods infused even more
overtly with political and economic commitments, the popularizers continue the
larger project of the neuroscientific thought-community, recursively reifying these
commitments by grounding them in the putatively objective facticity of the brain
and the genome.
While it was tempting to simply review literature with titles like Evil Genes or
Murderous Minds, we instead survey three of the most important and scientifically
astute popularizers of modern neuroscience—Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, and Paul
Zak. Each is a leading figure in the science of morality, and each is a prolific high-culture
public intellectual, translating the science of morality to a hungry public. Each thinker
is interested in morality and holds that morality can be understood scientifically. Each
is also interdisciplinary in his approach, with two of them having primary disciplines
outside neurobiology. Haidt is a social psychologist, whose primary interest is in moral
and political psychology. Harris has PhD-level training in neuroscience, but seeks to
write more as a philosopher and public intellectual. Zak is an economist by training
but is interested in the psychological and the biological roots of economic and moral
behavior. Haidt is the most careful. Harris is the boldest in his claims. Zak is the most
reductive.
In the writings of these public intellectuals of neuroscience, we hear a common
narrative. In this story, science is beginning to prove that morality is less about
rationality and more about moral tastes or preferences, based in neurologically
generated experiences of pleasure and pain. Rooted in our evolutionary biology,
these moral tastes served to bind social groups together for the purposes of survival.
Biologically grounded, these moral tastes give rise to human behaviors that are more
instinctual or automatic and unconscious than we have normally understood, with
rational deliberation, conscience, or choice being merely the post hoc operations of
our cerebral cortex working to understand or justify our actions. As such, morality
is largely not under our control. This bottom-up account of morality combined with
the continuing importance of morality for society’s well-being suggests, in the end,
that the political and economic order must necessarily act as the regulative locus for
the possibility of moral behavior, or, in other words, help us control of our animal
emotions.
In order for the neuroscientific narrative of morality to be heard by the larger
community of Western societies, touchstones must already exist in the larger society.
We claim in this chapter that while the popularizers translate the science in a way
that the public can understand, there must already be resources in circulation that
permit the larger society to take up the science. These shared background assumptions
are a common set of regnant beliefs about the relationship of the human actor to the
social milieu. A regnant anthropology, however inchoate it may be, grounds the shared
assumptions of the neuroscientists of morality, the popularizers, and the larger society.
In this chapter, we bring this implicit anthropology into relief.
 
Popular (Neuro)Science 79

Haidt’s Righteous Mind: The Politics of the Brain

One of the most careful popularizers of the science of morality is Jonathan Haidt.
By training, Haidt is located within the human sciences. He draws on the findings of
neurobiology and evolutionary biology in order to discover the psychological roots
and mechanisms of political and moral behavior. He seeks and finds the source of
this behavior in psychological predispositions, which in turn have some basis in the
brain.
Haidt is a social psychologist, who cut his teeth as a moral psychologist in an academic
department of psychology. Since 2011, he has served as the Thomas Cooley Professor
of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. His research
focuses primarily on the psychology of morality and the moral emotions, particularly
as they apply to efficiency and ethics in economics and business. He describes his work
as helping “economists and other social scientists to figure out how to make businesses,
non-profits, cities, and other systems work more efficiently and ethically,”2 “with only
minimal need for directly training people to behave ethically.”3 His books include The
Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom and The Righteous
Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, the former attempting
to bring the wisdom of the ages into conversation with the contemporary science of
happiness and the latter attempting to explain why we find Western societies divided
by morality and politics.4 A presenter of three TED talks, author of numerous articles
in The New York Times and other news outlets, and guest on The Colbert Report,
Haidt has impeccable credentials as one of the leading translators of the findings of
neuroscience into the popular media.5 Here we focus on Haidt’s landmark book, The
Righteous Mind, which explores (per its promo page) “one of the hottest topics in the
sciences: morality.” Reaching number six on The New York Times best-seller list in
2012, it has been translated into multiple languages; excerpts from the book have also
been published as separate products in both English and translations.
Haidt is measured and thoughtful in his reading of morality, politics, and psychology,
and careful at interpreting the science. He draws widely from an array of disciplines
spanning philosophy, history, politics, evolutionary biology, cross-cultural studies of
moral attitudes, and experimental psychology, in addition to neurobiological studies.6
As such, his work depends less upon the technological dimensions of neuroscientific
research. But, as with our previous figures, he deftly correlates neuroscientific findings
with material from the other literatures, drawing inferences that ground social science
theories in genes and brains. Thus, The Righteous Mind is a synthetic work; it should be
thought of less as a work of science and more as a work of public philosophy.
The book is divided into three parts, each of which accumulates evidence for three
claims about morality and politics. These claims are, as the section titles indicate:

Principle 1: Intuitions Come First, Strategic Reasoning Second

Principle 2: There’s More to Morality than Harm and Fairness
Principle 3: Morality Binds and Blinds.7
80 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

The upshot of these principles is that morality and politics is primarily a function
of emotions, of moral intuition—what Haidt calls moral tastes—and less so about
rational deliberation. He calls his moral psychology a social intuitionist model. In order
to unpack this model, we will spend more time focusing on Haidt’s second principle,
but we will briefly describe the evidence that he garners for each claim. We will show
that his work is built on a theory of moral taste, while marginalizing rational moral
agency and emphasizing the automaticity of much of moral behavior.
For each of his principles, Haidt proposes and deploys a metaphor. For his first
principle, “intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second,” the corresponding
metaphor is the elephant and the rider: “the mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant,
and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant.”8 The rider is reason or rationality, and
the elephant is moral emotion or taste. Haidt claims that for the past four centuries,
morality has gotten this metaphor backward. Especially since the Enlightenment,
theories of morality, he claims, have been too centered on rationality, as epitomized
in the extreme rationalism of both Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham. Setting aside
his problematic claims about Jeremy Bentham, Haidt argues that morality has been the
product of Western society’s emphasis upon reason and the individual—or, in other
words, the rider.9 He finds this misunderstanding not only in moral philosophy but in
developmental and moral psychology as well, taking to task luminaries like Jean Piaget
and Lawrence Kohlberg, who have focused primarily on the cognitive development of
children.10
For Haidt, this idea that morality is primarily about cognition is an artifact of
Western individualism. He argues instead that morality is primarily driven by group
identity and moral intuitions or “gut feelings.”11 As the centerpiece of this section, Haidt
cites a series of psychological studies showing that cross-culturally (or “universally”)
many decisions are made strictly based on disgust or a violation of some rule that
appears not to have any aspect of harm.12 In these studies, subjects were presented with
behavior many might deem disgusting and asked if they found it moral or immoral.
For example, they might be presented with scenarios like this: “A man goes to the
supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has
sexual intercourse with it. He then cooks and eats it.”13 The subjects were then asked
about the morality of the man’s actions and challenged as to why they found the action
immoral. Other studies asked subjects to reflect on the morality of particular scenarios
while standing next to foul-smelling things—like dog excrement—to see if subtle
negative sensory (read: emotional) contexts shape people’s moral deliberations. For
Haidt, these studies indicate that certain levels of disgust—and therefore unconscious
emotional responses—can change how we behave and what we think about the
morality of a situation.
The scenarios used in these studies were carefully crafted to ensure: (1) that they
included an action which typically registers to people as disgusting; and (2) that by
that action no harm was done to the actor or to another person. The man who has
sex with his store-bought chicken before he eats it is not causing harm to himself,
others, or the chicken.14 Yet many respondents, even those in Western societies, will
make a moral judgment that this behavior is wrong. Others will initially claim it to
be wrong, but they will gradually come to realize that they cannot figure out what is
 
Popular (Neuro)Science 81

wrong about it, and subsequently conclude that they just don’t like it. In Western liberal
or libertarian societies, many more respondents will conclude that the behavior is odd
but not necessarily a moral failing on the part of the man.
Haidt concludes from such studies that our sense of right and wrong has more to
do with feelings, like disgust, than with rationality, and seems more grounded in the
emotional centers of our brains, rather than the rational and cognitive centers. He thus
concludes:

the mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the
elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning—the stream of words and images
of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental
processes—the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most
of our behavior.15

In other words, our moral judgments are primarily driven by the way the elephant—
our feelings of disgust and desire—intuitively perceives and responds to a situation;
we are only marginally able to control the elephant with our rationality. Drawing
on cross-cultural studies, he claims that these feelings of disgust or desire are innate
and not strictly speaking cultural. However, culture can and does shape our moral
deliberations because most Westerners participating in these studies will eventually
conclude that the behavior is not immoral because no one is harmed. Thus, culture has
something to do with the final assessment of the behavior.
Haidt notes that, in fact, if morality were primarily a function of reason, the world
would be full of psychopaths. “Psychopaths,” he asserts, “reason but don’t feel . . . babies
feel, but don’t reason.”16 In other words, psychopaths reason perfectly but lack any sign
of empathy. It is the empathic dimension, for Haidt, that makes an action moral.

Psychopathy does not appear to be caused by poor mothering or early trauma, or

to have any other nurture-based explanation. It’s a genetically heritable condition17
that creates brains that are unmoved by the needs, suffering, or dignity of others.18
The elephant doesn’t respond with the slightest lean to the gravest injustice. The
rider is perfectly normal—he does strategic reasoning quite well. But the rider’s job
is to serve the elephant, not to act as a moral compass.19

Haidt’s claim that psychopathy is not based in nurture seems only partially correct in
light of studies by Caspi et al. and by Sadeh et al., which we cited in Chapters 1 and
2. Also note that his thinking follows the typical bottom-up causal arrow, from genes
to brains to behavior. Thus, “[i]ntuitions come first, and strategic reasoning comes
second,” functioning more like a press secretary (a second metaphor he deploys
frequently throughout the book), attempting to give explanations for the way that one
has behaved, but only after the fact.
In Part II of The Righteous Mind, Haidt turns to his second principle: “there’s more
to morality than harm and fairness.”20 This second principle spotlights a key problem
of generalization in moral psychology and much of neuroscience: can we conclude
universally valid moral insights from a predominantly Western scientific and
82 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

philosophical framework deployed primarily on Western subjects? Here Haidt makes

an important cultural observation. He notes that Western, Educated, Industrialized,
Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies21 have, at least since the 1700s, privileged
normative moral frameworks focused on harms and fairness, the two great moral
principles from modern Western thought. Such mores, Haidt claims, correlate with
individualism. Haidt points to evidence from the cross-cultural moral psychological
literature, showing that in more traditional sociocentric cultures, harm and fairness
are only two moral intuitions, embedded within a wider embrace of more dominant
moral commitments, particularly loyalty, authority, and sanctity.22 As we suggested
at the end of Chapter 2, if moral psychological and neuroscientific studies were to
be conducted in non-WEIRD cultures, other moral principles would likely emerge
as operative, principles more concerned with the social rather than an individualist
dimension.23 Yet, he again asserts that these non-Western moral principles are equally
not so much rules but rather intuitions grounded in the affective or emotion centers
of the brain. In other words, the brain’s emotional centers, not its rational centers, are
the primary drivers.
In fact, for Haidt, it is a misnomer to even refer to notions of fairness (justice) or
harm as principles. Rather, he maintains that Western moral psychology has uncovered
fairness and harm as important moral tastes. The concept of moral tastes provides
the core of Part II of The Righteous Mind. By moral tastes, Haidt means something
akin to the notion of “moral senses” advocated by eighteenth-century-philosopher
David Hume. As we will see in Chapter 6, for Hume, sense experience could be both
pleasurable or noxious; similarly, Haidt’s moral tastes also appear in binaries. Like our
other five senses, Haidt asserts that our moral tastes are biologically grounded, though
he is not interested in pinpointing their exact neural location, seeing them as primarily
psychological concepts.
In his seventh chapter, “The Moral Foundations of Politics,” Haidt identifies and
discusses at length each of five moral tastes: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/
Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation. After an interlude describing his
work correlating these tastes with people’s stated political preferences in the tumultuous
US context from 2005 to 2011, he adds in his eighth chapter “The Conservative
Advantage” a sixth taste: Liberty/Oppression. He outlines how each of these moral
tastes has led to evolutionary survival benefit for the contemporary human animal, and
then postulates how they now serve as a foundation for morality and politics. Thus, he
uses the phrases “moral taste” and “moral foundation” interchangeably.
As noted, in modern Western liberal democracies two tastes—Care/Harm and
Fairness/Cheating—rise above the others. The Care foundation allows the human
animal to survive in the face of evolutionary pressures. Whereas many organisms
survive by producing numerous offspring, humans survive by investing more energy
in the form of care in each individual offspring.24 The Fairness/Cheating foundation
also promotes survival in the face of evolutionary threats by allowing social bonds to
overcome the so-called “selfish gene” phenomenon. Rather than a human acting solely
to save his own hide or the hides of those who share his own particular genes, certain
socially active emotional pressures “triggered” by acts of reciprocity and cooperation
keep the human from acting selfishly. Haidt’s language here is important to hear:
 
Popular (Neuro)Science 83

For millions of years, our ancestors faced the adaptive challenge of reaping these
benefits without getting suckered. Those whose moral emotions compelled them
to play “tit for tat” reaped more of these benefits than those who played any other
strategy, such as “help anyone who needs it” (which invites exploitation), or “take
but don’t give” (which can work just once with each person; pretty soon nobody’s
willing to share pie with you).25

Such practices of exchange (or economics), Haidt argues, allowed humans to move
beyond the “selfish gene” to altruism that promoted group survival.26 Given the
political contingencies in the West, where individualism reigns supreme but where
political agreements also navigate (in theory) between extreme individualism and
group survival, it is no wonder that Care/Harm and Fairness/Cheating are essential
to Western political arrangements, and thus they take precedence in Western moral
psychology. Care and fairness are prosocial; harm and cheating are antisocial.
While these two moral tastes take precedence in the West, all six moral tastes
remain operative and likewise ground moral beliefs and political commitments. The
Loyalty/Betrayal foundation has evolutionary benefit in that loyalty permits group
bonding, and therefore promotes survival in the face of threat. Betrayal is thought
to be one of the most hurtful of emotions. The strong emotional response to betrayal
and the subsequent judgment of the community might force the perpetrator out of
the community. Thus, the strong desire to avoid the negative emotional response to
betrayal acts to encourage loyalty, and the exclusion from the community, might give
an evolutionary selection benefit to those who remain loyal.27
Like chimpanzees, humans also demonstrate deference to authority, and we
expect leaders to demonstrate some sort of responsibility to care for those lower
in the hierarchy, which in turn encourages loyalty. However, overly authoritarian
leaders trigger the negative side of the Authority/Subversion foundation, inciting
subversion and revolt giving group members the ability to take charge when a leader
has overstepped his bounds. This can help to keep leaders from becoming tyrannical.
The balance between the two poles of this moral taste helps to keep group cohesion.28
Haidt’s fifth moral/political foundation is the Sanctity/Degradation taste. This
foundation, he claims, is the hardest for Westerners to understand and accept. It is
born out of seeing certain aspects of human life as dignified and worthy of praise, or
as degrading and thus disgusting. Haidt notes that there is some evolutionary benefit
to this foundation, like steering clear of certain foods that may be dangerous or the
setting aside of bodily wastes. But there is also the positive element as well, namely, the
setting apart of some aspects of life, or some culturally important group of people, as
sacred. These sacred people—shamans, for example—are set aside for certain kinds of
tasks that will in turn promote social cohesion. This foundation also gives us a sense of
the importance of human beings as set apart from other animals. For instance, eating
another human being elicits disgust, even if done out of a need to survive. This action
triggers a sense of the violation of the sacred.29
Haidt’s sixth moral/political foundation—which he developed after attempting to
operationalize the first five—is also posited as downstream in evolutionary history. As
humans began to evolve such that they could use tools—or more particularly weapons—
84 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

and as they evolved language, he speculates that the predisposition for the powerful to
lead became less of an evolutionary plus for survival. With the development of weapons
and linguistic cooperation, concentrated power was less necessary for survival, and
thus the Liberty/Oppression foundation emerged. This foundation allows people to
notice and to resent crass domination; it creates bonds between the oppressed such
that they can organize and attempt to overthrow the tyrant. According to Haidt, “[t]his
foundation supports the egalitarianism and antiauthoritarianism of the left, as well as
the don’t-tread-on-me and give-me-liberty antigovernment anger of libertarians and
some conservatives.”30 Thus the political arrangements in technologically advanced
cultures give birth to a new moral taste, according to Haidt.
These political bonds, to which all the tastes contribute, gives rise to Haidt’s
third principle: “[m]orality binds and blinds.” In Part III, to capture this principle, he
deploys a third metaphor: “human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee,”
meaning that we form troops or ideological camps and promote those camps over
cooperation with other camps. Here he is attempting to reclaim and explain one of
Darwin’s insights, “that morality was an adaptation that evolved by natural selection
operating at the individual level and at the group level. Tribes with more virtuous
members replaced tribes with more selfish members.”31 Haidt does not define what he
means by “virtuous” here, but we suspect that here, as for the thinkers we discussed
in Chapter 2, virtuous behavior is equivalent to prosocial behavior. He goes on to
describe the group-level genetic adaptations for “ultrasociality,” “group-mindedness,”
and “shared intentionality” that must be considered.32
He is challenging here those like Richard Dawkins and George Williams who
argue that the “free rider problem” disproves group selection. But he pushes Darwin
even further to argue for what he calls “the hive switch”: “the ability (under special
circumstances) to transcend self-interest and lose ourselves (temporarily and
ecstatically) in something larger than ourselves.”33 To theorize this collective emotional
experience, he turns to sociologist Emil Durkheim, who describes how participation
in group rituals generates an experience of self-transcendence wherein people lose a
sense of themselves as individuals, become “simply part of a whole.” Durkheim names
this experience of self-transcendence as the sacred, crediting it for the widespread
phenomenon of religion.34 Religion, for Haidt, was one way of binding us together as
teams to meet the evolutionary vicissitudes at hand:

Religions and righteous minds had been coevolving, culturally and genetically, for
tens of thousands of years before the Holocene era, and both kinds of evolution
sped up when agriculture presented new challenges and opportunities.35

For Haidt, religion is not necessary; nature, raves, sporting events, drugs (like mescaline
and LSD) can generate the same experience. This newly evolved ability to hive-switch is
rooted in “neurons, neurotransmitters, and hormones.”36 Lead candidates are oxytocin
and mirror neurons: “Oxytocin bonds people to their groups, not to all of humanity.
Mirror neurons help people empathize with others, but particularly those that share
their moral matrix.”37 These enable “the suppression of free riders” and the promotion
of prosociality.
 
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However, this team approach creates insiders and outsiders, and thus the morality
built up around religion also “blinds people to the motives and morals of their
opponents.”38 It “binds us,” he claims, “into ideological teams that fight each other as
though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to
the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to
say.”39 Here Haidt suggests we are essentially geared to perceive threats to our group
and to respond vigorously to those threats to improve survival, in much the same
way that a chimpanzee troop might in order to overcome a threat. However, we get
ensnared in the “moral matrix” of the group and do not reach out beyond ideological
partners. He ends the book for a call to cooperation, that we all become more bee-like,
widening the net to include the insights of others who have a different set of operative
moral tastes.
In the end, Haidt’s descriptive project is admirable, and it problematizes much that
is taken for granted in WEIRD societies. His explanation of the battles of political
partisans can be refreshing, and we appreciate his attempt to advocate for a more civil
politics based on solidarity, cooperation, mutual understanding, and dialogue.
Haidt not only draws on the literature represented in our first two chapters, but
embodies much of what we encountered there. He clearly exemplifies Fleck’s account
of how “facts” move from the emerging neuroscientific thought-community to the
broadest kind of thought-community, namely, society. Trained as social and moral
psychologist, he draws from the neurobiological sciences to amplify the findings of the
neurosciences in public consciousness. Not only does he draw from the psychology
and neurobiology—he draws from an almost dizzying array of subdisciplines. In doing
so, he moves quickly, relying on inferences, correlations, and suggestive connections
rather than hard evidence. He amplifies the concern we raised in Chapter 1 about
methodology, by using the ready-made conceptual definitions, which as we showed
emerge from the shared assumptions of social scientists and the broader society.
Prosociality is a stand-in for virtue; antisociality is a stand-in for vice.
He also shares the same difficulties encountered earlier in conceptualizing
“morality.” For example, when he begins to try to map political liberals and political
conservatives onto his six “tastes” or “foundations,” his research leads him to conclude
that political liberals tend to draw on three moral tastes—the Care/Harm, Fairness/
Cheating, and Liberty/Oppression tastes—where political conservatives tend to draw
from all six.40 Yet as he discusses how people from different camps align with these
“foundations,” he is forced to incorporate into each axis quite opposite elements. For
example, as he notes,

Everyone—left, right, and center—cares about Liberty/Oppression, but each

political faction cares in a different way. In the contemporary United States,
liberals are most concerned about the rights of certain vulnerable groups (e.g.,
racial minorities, children, animals), and they look to government to defend the
weak against oppression by the strong. Conservatives, in contrast, hold more
traditional ideas of liberty as the right to be left alone, and they often resent liberal
programs that use government to infringe on their liberties in order to protect the
groups that liberals care most about.41
86 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

He is attempting to strike a neutral stance, but it is also clear that the conceptual
funneling process has not sufficiently refined his conceptual or operational definitions.
After all, liberty implies more than a small rider atop the emotional elephant.
As with most of our interlocutors in the first two chapters, Haidt shares the belief
that the arrow of causation moves, in his words, “From Genes to Moral Matrices.” In
fact, to ensure that the point is not missed, he outlines this causal vector as a three-step
sequence, called out as subheads in his final chapter—“Step 1: Genes Make Brains,”
“Step 2: Traits Guide Children along Different Paths,” and “Step 3: People Construct
Life Narratives.”42 These narratives, he notes, “are not necessarily true stories,” but they
are “saturated with morality” and ground political identities.
As with his counterparts, Haidt moves from his aggregated findings from the
array of sciences to explore implications not only for individual persons but for the
broadest possible subject: the body politic. In doing so, he is careful to adopt an air of
neutrality with regard to any political position. He finds strengths and weaknesses in
both liberal thinkers and conservative thinkers.43 But as he moves into his final chapter,
his allegiances begin to appear, particularly his allegiance to capitalism.44 Corporations
are cited earlier as an exemplar of “hives at work,” “new superorganisms” that can be
sites where individuals become “united into one body” and—under transformational
leadership—can achieve a certain level of transcendence.45 He shifts from a discussion
of morality to one of “moral capital,” citing Edmund Burke, Frederick Hayek, and
Thomas Sowell.46 He argues at length the claim that “Markets are Miraculous,”47
puzzles over liberals’ rejection of Adam Smith, and returns repeatedly to a theme that
runs through the book, that of “the free rider” problem.
In fact, his next project, which he envisages as “a sequel to The Righteous Mind, will
explore the relationship between capitalism and morality.”48 His goal is to “depolarize
capitalism,” for “if economic conversations become less polarized and more pragmatic,
economic policies will get better and prosperity will rise.” Toward this end he has
already begun to explore capitalism’s moral narratives, its relationship to “moral
evolution,” and “How Capitalism Changes Conscience.”49 He has also helped launch
EthicalSystems, Inc., which provides training and consulting services to businesses and
other organizations.
Again, despite his claims of moral neutrality, Haidt himself remains dependent
upon a moral anthropology that originates in the West. His appeal to moral tastes
places him firmly in the British empiricist tradition of moral philosophy, in line with
Adam Smith, David Hume, and Frances Hutcheson, as we will describe in chapter
six. Political and moral foundations arise in moral intuitions or moral sense or, as
he prefers, moral tastes. Haidt credits Hume with metaphor, which was omitted from
the third and subsequent editions of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
(1748):

Morality is nothing in the abstract Nature of Things, but is entirely relative to the
Sentiment or mental Taste of each particular Being; in the same Manner as the
Distinctions of sweet and bitter, hot and cold, arise from the particular feeling of
each Sense or Organ. Moral Perceptions therefore, ought not to be class’d with the
Operations of the Understanding, but with the Tastes or Sentiments.50
 
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Like Hume, Haidt does not place virtue in human nature but holds that it is derivative
from sense perception, namely, pleasure and pain. “The Righteous Mind,” Haidt claims,
is unapologetically “evidence for Hume’s claim . . . [written] in 1739 that ‘reason is, and
ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office
than to serve and obey them.’”51 He pays homage to Hume throughout the book.
Thus, to say that Haidt has little place for rational moral agency would be an
understatement. He refers to those who would reverse Hume’s claim to be engaged in
“the ultimate rationalist fantasy” or better laboring under a “rationalist delusion”;52 per
Hume, reason is “only fit to be the servant of the passions.”53 Rather than rationality
guiding our moral behaviors, we find that moral tastes, acting independently from a
rational free will, are foundational. Combined, these moral tastes ground our moral
and political arrangements and together promote the survival of the group in the face
of threats from nature or other animal and human aggressors. Haidt does not explore
whether political systems exert evolutionary pressures, nor does he give an explanation
for how evolutionary pressures resulted in these pairs of moral tastes. He does not
touch on whether all the tastes are fixed for the species or how political systems act
to enculturate these tastes and promote certain tastes over others. He also does not
explore whether certain tastes might work within some political systems and not work
so well in others. Moreover, he does not give any sense of whether or how the rational
mind might exert pressure on the moral tastes. For instance, the rational mind might
be fully active in tamping down the emotional content of the moral tastes, thus itself
exerting an evolutionary pressure.
In the traditional construal of the virtues, the rational mind works to habituate one’s
behaviors such that the emotional dimension does not outrun the rational dimension.
The rider, to continue Haidt’s metaphor, tames the elephant.54 Haidt is not alone in
his reliance on Hume. As noted by Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, Hume’s theory
of moral sentiments animates much of the Western cultural milieu when it comes to
moral, political, and economic thinking. Haidt, as well as Sam Harris and Paul Zak,
picks up this extant theory of moral sentiment that animates much of Western politics
and economics. In this sense, other popularizers of neuroscience do not stray far from
Haidt. Thus, the milieu of the late modern West shapes what it is possible for a moral
psychologist like Haidt to say. Whereas Haidt desires only to describe moral tastes, in
a rather un-Humean move, two other thinkers are willing to say what ought to be the
case based on the findings of neuroscience.

Harris’s Moral Landscape: Toward a Moral Physics

One of the most prolific popularizers of the neuroscience of morality is Sam Harris.
Harris, trained as a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, was for ten years the CEO
of Project Reason, a nonprofit foundation he co-founded, which was “devoted to
spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society.”55 Like Haidt, Harris is a
frequent voice on the public intellectual circuit, regularly gracing the pages of major
newspapers, blogs, and presenting two TED talks.56 Per his own website, Harris has
authored five New York Times best sellers, been translated into twenty languages, hosts
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the “Making Sense” podcast that was selected by Apple as one of the “iTunes Best” and
has won a Webby Award for best podcast in the category Science and Education.
Harris’s primary agenda, as one of the leading figures in the New Atheism
movement, is to debunk religion. Where Haidt (and, as we shall see, Paul Zak) sees
religion as having played a powerful, functional role binding humans together, Harris
sees religion as primarily blinding humans to the realities of morality. Harris’s early
work explored the neurobiology of religious belief.57 He has continued to champion
this project in a series of books, including The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the
Future of Reason, which won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction, Letter to a Christian
Nation, and Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion.58 Harris’s scathing
comments on religion have not been limited to Christianity; he has been accused of
Islamophobia and inciting violence toward Muslims.59
It is difficult to tease Harris’s work on the neuroscience of morality apart from his
agenda to debunk religion. In fact, Harris sees them as two sides of the same coin. While
we will focus primarily on the ways in which he translates neuroscientific findings
regarding morality into public discourse, his constructive work is always in dialogue
with religion, and thus we will also be referencing some of his work on religion. We
take as exemplars his 2010 book The Moral Landscape, as well as The End of Faith and
his short book Free Will published in 2012.60
In The Moral Landscape Harris sets out to convince a public benighted by religion
that the real grounds for articulating a true science of morality can only be found in
reason and experiment. Despite this conviction, he does not appeal to scientific literature
directly, but instead writes in the spirit of materialist science; nor does he do actual
neurobiology or even work in the human sciences. His writings, thus, are works of
public philosophy more than works of actual neuroscience.61 Nonetheless, he identifies
as a neuroscientist, presents his work as that of neuroscience, and is acknowledged as
such by the public neuroscientific community. Neuroscience is his thought-community.
While Harris claims that his account of human moral behavior is objectively true, as
we will demonstrate, he simultaneously (and contradictorily) remains deeply emotivist
and deeply deterministic. Moreover, when pressed, it becomes clear that his putatively
objective morality serves a more foundational commitment to a kind of Western
exceptionalism. In illustrating this, we will again show how the neurosciences are
informed by a certain late modern, Western understanding of political economy.
Harris’s fundamental thesis in The Moral Landscape is that “human well-being
entirely depends on events in the world and on states of the human brain.”62 By studying
the brain, we can discover the neuroscientific facts that ought to inform human
values.63 Equipped with a detailed map of these morally relevant brain states, the
neurosciences can ground an objective, scientific, and universal account of morality.
This neuroscientific study of morality, thus, can be as certain as the study of physics.
Because this moral physics is discoverable, Harris eschews moral relativism and moral
pluralism. Moral truth is scientific truth. If we cannot say that something is wrong,
how can we ever be outraged at something like the attacks on the World Trade Centers?
Thus for Harris, science provides not only descriptive information (which for many
researchers is the only legitimate project); it can also serve the normative project as
well. Studying neuroscience should:
 
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help us understand what we should do and should want—and, therefore, what

other people should do and should want in order to live the best lives possible. My
claim is that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, just as there are
right and wrong answers to questions of physics, and such answers may one day
fall within reach of the maturing sciences of the mind.64

Science, thus, not only solves the problem of moral pluralism or relativism; more
importantly, it frees us from moralities based in faith commitments.
While admitting that all science is founded on some form of belief or intuition, Harris
is quick to point out the difference between faith—which he defines as an unfounded
religious belief—and belief founded on empiricism. “Belief, in the epistemic sense—
that is, belief that aims at representing our knowledge about the world—requires that
we believe a given proposition to be true, not merely that we wish it to be so.”65 He
notes that once we see that our beliefs are really attempts to represent the world, “we
see that they must stand in right relationship to the world to be valid.”66 Thus, beliefs
are justified insofar as we can give reasons grounded in the empirically observable
world. Any belief, then, that originates from the received wisdom of the past, anything
that depends on “faith,” is a problem. By definition, since religious faith can never be
empirically anchored, moral precepts of religious faith are not, in fact, moral. Religious
faith is an epistemological black hole, sucking the scientific light of truth out of the
world. It is “still the mother of hatred here, as it is wherever people define their moral
identities in religious terms.”67
Freed from religion, what then is the empirical starting point for morality? Since all
science begins in sense experience, all moral science should begin in the relevant moral
senses. For Harris, these are the sense experiences of pleasure and pain. The constitution
of moral truth, in other words, must begin in the morally salient intuitions. He notes:

A rational approach to ethics becomes possible once we realize that the questions of
right and wrong are really questions about the happiness and suffering of sentient
creatures. If we are in a position to affect the happiness or suffering of others, we
have ethical responsibilities toward them—and many of these responsibilities are
so grave as to become matters of civil and criminal law. Taking happiness and
suffering as our starting point, we can see that much of what people worry about
under the guise of morality has nothing to do with the subject.68

Thus, he grounds moral knowledge in the empirical—the phenomenal states of pleasure

and pain. From there, we can work backward to discover the brain states that are
responsible for the sensations of pleasure and pain, a.k.a. the neurobiological experience
of happiness or suffering. By understanding how the objective brain produces such
experiences, we can then extrapolate to the ways we can promote pleasure and reduce
pain, which is the sum total of morality. Correlatively or conversely, since we can figure
out what states in the world might cause the brain to produce pleasurable or painful
sensations, we are capable of objectively discerning what states of affair ought to be
brought about in the world, so that they trigger the brain to produce sensations of
pleasure and experiences of happiness.
90 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

Harris does not propose how one derives axiological facts from states in the world
and states in the brain, but he does derive a set of imperatives from sensations of pleasure
and pain. Wedding his thin utilitarianism to a version of the Kantian imperative, he
asserts that: insofar as other human brains are capable of having sensations of pleasure
and pain, we ought to avoid those actions that induce pain and promote those states of
affairs that induce pleasure. The morally salutary imperative—the generalizable moral
claim—emerges from the empirically verifiable fact that brains of similarly situated
others can have sense experiences of pleasure and pain. A person should be an end in
herself insofar as she can have positive emotions of happiness.
The generalization from particulars knows no limit. The happiness of another—
even a distant other with whom one has no contact, but of whose suffering one is
aware—becomes part of one’s responsibility. This obligation emerges out of the desire
to have pleasurable sensations oneself, which one will have if one produces pleasurable
sensations in another. Now, through science, a person knows that certain actions will
increase the amount of happiness in the brain states of another, and because this will
increase the amount of pleasure she feels, an obligation emerges. “Reason,” for Harris,
“is nothing less than the guardian of love.”69 Love seems here to mean the desire to give
pleasurable sensations not only to those close to one’s personal circle but to all similarly
situated beings.
“[B]ecause moral concerns translate into facts about how our thoughts and
behaviors affect the well-being of conscious creatures like ourselves,”70 Harris sees
himself as a moral realist. If there are moral facts, and facts can be correct or wrong,
then we can know which norms, actions, and behaviors are true, correct, good actions
and which are false, incorrect, bad.71 “Moral view A is truer than moral view B, if A
entails a more accurate understanding of the connections between human thoughts/
intentions/behavior and human well-being.”72 Thus, we have the moral physics—the
true science of morality—around which society should be organized.
For Kant, freedom was the a priori condition of possibility for any action to be moral.
Yet in Harris’s moral physics, agential free will disappears. Scientifically discoverable
causes of action precede our becoming aware that we have chosen. Thoughts, moods,
and desires spring up for subjectively inscrutable reasons.

Why did I use the term “inscrutable” in the previous sentence? I must confess
that I do not know. Was I free to do otherwise? What could such a claim possibly
mean? Why, after all, didn’t the word “opaque” come to mind? Well, it just didn’t—
and now that it vies for a place on the page, I find that I am still partial to my
original choice. Am I free with respect to this preference? Am I free to feel that
“opaque” is the better word, when I just do not feel that it is the better word? Am I
free to change my mind? Of course not. It can only change me.73

For Harris, our belief in free will arises only out of ignorance of prior causes; it is a
trick of consciousness. Our behavioral action begins prior to our awareness of any
choice or reason to act. We are only aware of the conscious thoughts, not of the series
of neurophysiological causes—the real causes—that have commenced prior to the
awareness of thoughts. Thus, we have the illusion that there is an “I” choosing.
 
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Accordingly, for Harris, not unlike Haidt, giving reasons for one’s action is a
post hoc endeavor, solely an interpretation laid over the real cause of our action. To
illustrate how causation is initiated prior to thinking in moral behavior, Harris outlines
a series of cases in which one person kills another person. He challenges readers to try
to identify the moral culpability of various agents. The cases are as follows:

1. A 4-year-old playing with a gun, accidently shooting someone.

2. A 12-year-old playing with a gun accidently shooting someone.
3. A 25-year-old who kills someone because he had been abused as a child.
4. A 25-year-old who killed someone for the fun of it.
5. A 25-year-old with a tumor in his medial pre-frontal cortex, who killed someone.

Harris’s point here is to show the degree to which culpability could be extended; in all
but one case (case 4), many are willing to say that the actor was not responsible. Yet,
many would also see the 25-year old who killed for the fun of it as psychopathic.74
Harris concludes: “It seems to me that we need not have any illusions about a causal
agent living within the human mind to condemn such a mind as unethical, negligent,
or even evil, and therefore liable to occasion further harm.”75
Thus, moral deliberation and our desire to assign moral culpability is a post hoc
process and a deception of our consciousness; we only become aware at a moment after
the preconscious action has begun.

But why is the conscious decision to do another person harm particularly

blameworthy? Because consciousness is, among other things, the context in which
our intentions become completely available to us. What we do subsequent to
conscious planning tends to most fully reflect the global properties of our minds—
our beliefs, desires, goals, prejudices, etc. If, after weeks of deliberation, library
research, and debate with your friends, you still decide to kill the king—well, then
killing the king really reflects the sort of person you are. Consequently, it makes
sense for the rest of society to worry about you.76

This notion of harm done to the rest of society is where Harris’s moral physics becomes
a social mechanics of control.
With regard to those displaying “antisocial” personalities, he has no sense of an
essential agent, merely a concatenation of forces that seem to coalesce around a settled
voluntary intention, and which taken together seem to display a predisposition to
problematic actions. Moral evaluation of such persons is not anchored on the essential
agent but rather on how that agent affects the stability of the polis/society, measured
by the amount of subjective suffering that he causes. Harris continues: “While viewing
human beings as forces of nature does not prevent us from thinking in terms of moral
responsibility, it does call the logic of retribution into question.”77 If it were the case
that psychopathy could be cured via neurobiological treatment, then “our retributive
impulse [would be] profoundly flawed,”78 since the psychopath does not consciously will
their evil. In fact, Harris moves a step further and claims that “the urge for retribution,
therefore, seems to depend upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human
92 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

behavior.”79 Our urge for retribution is not so much a moral failure as it is an epistemic
one. Should we have the necessary scientific knowledge to diagnosis the human brain
correctly, our sense for retribution will follow in lockstep. In general, armed with
neuroscientific knowledge of moral norms, we will be equipped to relieve the human
estate of suffering and to promote conditions which create brain states which produced
subjective experiences of happiness. As he notes: “Clearly, such insights could help us
to improve the quality of human life—and this is where academic debate ends and
choices affecting the lives of millions of people begin.”80
We find several features of Harris’s popular neuroscience confusing, scientifically,
philosophically, and politically. First, he is a consequentialist that places heavy emphasis
on pleasure as the ground of morality and pain as the ground of immorality. It appears
that his notion of good arises here. By knowing what states of affairs in the world cause
pleasurable or painful phenomenal states, we can know morally what out to be done
and what we ought to avoid doing. Yet, oddly, these his moral scheme is not concerned
so much with these phenomenal states, because the really real aspects of pleasure and
pain are not phenomenal, but are instead found in the brain states that seem at best to
be coincident with the phenomenal states. In his commitment to rational empiricism,
he does not unpack the mystery of sentience.
This leads to a second problem. If our experience of free will is a trick of our
phenomenal conscious experience, then it would seem that pleasure and pain might
also be tricks of consciousness. He seems to suggest that phenomenal experience is
pretty closely linked to brain states without ever proving it—he simply asserts it as a
correlation. Moreover, this correlation would not hold for those who are immoral, or
for us when we commit immoral actions. Most often in these situations, agents act
with blatant disregard for the pleasure and pain of other sentient creatures, and thus
they create states of affairs in the world that increase pain and reduce pleasure, even
while it may in fact increase pleasure for themselves. Thus, the correlation between the
phenomenal experience of moral agency and the brain states collapses.
Third, as we saw earlier, for Harris psychopaths are not free to inflict pain as there
is no moral agency. Their brains are not functioning properly. If we cannot get their
brains to function properly either through remediation or through neuroscientific
techniques, then they should be removed from society, not punished by society. Yet
in fact, there are no free-willed agents at all. And if so, there are no free-willed agents
to construct the morality for society. Rather, morality is to be created and enforced,
but not created by individuals and enforced upon themselves, but by society, where
remediation schemes constructed by the general will of society (and not the individual
wills of agents) become the enforcers of the morality.
Thus, Harris’s moral physics gives rise to a kind of social mechanics that seems
rather totalitarian in its function. The dictates of neuroscience, seeking to understand
the ways that more general happiness can be created for more individuals in society,
give birth to the dictates of the general will of society.

If our well-being depends upon the interaction between events in our brains and
events in the world, and there are better and worse ways to secure it, then some
cultures will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others; some
 
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political persuasions will be more enlightened than others; and some world views
will be mistaken in ways that cause needless human misery.81

Where Haidt thinks that we can understand the moral tastes of humans, we can
begin the work of decreasing our blindness and increasing what binds us together,
Harris creates a social mechanics out of his moral physics. What cannot be controlled
through techno-scientific manipulation of brains ought to be controlled through
social mechanisms. Polis emerges from bios, that just is the case; but given that, on
Harris’s account, some civilizations are better than others, the polis ought to intervene
on bodies. Harris’s social mechanics looks very much like the modern secular West
precisely because it has been formed by that same social imaginary. That is to say,
Harris’s thought-community is thoroughly that of Western political economy that seeks
to shape behaviors via political and economic nudges. As we shall see more fully in the
next section, it is the market that binds us together morally, and as neuroeconomist
Paul Zak shows us, it is neurobiology, specifically oxytocin that grounds markets
biologically.

Zak’s Moral Molecule: Sex,

Religion, and Political Economy
If reason is love’s guardian, as suggested by Harris, then Paul Zak thinks he has found
the source of all love—the moral molecule, oxytocin.82 Zak, who holds a PhD in
economics, is a self-described neuroeconomist, Professor of Economics, Psychology
and Management at Claremont Graduate University, and the founding director of their
Center for Neuroeconomics Studies. His training in the neurosciences came in the form
of a one-year postdoctoral fellowship in fMRI at Harvard. As with Haidt and Harris,
Zak is a prolific media presence, ceaselessly seeking to translate neuroeconomics to
an eager public. Exceeding the others, he boasts a lengthy resume of print and media
placements, as well as a TED talk.83
Zak’s research attempts to find the neuroscientific basis for human moral and
economic behavior. In his book The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity,
he identifies the mammalian neurohormone oxytocin as the molecule responsible for
morality, as well as for love and prosperity.84 Oxytocin is synthesized in the hypothalamus
and stored in the posterior pituitary gland. It is part of the hypothalamic-pituitary-
adrenal (HPA) axis discussed in Chapter 1 that is integral for the neuroendocrine
system and seems particularly important in human behavior.
Zak’s primary location as an economist shapes his work in three interrelated ways.
First, his turn to neurobiology is driven by a desire to understand economics—both
individual economic behavior and ways of advancing economics generally.85 Second,
his work (like that of Haidt) aims to be of practical use in the business environment and
organizational management. He largely targets the practical applications of his work
toward “neuromanagement” (another term he has coined) for business environments
as well as “consumer neuroscience.”86 The mechanisms he has discovered, his website
notes, “have been used by the World Bank to stimulate prosperity in developing
94 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

countries and by businesses to enhance economic performance.”87 Third, Zak

understands morality—or love—as a kind of economic transaction.
Zak’s work on oxytocin began as an interest in the moral concept of trust as it
relates to economic theory. As we will explicate further in Chapter 4, in the economic
theory that dominated most of the twentieth century, rational self-interest ruled the
day. Ideal economic actors were portrayed as those who rationally chose between
competing alternatives in order to maximize individually determined interests. Zak’s
work seeks to challenge this understanding of both markets and agency. He draws on
both moral psychology and economic theory to argue, like Haidt, that people often
do not act rationally but emotionally and recasts markets not simply as the locus for
cutthroat individual competition but rather as arenas of trust, empathy, and altruism—
or morality, as he sees it. In fact, the market becomes for Zak the communal locus for
moral behavior, and creates the conditions for human flourishing. As a neuroscientist,
he is more explicit than most in clearly correlating his work with virtue and vice.88
As we noted earlier, such altruism, or acting prosocially at a cost to oneself, is
one aspect of human behavior that bedevils contemporary evolutionary biologists.
Whereas in the history of evolutionary theory, it was believed that selfishness would
lead to the selection of the selfish, an evolutionary account of altruism offers a way
to understand the realities of human cooperation which are necessary for building
economic relationships. Here Zak and Haidt are in harmony with one another. Yet,
if altruism is a biologically grounded phenomenon that logically must get eliminated
from the gene pool as the selfless person dies in his sacrifice for the biologically
grounded egoist, then how does altruism survive?
Zak thinks that he has found the answer in oxytocin. Human cooperation and
economic success, he claims, are mediated by oxytocin. He tests this theory in a
series of studies examining the relationship between rationality and emotionality in
economics. In one study, he uses a game created by economists called the Trust Game.
It works like this. Two Players A and B, who are anonymous to each other, are given ten
dollars and allowed to keep whatever money they have at the end of the game. Player A
is told that if he sends Player B an amount of money, the moment the money hits Player
B’s account, it will triple. So if Player A transfers two dollars to Player B’s account, then
Player B will now have sixteen dollars in his account. Player B is told that if he sends
money back, the amount sent by B will likewise triple in A’s account. Player B is given
one opportunity to reciprocate. So if he transfers four dollars into A’s account, A will
now have twenty dollars and B will be left with twelve dollars. Both come out ahead.
But if B does not transfer money, B could leave the game with sixteen dollars. The
rational self-interest theory of economics would suggest that the best thing for Player
A to do is to not transfer any money into Player B’s account. He should take the ten
dollars and run, because if B does not reciprocate, he could end up with only eight
dollars. The theory of rational self-interest would also suggest that Player B should not
reciprocate by sending Player A any money because he now has sixteen dollars. But in
the vast majority of cases where Player A trusts enough to transfer money to Player B,
Player B reciprocates and they both come out ahead. In practice, Player B seems always
to reciprocate, taking less money for himself in order to reward Player A for his initial
generosity.89
 
Popular (Neuro)Science 95

Zak sums it up thusly:

In the United States the stakes in the [Trust Game] have been as high as $1,000, and
in developing countries as high as three months’ average salary. With large sums
or small, in dollars or dinars, participants almost always behave with more trust
and trustworthiness than the established theories predict that they will. In my own
experiments with the game, 90 percent of those in the A-position (the trusters. . .)
send some money to the B-player (the recipients. . .), and about 95 percent of the
B-players send some money back, based on . . . what? Gratitude? An innate sense
of what’s right and wrong?90

Although he did not survey Players A and B to discern what motivated their decision-
making, Zak claims that the players do not have a reason for their behaviors, like
gratitude or an innate or rational sense of right and wrong. He instead looks for the
instrumental and efficient cause—that is to say—the biochemical cause. He “finds”
it in the neurochemical pathways of oxytocin. Not unlike Haidt and Harris, Zak
presumes that there is more going on than rational calculation and careful deliberation
moving toward discreet ends. In other words, there is less rational agency at work in
neuroeconomics and in altruism than we think; through the action of oxytocin, our
behaviors are more subconscious than conscious.
As he did not query the Trust Game payers as to their reasons or deliberations,
Zak likewise did not measure their oxytocin levels. Oxytocin cannot be measured
in vivo. Like his fellow neuroscientists, Zak works through inference and correlation.
In separate studies, he gives people a nasal dose of oxytocin and measures behavioral
changes; he finds that people become more generous under the influence of oxytocin.91
Zak describes two pathways for how oxytocin works. These are not actual
neurochemical pathways but rather schemata for how oxytocin might produce certain
behavioral effects.92 First, he proposes what he calls the Human Oxytocin Mediated
Empathy circuit, or the HOME circuit.93 When oxytocin is released by the pituitary
gland, it acts to increase the release of serotonin in the brain, which reduces anxiety. It
also acts to increase the release of dopamine, the “reward” hormone, which stimulates
the reward areas of the brain, which we described in some detail in Chapter 2. Thus,
oxytocin acts to reduce anxiety (which arises due to threats) and to stimulate the
pleasure/reward areas of the brain. The latter effect results in our desire to repeat the
behaviors that resulted in pleasure.94
The second “pathway” Zak names the Oxytocin Virtuous Cycle (OVC).95 In this
schema, oxytocin release leads to more empathy, which in turn leads to more altruism,
which in turn leads to more trust, which in turn leads to more oxytocin release. While
there are certainly other hormones—like testosterone and epinephrine—that act in
the opposite direction as serotonin, oxytocin, and dopamine, Zak prefers to focus
on the upside of oxytocin.96 He proposes that the HOME and OVC pathways help to
create the social bonds necessary for group cooperation and therefore for the increased
likelihood for group survival in the face of threats through more mutual cooperation
within the clan. “The virtuous cycle, with oxytocin front and center,” he avers, “is still
the glue that holds society together.”97
96 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

Due to its hypothesized role in increasing empathy and prosocial behaviors, Zak
names oxytocin “the moral molecule.” Likewise, he credits oxytocin for playing a key
role in sex and religion. In the sex act, especially at climax, oxytocin reaches its highest
levels.98 In other forms of association, especially around religious rituals and dancing,
oxytocin levels also appear to be high.99 Oxytocin, he avers, mediates connection to
other persons, to the universe, or to the ultimate things, or to God. Therefore, for
Zak, what we have traditionally named God is really just a product of oxytocin, which
stimulates neurological pathways around connection and community, as well as the
desire to keep outsiders out. In the end, God is a story concocted to rationalize the
feeling of connectedness to the group and disconnectedness to the out-group.100 Zak
describes the way in which these two desires compete for the mind and will of the
person, seeking selfishly to protect one’s own, but also needing to cooperate with
others—including outsiders—in order to better survive.
To more clearly capture Zak’s conclusions, let us outline a second set of studies that
are fundamental for his thesis, namely, a set of experiments that deploy the Ultimatum
Game. In the Ultimatum Game, the participants are again anonymous to each other.
Player 1 is given a stack of one hundred $1 bills. She is instructed to give Player 2 some
or none of the bills. Player 2 can accept or reject Player 1’s division of the bills. If Player
2 accepts the division, then both Player 1 and Player 2 get to keep their respective
number of bills. However, if Player 2 rejects the offer, neither player keeps the bills.
Thus, it is in Player 1’s best interest to offer a high enough amount such that Player
2 will not reject it, and it is in Player 2’s best interest to accept any amount offered by
Player 1, because any amount is better than no amount.
As it turns out, the players of the Ultimatum Game rarely act purely out of rational
self-interest. As said, Player 1 if acting out of rational self-interest would keep ninety-
nine dollars for herself and give only one dollar to Player 2, and Player 2 would accept it
if acting purely out of self-interest. But that does not happen. If Player 1 offers anything
less than about forty dollars, then more people in Player 2’s position reject the amount,
leaving none for either. Thus, statistically speaking most people in Player 1’s position
offer more than rational self-interest would dictate and more people in Player 2’s
position reject the offer if less than about forty dollars, meaning that they too do not
act out of rational self-interest, but out of an emotion—anger.
Equipped with such outcomes, Zak seeks to justify the morality of market economies
and the kinds of community and altruism mediated by oxytocin. Most people,
he claims, are willing to be generous only with those who are close in kinship and
friendship. Exercises like the Trust Game and Ultimatum Game, however, demonstrate
that “the marketplace actually makes people more moral, not less.”101 Trade, Zak
claims, stimulates the production of oxytocin and extends the OVC “beyond the small
circumference of kinship and friendship,” into the larger world.102 It therefore takes the
OVC to a new level, a third “pathway” that he calls the Oxytocin Prosperity Cycle.103
In this schema, oxytocin produces empathy, which produces morality, which produces
trust, which produces prosperity, which produces more oxytocin.
As such, for Zak, market exchange increases prosocial behavior.104 He presents
evidence showing that the more heavily integrated a person is into the market, the
greater their propensity to share more of their money in the Ultimatum Game. “Market
 
Popular (Neuro)Science 97

integration” is a term used by economists to mean that one is more heavily dependent
on the market rather than upon farming, or hunting and gathering, etc. to acquire
one’s necessities for living. In other words, Zak argues that the more committed one is
to the market, the more generosity increases when playing economic games. Market
integration improves generosity. According to Zak, “[s]tripped to its essentials, then
market exchange is a bit like coming together to worship a higher power,” because like
sex and ritual, participating in markets increases oxytocin, which increases morality
and generosity.105 Self-interested and altruistic behavior is in a balancing relationship.
Zak notes that “prosocial behavior, which melds individual interest with the greater
good, creates the virtuous cycle, then reinforces it in an endless loop. That’s the model
for economic behavior [Adam] Smith was talking about.”106
This analogy between ritual and markets is not accidental. The story, according to
Zak, goes that, once Adam Smith figured out that markets led to the attenuation of
self-interest as much as they depended on self-interest, we began to move away from
religion as the main promoter of connection, trust, prosocial attitudes and behaviors,
and prosperity, and we could move to markets as the great organizing forces of the
polity of modern cities and nation states. Zak states:

In ancient times cities were built around temples, and as late as the eighteenth-
century travelers in Europe or North America would have known they were
approaching a city when they saw church spires on the horizon. But shortly
thereafter, the telltale urban landmark became billowing smokestacks and
redbrick factories. During the Gilded Age before the First World War, historian
Henry Adams observed that the market had superseded religion as the central
organizing principle of all modern societies. The religious energy that had once
motivated the building of great cathedrals, he said, had morphed into a drive to
invent and acquire.107

Where once sex had promoted increased connectivity and kinship bonds, and where
once religion had promoted larger group connectivity beyond kinship, now the market
can reach beyond lands and peoples, creating one-world in which all are connected.
And this has all happened through the mediation of oxytocin. While Zak avoids the
moralizing attitudes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries toward vice (where
vice produced poverty, or poverty produced vice), now the market produces human
happiness by growing the economy through the feedback loops of oxytocin and
social cohesion. Through the mediation of oxytocin markets are created, prosperity is
created, the great city is created, political economy is created. Oxytocin is the founder
of all political economies, as well as markets and prosocial behavior.

The Political Economy of Neuroscience

The vector is now complete. We have traced the arc of the neuroscientific narrative of
morality from the inner circle of the esoteric community—neuroscientific researchers
exploring the biological science of vice and virtue—as it has been amplified by three
98 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

popularizers of neuroscience through the channels of Western culture. For evidence

that the neuroscientific thought-style has osmosed into the larger community, we have
to look no further than pages of The New York Times, where opinion columnist Thomas
Edsall recently cited Haidt’s moral foundations theory as if it were simply true: “Fights
about abortion, gay rights, gun rights etc. are less about policy than about underlying
core values, values that for many are not up for discussion or compromise because they
are deeply held — indeed, given the genetic influences on such attitudes, it’s probably
fair to say they are at least partly biologically instantiated.”108
At first glance, the three popularizers analyzed here appear to be working at different
projects. However, on closer inspection, the similarities are striking. Although Harris
was formally trained in cognitive neuroscience, and they all make strong claims
about the biological basis of morality and behavior, none of them actually conducts
neurobiological research. Haidt is primarily a social psychologist, Zak is primarily
an economist, and Harris functions now primarily as a philosopher. Nonetheless,
they adopt the method of inference and correlation we saw practiced by the patho-
neuroscientists and positive psychologists in Chapters 1 and 2. And they take it to the
next level, not simply postulating practical outcomes of particular scientific studies,
but by drawing on widely disparate sources to craft grand narratives about normative
political arrangements, social theory, and economic infrastructure.
In doing so, they amplify and make explicit two subtle presuppositions that shape
the neuroscience of morality. First, each author plants the seeds of doubt about rational
moral agency, more popularly known as free will. Harris sees no place for free will,
drawing on Libet’s experiments and by appeal to a reductive account of the brain as a
kind of machine produced by genes, and thus advocates for techno-scientific control of
disordered genes and brains. Haidt gives some role to rational agency, but his account
locates moral explanation as a post hoc rationalization of behavior motivated by
emotionality. He approximates the rider’s role in moral deliberation to be 1 percent.
Zak does not address free will directly, but the amount of explanatory power that
he grants to oxytocin suggests that oxytocin is acting behind the scenes rather than
rationality. We do things that increase oxytocin. Oxytocin binds communities together,
and produces forms of social organization that create conditions where there is more
oxytocin, more pleasure. Reason is used by the group to create more pleasure for the
group.
Secondly, our three popularizers share a common objective: to reject or reconfigure
the relationship between morality and religion. Harris, again, sides with the abolition
of religion; Haidt and Zak are more subtle, both narrating religion as simply a
manifestation of biological processes that bind people together. Haidt’s Durkheimian
account casts religion as an evolutionary adaptation that, via a biologically mediated
experience of self-transcendence, overcomes our inherently selfish genes to foster group
cohesion, increasing the fitness and survival of particular communities. Now that we
understand the function of religion, however, we find these same biological processes
stimulated by a wide variety of other social practices (e.g., LSD, raves, and sports). At
the same time, however, what we are now finding is that too much group cohesion can
be a negative, undermining the social cohesion of the wider polis. Thus, what is needed
in the twenty-first century are communal rituals that engender social cohesion but take
 
Popular (Neuro)Science 99

us to a new evolutionary level by enabling us to cross group boundaries. Zak names

the biological source of this self-transcendence: the molecule oxytocin. Oxytocin binds
families together in that it increases in sexual activity and in that it increases in breast
feeding, and in loving familial relations. It also increases in group activities like dances
and liturgical activity, and other forms of religious expression in worship. Religion,
however, is not universal. In fact, it divides.
However, there is another form of “worship” that binds more universally. It covers
the world over in the global economy. Where familial relations and religious activity
bound smaller and larger groups, we now have a new form of social organization that
can bind us all together. That form of social organization we call the market.109
How is it, we ask at this juncture, that neuroscience—or at least, the neuroscience
of morality—has become such a consistent apologist for market economics,
particularly in its twenty-first-century globalized form? Certainly, the neuroscientific
narrative of morality taps into, in a savvy way, social touchstones that enable the
translation of specialized, scientific discourse into publicly accessible language. More
deeply, neuroscience and the wider public symbiotically share a set of background
assumptions, a common set of beliefs about the relationship of the human actor to the
social milieu. At the center of these beliefs is a regnant, implicit anthropology and an
implicit political and economic landscape, one that regardless of how inchoate it may
be is shared by neuroscientists, the popularizers, and society at large. And while these
beliefs certainly enable neuroscientific findings to travel the vector from the scientific
community to society, we will argue in Part II that the vector as powerfully—but more
invisibly—moves in the other direction: that since the beginning of the modern period,
it has in fact been the regnant social, economic, and political thought-style of Western
culture—Taylor’s social imaginary—that has and continues to provide the conceptual
framework out of which contemporary neuroscience and its precursors see the world,
shape their questions, and determine their findings. To that narrative, we now turn.
 Interlude between Neuroscience
and the Economic Imaginary

Of Capitalists and Criminals

The economization of neuroscience won’t surprise those familiar with Steven Levitt
and Stephen Dubner’s 2005 best seller, Freakonomics.1 Freakonomics’ aim, as its subtitle
states clearly, is to extend economic market models to an increasingly wider array of
social interactions—sumo wrestling, drug dealing, legalized abortion, parenting,
naming children, and more. The book, and its sequels, make the case to an eager public
that the invisible hand drives not only the market but is, in fact, “the hidden side of
everything.”
In Levitt and Dubner, the academic and popularizer meld. Levitt is a highly
accoladed economist who holds the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor
of Economics at the University of Chicago, where he directs the Becker Center on
Chicago Price Theory.2 He has been awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, given to the
most influential economist under forty, been named one of Time magazine’s “100 People
Who Shape Our World,” served as former editor of the Journal of Political Economy,
and founded and directed the Center for Radical Innovation for Social Change at the
University of Chicago.3 Like Haidt, he has founded a consulting company, the TGG
Group, which brings together economists, psychologists, and behavioral scientists to
advise businesses and philanthropies in maximizing performance and profitability.4
Stephen Dubner is a journalist for The New York Times who, in 2003, reluctantly
accepted an assignment to do a story on Levitt.5 He was, at the time, working on a book
on the psychology of money. From their shared interests, the Freakonomics franchise
was born, expanding to a blog, a documentary film, a radio show and more.6
As we will see, that Levitt teaches at the University of Chicago and directs the
Becker Center is essential to the story we tell. In Part II, we are particularly interested
in unpacking the larger social imaginary that has subtly shaped the neurosciences,
especially as this has so deeply infused the neuroscientific narrative of morality. Our
study here was driven by a series of questions: Why do our popularizers, as well as
other neuroscientists, so frequently cite as their forebears the late-eighteenth-century
figures of David Hume and Adam Smith? Why is the neuroscientific narrative of
morality so keenly interested in correlating proxies for vice with socioeconomic
status or socioeconomic position? Why is this narrative so enrapt with questions of
criminality? And how does it happen, as we shall see, that the person the neuroscience
of morality finds in the brain is Homo capitalus?
 
Interlude Between Neuroscience and Economics 101

In Part II, we focus on three intertwined threads of this social imaginary—

neoliberalism (Chapter 4), the rise of the social sciences concurrent with political
economy (Chapter 5), and the Baconian roots of Hume’s innovations in moral
philosophy (Chapter 6). Behind these movements lie two additional historical
developments crucial to our account: the emergence of neoliberalism in the twentieth
century and the reimagination of “the poor” as a social category in the sixteenth. In this
Interlude, we sketch these developments.

Neoliberalism: The Hidden Side of the

Hidden Side of Everything
Neoliberalism is currently the dominant economic theory and cultural form. It traces
its roots to twin birthplaces—the Ordoliberal or Freiburg School that emerged in
Germany and Austria in the mid-1930s, and the Chicago School of Economics that
began in the 1920s. Historians chart three phases in its development. The first phase
was launched at the meeting of the Walter Lippmann Colloquy in Paris in 1938 where
the term “neoliberalism” was first introduced.7 German Ordoliberalism largely defined
itself over against Nazism.8 The German state had been in shambles since the end
of the First World War, and the rise of fascism had been intertwined with economic
collapse. Positing Nazism as the logical outcome of state power and economic
intervention, this new movement used this unique historical moment to reorder the
relationship between the state and the market, with an eye to limiting the state in order
to maximize the market’s hegemony.9 In the American context, the Great Depression
served largely the same rhetorical function as the Nazi state in the German context.
Paul Krugman traces, for example, how the Chicago School’s Milton Friedman claimed
that the Federal Reserve was the sole causal factor for the Great Depression, casting
the economic crisis as “in some sense a demonstration of the evils of an excessively
interventionist government.”10
Thus, neoliberals capitalized on these global crises to enact a subtle inversion in
the relationship between the market and the state. No longer was the problem that
defined by nineteenth-century classical liberal economics’ doctrine of laissez-faire
which sought simply to carve out a space for free markets by limiting the state.11
Rather, neoliberalism sought to establish the market as the regulator of the state. The
market economy becomes itself the principle, not only of the state’s limitation, but of its
internal organization and regulation, resulting in “a state under the supervision of the
market rather than a market supervised by the state.”12 In other words, neoliberalism
sowed the seeds for the market economy to become the formal principle for regulating
of the state, society, and, eventually, “everything.”
Notably, it is only in the 1940s to 1950s that “the economy” emerges as an objective,
distinct domain.13 As Wendy Brown notes:

Prior to this time, “economy” (without the article) referred to seeking a desired
end with the least possible expenditure of means, closer to our notion of efficiency
or thriftiness today . . . It is only when the definite article is slipped in that “the
102 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

economy” is cast as a self-contained structure, one in which wealth generation

becomes its own autonomous sphere. Compare this with the etymological root
of economy, oikos, which identified for the ancient Greeks the space/place of the
household, not material life as such, not the market, and not the economy. In short,
the identification and reification of “the economy” as a distinct object is recent . . .
This suggests that the economy, far from being a transhistorical category, may have
been a brief twentieth-century event.14

Thus, neoliberalism introduces a second mutation—from economics conceived

as practical activity (actions ordered to sustaining a household) to the economy
as an entity, a thing unto itself. The economy as an objective domain of scientific
investigation or economics as a body of knowledge was unknown prior to the mid-
twentieth century. This shift follows a similar trend seen with other sciences. As Peter
Harrison notes, from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth centuries, “science,”
which had been an activity of natural philosophers, became understood as a discrete
body of knowledge.15 Economics followed this same pattern; once a domain of moral
philosophy, it too sought to become a science.
The second chapter in the development of neoliberalism is marked alternately
by Milton Friedman’s 1951 paper “Neo-liberalism and Its Prospects”16 or by the first
meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), an institute dedicated to developing and
promoting neoliberal commitments, in Mont Pelerin, Switzerland, in 1947.17 Here
Ordoliberal Friedrich von Hayek, author of the influential book Road to Serfdom
(1944), gathered a small circle of economists, philosophers, and sociologists, including
the young Friedman. Responding to Nazism and fascism in Freiburg and New Deal
Keynesianism in Chicago, economists in this second phase began to argue that
governments should take a more active role to protect the markets’ freedom in large
part by reimagining a state shaped by formal economic principles. In other words,
though putatively opponents of government intervention, neoliberal economists in
this phrase strongly supported—in fact, demanded—what Foucault refers to as “active,
multiple, vigilant, and omnipresent” government intervention aimed at creating the
possibility for a market economy.18
In order to advance its ideology, Hayek understood that neoliberalism had to
capture the cultural imagination. Hayek, Foucault notes, argued that

We need a liberalism that is a living thought. Liberalism has always left it to the
socialists to produce utopias, and socialism owes much of its vigor and historical
dynamism to this utopian or utopia-creating activity. Well, liberalism also needs
a utopia. It is up to us to create liberal utopias, to think in a liberal mode . . .
Liberalism must be a general style of thought, analysis, and imagination.19

In other words, Hayek understood that his esoteric-circle needed to move its ideas
beyond the small, economic thought-collective into the larger, mainstream thought-
community. Hayek proposed a very effective two-pronged strategy for fostering
neoliberalism as the general thought-style of Western culture, taking cues from
Edward Bernays, the Austrian-American who pioneered the fields of public relations
 
Interlude Between Neuroscience and Economics 103

and propaganda. First, it needed to foster a cadre of public intellectuals, “professional

secondhand dealers in ideas” who “need not possess special knowledge of anything
in particular, nor need even be particularly intelligent, to perform [their] role as
intermediary in the spreading of ideas.”20 Second, it needed to establish centers of
neoliberal thought. From the 1950s through the 1980s, various think tanks, often well
financed by corporations, were established, from the Institute of Economic Affairs,
the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the
Center for the Study of American Business, and more. These centers funded research,
published their own academic journals, and promulgated their commitments through
popular media. Today, there are now over 275 free-market think tanks in seventy
countries.21
Via these think tanks and their popularizers, neoliberalism entered its third phase
in the late 1970s, conquering Keynesianism and spreading rapidly across the globe as
the dominant approach to economic and political policy through the agency of the
British and US governments and the international financial institutions. It remains in
practice the largely uncontested dominant ideology of the global political economy.
Critical to this shift was Gary Becker who developed the theory of human capital.
Where the second phase of neoliberalism reconfigured the state under the aegis of
the market, a space had remained carved out for individual freedom, both in terms of
ethics and economics. In the third phase, this space subtly disappears. All aspects of
society, all human actions, and in fact, the human agent herself, come under the general
economic form of the market. “Now everything” as Foucault notes, “can be analyzed
in terms of investment, capital costs, and profit—both economic and psychological
profit—on the capital invested.”22
Yet despite its utopian rhetoric, recent commentators have begun to name
neoliberalism’s dark underbelly. One of its first real-world experiments was, for example,
the 1970s “Miracle in Chile,” where the violent Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet,
directly counseled by Friedman, his Chilean protégés, and the CIA, implemented
draconian neoliberal economic reforms alongside his reign of terror against the Chilean
people. The Pinochet regime killed or “disappeared” over 3,000 Chileans, tortured some
30,000, and interred almost three times that many. While eventually the Chilean economy
met certain benchmarks for success (e.g., reducing the number of Chileans living in
absolute poverty), a commentator living through the “shock” intentionally imposed on
the country observed that the Chilean program’s primary result and likely aim were to
effect a massive transfer of wealth and power to a small minority of monopolists and
speculators.23 Analysts concur that this wealth transfer inflicted severe suffering on the
poor and middle class, increasing and entrenching economic inequality.24
Based on similar outcomes inflicted globally since neoliberalism’s ascendance in the
1980s, critics often characterize neoliberalism as a “more efficient regime for the global
production of suffering and death.”25 Contra Zak and other free-market enthusiasts
who declaim capitalism as the moral system, statistics make strikingly clear that
the phenomenal increase in accumulated wealth that has occurred since the 1980s
has been accompanied by extraordinary increases in socioeconomic inequality and
exponential increases in human suffering.26 What Pope Francis refers to as the “throw-
away culture,” Sakia Sassen describes as “a global system of expulsion”:
104 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

In the current global economy, millions of human beings are needed for neither
production nor consumption. These unfortunate souls have become a permanent
underclass. The existence of an ever-expanding population of migrants, refugees,
prisoners, asylum seekers, the perpetually unemployed, and other outcasts become
what [Zygmant] Bauman calls “the waste products of globalization.”27

These “expelled” challenge the narrative and truth of the neoliberal economy.
Moreover, concomitant with neoliberalism’s ascendance has been the augmentation
of “the contemporary security state [which] manages this population through policing
and confinement—either literally or by economic segregation into ‘low rent’ districts—
as well as by direct or indirect extermination.”28 Per Jaime Peck, a key element of
neoliberalism’s third phase has been the “invasive re-regulation of the urban poor.”29
Rogers-Vaughn brings this home pointedly for our neuroscience popularizers, noting:

What we have here is nothing less than the privatization of death and violence. This
allows neoliberal social orders, through what William Davies calls “the happiness
industry,” to foster the illusion that life within their protection is one in which
“human flourishing” and positive emotions predominate. But simultaneously, it
also enables them to conceal and deny their own production of terror and death.30

Not only does this manifest itself via proposals to pharmacologically intervene in
the genetic-neural pathways of persons with low SES or to enhance the rest of us
with oxytocin. Neoliberal violence is systemic, abstract, and anonymous, primarily
functioning through faceless, “objective” financial mechanisms, as well as the “expansion
of [the] penal state apparatus and social control policies.”31 It is not accidental, that
since 1970 the US incarceration rate has increased 700 percent. Although comprising
only 5 percent of the global population, the United States is home to roughly 25 percent
of the world’s prison population.32 This extraordinary practice of confinement—in
which one out of every three Black boys can expect to spend time in prison during
his lifetime (versus one in seventeen white boys) with currently almost 40 percent of
US prison inmates being Black—developed concurrently with a rapid increase in the
neoliberal privatization of the prison system in the United States beginning in 2000,
one component of what critical legal scholar Michelle Alexander has named “The New
Jim Crow.”33
If the critics are correct, how do we find such wildly different accounts of
economics? How, more pointedly, could our neuroscientists of morality, particularly
the popularizers, have missed this dark underbelly and champion the market as the
apogee of morality, the moral system, a moral system that is putatively embedded in our
biology? The answer, we suggest, lies in the correlate peculiarity of the neuroscientific
narrative of morality, namely, the presumed connection between poverty and vice. As
we saw with Hollingshead and others, the human sciences in the twentieth century
have repeatedly hypothesized and investigated a putative relationship between
socioeconomic status and the behavior of the poor. This connection between economics
and morality traces a much longer history—one that is, in fact, co-extensive with the
history of the human sciences.
 
Interlude Between Neuroscience and Economics 105

Moralizing the Poor: The Foundation

of a Bifurcated Anthropology
As we will see in Chapter 5, from Hume to Mill, a key focus was the political task
of reforming the English Poor Laws, an outcome finally accomplished in 1834. In
fact, a driving factor in the development of social and human sciences was the vexing
problem of the management of the poor. As Polanyi notes:

The figure of the pauper, almost forgotten since, dominated a discussion the
imprint of which was as powerful as that of the most spectacular events in history.
If the French Revolution was indebted to the thought of Voltaire and Diderot,
Quesnay and Rousseau, the Poor Law discussion formed the minds of Bentham,
and Burke, Godwin and Malthus, Ricardo and Marx, Robert Owens and John
Stuart Mill, Darwin, and Spencer . . . Pauperism, political economy, and the
discovery of society were closely interwoven.34

Due in large part to this decades-long debate about the Poor Laws, this period—roughly
1740–90—has been identified as the first “poverty enlightenment.”35 The English Poor
Laws comprised a series of legislative acts implemented and repeatedly revised from
1536 to 1834 that sought to provide relief for a precipitous and visible rise in rural
pauperism. As Polanyi notes, at the beginning of this era, “the poor” were essentially
synonymous with “the common people”—people who did not own land and therefore
worked the common lands (or the “commons”) of manors and monasteries.36 Social
consensus held that, as a Christian culture, there was a shared obligation to care for the
elderly, the sick, widows, and orphans. Vexing, however, were beggars and vagrants.
Early poor laws sought primarily to punish “vagabonds,” “sturdy beggars,” and “idlers,”
inflicting anything from short-term imprisonment, whipping, placing in stocks, and a
return to their birth place to two years’ servitude, branding with a V or burning through
the ear for a first offense and death, perhaps by hanging (for repeat offenders).37
These punitive measures sought to “solve” the problem of the poor through discipline.
Positive efforts to provide provisions for poor relief began to emerge around 1547 and
were continued during the reign of Elizabeth I, culminating in her Poor Relief Act of
1601.38 This and subsequent legislation shared key characteristics. It was administered
through some 1,500 local parishes, each responsible for “their own” poor. Each parish
collected local taxes or “rates” from local property owners and tenants in order to fund the
program. The legislation differentiated between the “deserving” or “impotent poor” who
were unable to work and the “undeserving” or “able-bodied” poor who, it was assumed,
could earn their living by manual work. For the former, the law counseled parishes to
set up alms houses or poor houses or to distribute money, food, and/or goods. For the
latter, parishes were directed to establish workhouses or other means of putting them to
work to earn their keep. Those who would not work were to be sent to newly established
Houses of Correction. A key concern driving this legislation was the mobility of the
poor as they left their ancestral homes to seek work in other communities. To counter
this “vagrancy,” the 1662 Act of Settlement required that the poor receive relief only
from their local parish in which they were registered, effectively limiting their mobility.39
106 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

The most significant revision of the poor laws was the Berkshire Bread Act enacted
in Speenhamland in 1795. In the face of increasing misery of the poor, local authorities
set up a system that subsidized wages “in accordance with a scale dependent upon the
price of bread, so that a minimum income should be assured to the poor irrespective of
their earnings.”40 Badly conceived and badly administered, Speenhamland paradoxically
both drove wages down to unlivable levels and discouraged people from working.41 It
was without dispute an economic disaster.42 Speenhamland became the primary target
and foil of the architects of the emerging political economy whose efforts contributed
to the repeal of the poor laws in 1834.
But why did a need for the poor laws emerge? Why did the population of the poor
increase so exponentially from the mid-1500s to the time of Hume, Bentham, and
Mill? As Polanyi notes, “it was in the first half of the sixteenth century that the poor
first appeared in England; they became conspicuous as individuals unattached to
the manor.”43 While many reasons were proffered at the time, this detachment was
driven by two primary events—what R. H. Tawney has called the “agrarian revolution”
catalyzed by the rapid, large-scale enclosures of common lands and the dissolution of
the Roman Catholic monasteries under Henry VIII.
First, the practice of enclosure. Prior to 1500, “commoners” were largely those who
worked manorial lands through a variety of generational practices, customary tenancy,
and villeinage, managed through local practices of communal oversight. Income and
livelihood generated by farming, pasturing sheep, and grazing horses and livestock on
the commons was supplemented by craft and other forms of local productivity at the
household and village level. Beginning around 1500, and escalating exponentially from
1700 to 1850, manorial authorities—at times aided and abetted by Parliament—begin
to “enclose” large swaths of the commons, in order to create massive pastures for sheep
herding to support the lucrative and growing international textile industry. Not only
did the process of enclosure eliminate villagers’ sources of food and income; as part of
the enclosure process, families or whole villages were also often evicted from their
homes as the villages themselves were converted to sheep pasture.44
As a result, tens of thousands of people were displaced and thrown into new and
appalling conditions of misery and starvation. Lacking means of support, persons
formerly tied to local land and communities began to search elsewhere for work.
Thus, as Tawney notes, “the new and terrible problem is the increase in vagrancy. The
sixteenth century lives in terror of the tramp.”45 As before, the first response to this new
problem was repression. Per Tawney:

The distinction between the able-bodied unemployed and the impotent is one
which is visible to the eye of sense. The distinction between the man who is
unemployed because he cannot get work and the man who is unemployed because
he does not want to work, requires a modicum of knowledge and reflection which
even at the present day is not always forthcoming . . . It is not accepted at once as a
matter of course that the destitute shall be publicly relieved, still less that the able-
bodied destitute deserve anything but punishment. Governments make desperate
efforts for about one hundred years to evade their new obligations. They whip and
brand and bore ears; they offer the vagrant as a slave to the man who seizes him.46
 
Interlude Between Neuroscience and Economics 107

In other words, the enclosure of the common lands resulted in a new moral order that
divided and confined the poor, defining a population of persons who were in need of
management and bodily control.
Simultaneously, the primary source of poor relief for local communities—the
network of over 800 Roman Catholic monasteries—was dismantled. At the time of
the English Reformation, Catholic institutions were among the greatest landowners
who, like their manorial counterparts, supported myriads of local villages that farmed
their lands. Beginning in 1535 with the Suppression of Religious Houses Act, over the
next five years Henry VIII dissolved most of the Catholic monasteries in England,
confiscating monastic property. In a process that historian Eamon Duffy refers to
as “the stripping of the altars,” in 1539 alone, “it is estimated that lands worth an
annual income of £136,000 as well as portable wealth of as much as £1 million to £1.5
million was confiscated [from the Roman Catholic Church in England] and given
to propertied laymen in an era in which the crown’s annual income from land never
exceeded £40,000.”47 This transfer of monastic property to the gentry functioned as a
form of enclosure of ecclesiastical and monastic properties.
Not only did the dismantling of the monastic infrastructure deprive local
commoners of their work, income, and often homes associated with the ecclesiastical
properties; Roman Catholic Churches and monasteries had also long served as the
primary social bodies engaged in charitable care for the poor and in the creation of
communal identity. The stripping of the altars crippled the church’s ability to exercise
this function at the same time that the enclosures, mercantilism, and a shift to industrial
economies were wreaking massive economic upheavals on the poor. With the Catholic
church incapacitated for this work, responsibility for supporting the poor fell to public
authorities, administering poor relief through local Anglican parishes, which were
now required to collect compulsory taxes.48
Thus, the violence outlined earlier—alternatively concealed and visible—is not
unique to neoliberalism. As Michael Perelman has detailed, state-sanctioned violence
that inflicted massive dispossession and fomented widespread suffering and misery
lies at the birth of capitalism itself.49 As Polanyi notes, while the Tudors and Stuarts
tried to save the common people from the worst effects of the social dislocations of
enclosure, “nothing saved the common people of England from the impact of the
Industrial Revolution . . . The effects on the lives of the people were awful beyond
description . . . the economic advantages of a free labor market could not make up for
the social destruction wrought by it.”50
Alongside these developments lie two fundamental transitions: one in anthropology
and one in axiology. First is the shift to understanding persons, land, and money
as commodities. As Polanyi notes, a market economy envisages markets “not only
for goods but also for labor, land, and money, their prices being called respectively
commodity prices, wages, rent and interest.”51 Prior to the end of the eighteenth century,
labor and land had been protected from commodification by mercantilism.52 But “in
a singular departure,” by the nineteenth century, Polanyi notes, “economic activity
[had been] isolated and imputed to a distinctive economic motive.” To achieve this, all
aspects of society needed to be somehow subordinated to the market, including labor
and land. But as Polanyi notes, “labor and land are no other than the human beings
108 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

themselves of which every society consists and the natural surroundings in which it
exists. To include them in the market mechanism means to subordinate the substance
of society itself to the laws of the market.”53
While more details will unfold in the following chapters, what we see in the era
from 1550 to 1800 is the process by which labor (some people) and land begin to
become commodities—objects produced for sale on the market, “subject to the supply-
and-demand mechanism interacting with price.”54 But, as Polanyi notes:

labor, land and money are obviously not commodities [they have not been
produced for sale] . . . Labor is only another name for a human activity which
goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but for entirely
different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life, be stored
or mobilized; land is only another name for nature, which is not produced by man;
actual money, finally, is merely a token of purchasing power which, as a rule, is not
produced at all, but comes into being through the mechanism of banking or state
finance. None of them is produced for sale. The commodity description of labor,
land and money is entirely fictitious.55

Thus, a key intervention had been made: persons—or, more specifically, some
persons—were extracted from their lands and communities, and reconceived under
the abstraction labor, “the technical term used for human beings, insofar as they are
not employers but employed.”56 Some persons had become commodities.57
The market for labor was one most strenuously resisted by English rural society
and therefore the last market to be organized under the new industrial system. The
Poor Laws effectively prevented the establishment of a competitive labor market; thus,
the free labor market finally came into being only with the repeal of the Poor Laws
in 1834.58 As we will see, key thought leaders of the preceding decades—from Hume
to Mill—were critical for laying the groundwork necessary to transform persons into
labor and in doing so completely recasting moral anthropology. But key to their work
was the specter of the poor, the pauper.
Concomitant with this transition in anthropology comes a transition in axiology.
As Polanyi notes,

The alleged commodity “labor power” cannot be shoved about, used

indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual
who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of man’s
labor power, the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological,
and moral entity “man” attached to that tag. Robbed of the protective covering of
social institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure;
they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion,
crime, and starvation.59

For as the numbers of the poor increase, a cause must be found. And the cause certainly
was not going to be laid at the feet of nobles, landowners, and the extraordinarily
profitable new economic system. Rather, the cause must lie in the poor themselves.
 
Interlude Between Neuroscience and Economics 109

Thus, the first response is disciplinary, to recast the poor as criminals—imprisoning

them, punishing them, depriving them of their freedom. And their main crime—
idleness. If they would choose to work, they would not be poor and starving. Therefore,
failure to work for one’s sustenance becomes defined as the central vice. As the census
of the poor swells, incorporating women, children, and the aged, this centrality of
wage labor becomes the central discrimen, distinguishing between those who deserve
society’s care and those who do not. It also proposes the main remedy: the horrific
institution of the workhouse, rendered even more dehumanizing under Bentham’s
watch.
Equally, contemporaries blame the endless increase in the rolls of the poor not on
constant dispossession of their property and livelihoods—the rolls of the poor are
increasing because they are reproducing. Thus, the second key vice of the poor becomes
sexual activity. As we will see with Malthus, the poor are reprimanded repeatedly for
marrying early and not curbing their sexual activity, even within marriage. Here again
the charges deflect attention from the true source of the problem. At least among men,
age of marriage is influenced by the age at which maximum earning power is reached.60
Tawney poses the question:

when a large number of agricultural and industrial workers (in the sixteenth
century probably a majority) were small landholders or small masters, did the fact
that they had to wait for the death of a parent to succeed to their holding, or (in
the towns) for the permission of a guild to set up shop . . . tend to defer the age of
marriage? . . . One may contrast the extraordinary reduction in the age of marriage
of the people of Lancashire brought about by the early factory system, with its
armies of operatives who had nothing to look forward to but the wages earned
immediately upon reaching maturity.61

In other words, the problem of “overpopulation” that emerged only at the end of
the seventeenth century was an artifact not of the immorality of the poor but rather
changed social conditions. But regardless, biopolitical mechanisms were needed to
solve the problem.

* * *

Here, then, we see the roots of the fundamental anthropology and axiology that shapes
the work of those figures we will meet in Part II—Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo,
Jeremy Bentham, David Hume, John Stuart Mill—and that are carried forward into
the social imaginary of the twentieth century and shaped the neuroscience of morality.
Our task in Part II of this book is to make explicit this social imaginary and to trace
its roots back to their origin. It is a complex argument. We begin by showing how
it has operated to produce the implicit, but nonetheless regnant, anthropology of
twenty-first-century neoliberalism—the human as capital, determined by biology and
controlled by the political and economic structures with little or no agency of its own.
It is the story of how Homo economicus—the animal that acts to maximize its rational
self-interest—emerges as a product of positive social and psychological sciences in the
110 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but morphs into a being equipped only
with moral tastes, moral intuitions, and moral emotions, a mere product of genes and
emotional brains, non-rationally pursuing its own pleasures, while avoiding pain. We
call this emergent twenty-first-century being with little or no real moral agency, whose
actions are voluntary yet not free, Homo capitalus. It is this vision of the human—the
person required for the political economy imagined by Gary Becker and others—that
the neurosciences “discover” in the brain.
Yet in unearthing the almost seamless alignment between neoliberalism and the
neurosciences, we were pressed to look farther by a striking—in fact, slightly jarring—
feature of the neuroscientific narrative of morality, namely, their frequent invocation
of the towering eighteenth-century figures of David Hume and Adam Smith as their
intellectual forebears. Why Hume? Why Smith? Asking these questions took us on
a journey step-by-step back to the eighteenth century and the emergence of market
capitalism and political economy. Here we discovered that while superficially the
neuroscientific narrative of morality is, indeed, heir to Hume, their story requires a
significant misreading of Smith and masks two more powerful, intertwined genealogies.
The first is an anthropology that begins with Francis Bacon and runs through Hume
to two giants of moral theory—Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Bentham and
Mill were less moral theorists, less interested in moral theory, than they were political
and economic operatives interested in establishing a positivist science to inform
political economy. But the driver for doing so was the new configuration of wealth and
property—and the attendant skyrocketing in human poverty that attended the onset
of market capitalism in the sixteenth century. We shall see that the moralization of the
poor—that is to say the birth of the deserving and undeserving poor which eventually
wends its way into twentieth-century instruments for measuring SES—finds it origins
here. The new social problems incited by the capitalist reconfiguration of British
society required a new post hoc reconfiguration of anthropology and morality. As we
arrive at Hume, the human has become a slave to his senses—to the moral taskmasters
of pleasure and pain; only wealth and property make one free. In fact, the moral “man”
can only be produced—since he has no will to self-create—by the panopticon of society
as can be seen in poor law reform of nineteenth-century Britain. Thus, we will show
that it is Hume, not Smith, that makes possible Homo economicus, and it is Hume, not
Smith, that results in the mutation of Homo economicus into Homo capitalus. But this
can only happen insofar as standing behind Hume is the empirical skeptic for whom
all knowledge—all science—becomes a tool, a technology, for “improving the human
condition,” socially construed; in other words, for engineering society. That skeptic is
Francis Bacon.
 Part II

The Evolution of an
Artifactual Being
112
 4

The Neoliberal Narrative of Morality

Jonathan Haidt opens his account of “The Moral Foundation of Politics” with a claim
that seems to distance him from the critique we have developed thus far, noting:

Behind every act of altruism, heroism, and human decency you’ll find either
selfishness or stupidity. That, at least, is the view long held by many social scientists
who accepted the idea that Homo sapiens is really Homo economicus.1

In order to demonstrate “how wrong this view is,” he follows with a series of examples
to test this theory, asking readers to put a price tag (from zero to one million dollars) on
a series of potentially troubling actions, concluding from how he surmises the readers
would answer these scenarios that Homo economicus is just an “economist’s fantasy.”
While Haidt’s moral theory may not depend on Homo economicus strictly
construed, his protest here is a deft sleight-of-hand, deflecting attention from his
operative anthropology. For, as we will argue, the vision of the human person
animating his account of moral behavior is not Homo economicus but, in fact, its most
recent mutation. As we suggested in the introduction, this mutation is not the figure
of the early twentieth century or even of Mill who first articulated him into being. It
is, moreover, “far from Adam Smith’s creature propelled by the natural urge to ‘truck,
barter, and exchange,’” a “creature of needs satisfied through exchange.”2
Rather, the figure championed by Haidt, as well as Harris and Zak, is the
anthropology required for the ironically emotivist “economic science” of the twentieth
century that stands in the lineage of neoliberal economics, captured well in the
apotheoses of the Chicago School of Economics, George Stigler and Gary Becker. Here
we find the person as entrepreneur of herself, “an intensely constructed and governed
bit of human capital tasked with improving and leveraging its competitive positioning
and with enhancing its (monetary and nonmonetary) portfolio value across all of its
endeavors and venues.”3 This anthropology—adopted blithely and wholesale by the
neuroscientific narrative of morality—we call Homo capitalus.
Homo capitalus did not spring de novo fully formed from the mind of Gary Becker.
Rather, this thoroughly economized human actor evolved incrementally, mutating in
response to innovations in political economy. In this chapter, we trace the ascent of
Homo capitalus, telling the story via three sentinel figures in the Chicago School of
Economics who together crystalize the three main phases of US neoliberalism in the
twentieth century—Frank Knight, Milton Friedman, and Gary Becker. We focus on
114 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

the Chicago School for three reasons. First, the emergence of the neurosciences aligns
largely with what is generally understood to be the third phase of the ascendance of
neoliberalism in the 1970s. Secondly, American neoliberalism is understood to be far
more radical, complete, and exhaustive than its European counterpart; Foucault in fact
refers to the Chicago School as “anarcho-liberalism.”4 Third, it is the moves made by
the Chicago School with regard to ethics and anthropology that appear most strikingly
in our neuroscientific narrative of morality.
In tracing the development of the Chicago School via Knight, Friedman, and Becker,
we focus on three specific and intertwined trajectories, of which neoliberalism is only
the latest chapter. First, we want to illuminate the long and rather contested relationship
between economics and ethics. Despite its scientific pretentions, economics was at one
time considered to be a subdiscipline of moral philosophy. The relationship between ethics
and economics was seemingly severed by Frank Knight in the early part of the twentieth
century—a move that differentiated this new chapter in economics both from Adam
Smith’s and from Knight’s nineteenth-century predecessors. This rhetorical commitment
to maintaining a bright line between economics and ethics notwithstanding, it is clear
that neoliberal economics has more brazenly asserted itself as a particular school of
ethics.5
Second, Knight’s attempt to carve out ethics as a separate sphere came as economics
sought to establish its credibility as a discipline and a science characterized by formal,
mathematical laws governing human behavior. Here Knight continued the project
of his nineteenth-century forebears of founding an economic science, but during
the first phase of neoliberalism (~1920s to 1950s), economists made a series of key
theoretical moves that distinguished twentieth-century economics from classical
liberal economics of the nineteenth century.
Third, where ethics worked primarily around questions of moral theory, generally
eschewing practical matters, economics took from Hume and Bentham a penchant
to focus on the practical control of human behavior. Economics sought to become a
positive science of praxis. It also followed the social scientists’ proclivity to distance
themselves from normative morality per se, preferring to draw on seemingly neutral
nonmoral terms. Doing so permitted them to adhere (for a time) to Hume’s is/ought
dichotomy, giving them an air of objectivity.
We begin, then, with the most recent chapter, neoliberalism. With neoliberalism,
moral agency and its attendant moral anthropology, subtly undergoes a deep
transformation. As we will see, vice becomes virtue, the irrational becomes rational,
the unfree (actions like addiction) becomes voluntary. In the end, “choice” loses its
relationship with freedom—although exercised prima facie, Homo capitalus is now
beyond freedom, an instantiation of capital, Itself animated by a biologically driven
impulse to maximize the return on its investments in the self, a micro-corporation
or entrepreneurial venture swept up into the game of global markets whose rules are
determined by economic science. As a result, classical understandings of free will and
human agency are no longer necessary—in fact, they must be illusions. He who was
once responsible is now responsibilized.6
As Foucault has noted, neoliberalism stands as one of the most subtle forms of
social control yet. As he puts it: whereas Homo economicus had long been the one
 
The Neoliberal Narrative of Morality 115

who must be left alone, freed from governmental control, the new “man,” a mutation
of Homo economicus, is he whose behavior can be shaped through the partnership of
the economic and biological sciences.7 Whereas Freakonomics and the popularizers
of neuroscience claim that rationality has little control over moral behaviors, they still
hold that those behaviors can be described rationally through scientific interrogation
of that behavior and controlled better by political-economic manipulation. Thus, a
term first coined by critics of the reductionistic anthropology posited by John Stuart
Mill in his account of political economy morphs in the twentieth century from the
ultimate rational actor to a creature discovered by the neuroscientific narrative of
morality—one completely determined by the laws of economics.

Gary Becker and the Birth of Human Capital

We start with the most recent chapter in the evolution of the Chicago School of
Economics, specifically with Gary Becker. Becker held a joint appointment as professor
of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago from 1970 until his death
in 2014. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1992 precisely for extending “the
domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction,
including nonmarket behavior.”8 He is also credited as the primary figure in advancing
the notion of human capital that began to emerge in the 1950s. In addition to his prolific
oeuvre, Becker translated his work for popular audiences first via a monthly column
for Business Week from 1984 to 2004, and subsequently with a blog co-authored with
Richard Posner.9 Becker was at times joined in his work by George Stigler, who was
also on faculty at the University of Chicago from 1958 to 1991. Stigler is best known
for work on industrial organization and the effects of government regulation, and he
is considered one of the most important contributors to the practice of deregulation,
adopted by governments across the globe from the 1980s forward.10
As captured by his colleagues Levitt and Dubner, Becker inserts a profound mutation
in economics: no longer is it simply that an “invisible hand” directs the market; now
economics—and particularly market economics—becomes the invisible, “hidden side
of everything.” Or as Foucault notes, neoliberal economics under Becker aims to explain
all ends through the control of means.11 Like the neurosciences, economics takes its
purview to be human behavior, which had traditionally been the jurisdiction of ethics.
Like the neurosciences, Becker and his colleagues remain entranced by criminality,
delinquency, socioeconomic status—and even socioeconomic positioning (SEP). Yet
where the neurosciences have developed proxies for virtues and vices, Becker blithely
adopts traditional ethical terminology or concepts traditionally associated with virtue
or vice; as with the neurosciences, he radically inverts their meanings. Moreover,
Becker’s work echoes our neuroscientific popularizers, reducing all behavior—moral
and otherwise—to preferences or “tastes.” These tastes are all governed by the one,
biologically grounded dogma of economics, the law of utility maximization, the
corollary of a new anthropology of the person as human capital. Under the inescapable
laws of economics, human actions remain voluntary but no longer free, an emphasis
captured in the concern of neoliberal economics with social policy and social operation
116 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

designed to encourage the automatic behaviors of individuals. Here we find, not Homo
economicus, but a new being, Homo capitalus, the person as capital.

Totalizing Economics and the Birth of Human Capital

The centrality of utility maximization in Becker’s work locates him as a neoclassical
economic theorist. But while using the language of neoclassical economics, Becker
subtly, but significantly, shifts the scope of the terms. Neoclassical economic
theory holds that human beings always act rationally to maximize individual
satisfaction or utility (what classical Utilitarians called “pleasure”). But where
previous economists limited their analyses to transactions and behavior that had
been clearly economic, Becker’s Nobel Prize–winning innovation lay in “extending
a specific formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to every
dimension of human life.”12 Thus Becker, who Foucault names “the most radical
of the American neoliberals,”13 applies economic analysis beyond economic and
rational conduct. It can be applied to any activity and thus becomes “the science of
the systematic nature of responses to environmental variables.” This, as Foucault
notes, “is a colossal definition.”14
Becker’s move to make economics about everything is already signaled in
his doctoral thesis on the economics of discrimination,15 and was continued in
subsequent analyses of crime and punishment;16 marriage, family, and children;17
drug use;18 and more. These initiatives are summarized in his 1992 Nobel lecture,
“The Economic Way of Looking at Behavior.”19 He explains that “by treating such
phenomena as racism, theft, and children as ‘tastes’ comparable to tastes in food or
fashion, economics is able not only to explain why racism persists or why some people
have more babies than others, but also to predict future behavior on both individual
and grand scales.”20 In applying market logic to social phenomenon, Becker inverts
what had been the classical relationship between the social and the economic, where
the economic was understood in opposition to, complementary to, or encompassed
within the social.21 Neoliberalism from its inception overturned the “liberal conceit of
separate economic, social, and political spheres”; Becker brings this to its apotheosis,
forwarding the conviction that all three must be evaluated according to a single logic,
that of economics.22
One crucial place we see this shift is in Becker’s attempt to re-theorize labor. Here
we meet the logical outcome of what Karl Polanyi identified as one of the key fictions
of classic economics. Becker’s work here, along with that of Theodore Schultz and
Jacob Mincer, results in the theory of human capital. The notion was first forwarded
by Schultz in his 1961 essay “Investment in Human Capital.”23 Here Schultz—who
served as chair of the University of Chicago Department of Economics from 1946
to 1961 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1979—proposes that
certain objects of consumption should be seen as ways that people invest in their
own capital. For example, education, health, and internal migration for better job
opportunities ought to be imagined as investments aimed at increasing their own
productivity or the rate of return, not of their possessions, but of their very self.
People become “a produced means of production.”24 Schultz spends the first section
 
The Neoliberal Narrative of Morality 117

of this essay responding to potential moral concerns about the concept, voiced even
by economists. Listing a number of ways in which humans have demeaned human
freedom by reducing human actors to inanimate, economic objects—property, slaves,
indentured servants—Schultz acknowledges that reducing human actors to capital
risks debasing the human. Still, he avers that none other than Adam Smith had
advanced a notion of human capital.25 Laborers who take the initiative to invest in
themselves thus are capitalists investing in themselves in order to be more productive
workers.26 In the end, he outlines recommendations for public investment in human
capital, despite the caveat that “one proceeds at his own peril in discussing social
implications and policy.”27
Becker was simultaneously developing a similar concept in work sponsored by
the National Bureau of Economic Research, culminating in his 1975 monograph
Human Capital: A Theoretical and Methodological Analysis.28 Here, Schultz’s moral
caveats are left behind, and Becker offers a full-fledged analysis of the economic
return on investment of various improvements to human persons as capital, for
both the individual and society. He focuses primarily on the question of education.
For Becker, from a prima facie economic perspective, the time and money spent on
education makes little sense unless it produces financial gain.29 Absent here—and
as we will see elsewhere—is any sense of education and knowledge as goods in and
of themselves, necessary for the flourishing of persons and communities. Equally
absent is any sense of the effects of negative social structures. Instead, he claims
blithely in his conclusion that clearly “some persons earn more than others simply
because they invest more in themselves [and] ‘abler’ persons tend to invest more
than others.”30
Under this regime, “capital” is “everything that in one way or another can be a
source of future income” including any physical or psychological factors.31 But what
is key here, contra Schultz’s caveats, is that human capital—and any improvements
that produce a return on investment—is inseparable from the person who possesses
it. To this extent, it differs from all other capital: “Ability to work, skill, the ability
to do something cannot be separated from the person who is skilled and who can
do this particular thing. In other words, the worker’s skill really is a machine, but a
machine which cannot be separated from the worker himself.”32 In this way, persons
are transformed from either laborers or simply rational, preference-maximizing
consumers to “a conception of capital-ability . . . so that the worker himself appears as a
sort of enterprise for himself.”33 As Wendy Brown notes, “all market actors are rendered
as little capitals (rather than as owners, workers, and consumers),” who must manage
and market the self as a personal enterprise and investment.34
Under Becker’s economics, the human is not one partner in a process of exchange
deploying the principle of utility to satisfy needs and wants; the human person is now
an entrepreneur, a producer of the self as a mode of production, an “enterprise-unit”
in “a society made up of enterprise-units.”35 What is more, no longer is the human
person circumscribed within a space from which he or she can participate in economic
activities or make economic choices; now capital has achieved totality, defining both
the space and structure of not only of the market and (as we will see with Friedman)
the state but human personhood as well.
118 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

The Evacuation of Ethics

At the same time that Becker is birthing this new creature, he also redefines ethics.
Just as Homo capitalus is the fully economized person, morality also becomes fully
economized. This change in ethics, as we shall shortly see, radicalizes Hume’s is-ought
distinction used by Frank Knight in his drive to make economics a science.
On a prima facie reading, Becker’s innovations in ethics might be easy to miss
insofar as he deploys traditional moral language drawn from the Aristotelian virtue
tradition. But he puts this language to a very different use. Consider, for example, his
2007 article, “Habits, Peers, and Happiness: An Evolutionary Perspective,” co-authored
with Luis Rayo.36 The article’s opening sentence directly echoes that of The Nicomachean
Ethics: “The principal motivating factor in our lives is the pursuit of happiness.”37 But
happiness here does not consist, as it does for Aristotle, in achieving the multiplicity
of goods intrinsic to the full flourishing of individuals and communities. Rather, Rayo
and Becker reduce happiness to utility, positing moreover that it can be defined by
a mathematical “happiness function” tied to variables of income and social position
(circularly defined via income levels) rooted, they suggest, in human biology. As they
state unequivocally:

we presume that maximizing happiness is the fundamental goal of the individual

when making decisions. In fact, we believe that happiness evolved precisely as a
decision-making device. In this sense, we consider that maximizing happiness
is closely linked, if not identical, to maximizing utility in the standard economic
way.38

Echoing Haidt, Harris, and Zak, Becker presumes that ideal human behavior lines
up with economic activity and that this dynamic is grounded in human biology.
Just as Aristotle tied human behavior to his metaphysical biology, Rayo and Becker
empirically ground it in an economized biology. Homo capitalus is a biological
creature.
In addition to happiness and a biological grounding for behavior, they press forward
with Aristotelian concepts in advancing their argument. For example, after asserting a
conundrum that happiness derived from increased income seems to be fleeting, they
note: “We rapidly become accustomed to a more expensive lifestyle. A common name
for this feature is habit formation.”39 Or later, “as is suggested by common wisdom,
income is strongly habit forming.”40 While it seems a truism that most people adjust
their lifestyles as their income increases, Rayo and Becker never actually define what
they mean by habit formation; it seems to mean little more than “become accustomed
to,” or, as we shall see, it may mean “become addicted to.” In other words, having
income creates a feeling of pleasure (a.k.a., happiness) that quickly, like a drug, fades,
so that more income is needed to sustain those same sensations of pleasure; so that, in
short, “additional income can indeed buy happiness.”41 Thus, habit here is not aimed at
any notion of the good; it is simply the need to constantly experience the euphoria of
an increased income. This notion of happiness is very different than Aristotle’s rather
 
The Neoliberal Narrative of Morality 119

complex account of the relationship between character, action, and virtue formation in
which habit plays an important role and virtue itself is its own reward.
Yet income alone does not supply happiness; rather, happiness is a function of how
one perceives one’s social position relative to one’s peers. Increase in peer income
relative to one’s own position is described as a “negative externality,” decreasing one’s
happiness.42 Deploying their mathematical happiness function, they conclude: (1) an
advance in social position has only a short-lived positive effect on happiness; (2) a
general increase in income that results in no changes in current income differentials
does not affect happiness; (3) those who have recently “received a positive income
shock and . . . have advanced recently in the social ranking” are therefore happier; and
(4) for the unfortunate person that does not advance in income relative to her peers, she
“eventually become(s) habituated to her new, lower social position.”43 Hollingshead’s
socioeconomic status and Gianaros and Manuck’s socioeconomic position turns out to
be a major feature of happiness and of habit formation.
We will return to their fourth point shortly, but first let us turn briefly to a second
theme that resounds loudly throughout Becker’s corpus: namely, that the goods or
ends individuals pursue are simply a matter of “taste.” This discussion of taste—which
also resounds through the work of Haidt and Zak—comes into clearest focus in what
Ross Emmett names as one of the two key methodological statements of the Chicago
School, namely, Becker and Stigler’s article “De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum.”44
The historic meaning of this phrase is that a person’s personal preferences or tastes
are merely subjective opinions, capricious whims that have no basis for their being
preferred. They cannot be evaluated as right or wrong. Rational persuasion on the
rightness or the wrongness of a taste is not possible. They are irrational and variable,
whimsical from one season to the next. Emotivism is fully embraced.
Becker and Stigler take a different tack. As they note:

Our title seems to us to be capable of another and preferable interpretation: that

tastes neither change capriciously nor differ importantly between people. On this
interpretation, one does not argue over tastes for the same reason that one does
not argue over the Rocky Mountains—both are there, will be there next year, too,
and are the same to all men.45

The significance of this claim lies in an ongoing dispute within economics. As we

will see in the third part of this chapter, Frank Knight—in his endeavor to establish
economics as a science in the early part of the century—drew a bright line between
human conduct, which can be observed as objective facts, and the subjective desires,
tastes, or “values” underlying that conduct. Economics, Knight held, could only deal
with the former and then only descriptively.46 Becker and Stigler overturn this position,
with the important closing caveat:

We are proposing the hypothesis that widespread and/or persistent human

behavior can be explained by a generalized calculus of utility-maximizing behavior,
without introducing the qualification “tastes remaining the same.” It is a thesis that
does not permit of direct proof because it is an assertion about the world, not a
proposition in logic.47
120 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

Desires are not subjective and therefore ordered to some good and chosen for reasons
according to the understanding of the good by a free actor, as they are for the tradition
prior to Becker and Stigler. Rather, they are themselves observable, objective entities,
stable across time, biologically grounded and habitually fixed. Free and rational
choices are no longer part of the equation. Becker and Stigler support their thesis by
developing what they name “stable, well-behaved preference functions,” akin to the
mathematical happiness function discussed earlier.
In unfolding their argument, Becker and Stigler make two significant interventions
at the level of ethics. The first intervention (essentially) equates tastes with addiction.
Traditionally, the term “addiction” has carried a negative moral valence, often equated
with vice. Yet Stigler and Becker broaden the scope of addiction to include any
activity for which a person may experience increased desire combined with increased
consumption over time:

Tastes are frequently said to change as a result of consuming certain “addictive”

goods. For example, smoking of cigarettes, drinking of alcohol, injection of heroin,
or close contact with some persons over an appreciable period of time, often
increases the desire (creates a craving) for these goods or persons, and thereby
cause their consumption to grow over time. In utility language, their marginal
utility is said to rise over time because tastes shift in their favor.48

This framework can be utilized to examine scientifically any activity or good that is
consumed.
They employ this framework to evaluate two possible addictions—heroin use and
the consumption of “good” music. Within this framing, they purport to demonstrate
that, “by definition, [an] addiction is beneficial” not if it motivates a person to pursue
an activity traditionally understood as a good or if the object consumed contributes
to human flourishing; rather, it is beneficial if it maximizes a utility function. Their
conclusion is most striking:

In the same way, listening to music or playing tennis would be addictive if the
demand curves for music or tennis appreciation were sufficiently elastic; the
addiction again is the result, not the cause, of the particular elasticity. Put
differently, if addiction were surmised (partly because the input of goods or time
rose with age), but if it were not clear whether the addiction were harmful or
beneficial, the elasticity of demand could be used to distinguish between them: a
high elasticity suggests beneficial and a low elasticity suggests harmful addiction.49

Put differently, the demand curve can tell you about addictions, which are just tastes
and thus not of their own accord moral or immoral; though one could predict whether
the addiction was harmful or not by the elasticity of the demand.
They then extend their argument beyond addictive behavior to other customary
behaviors as well as advertising and fashion. While admitting that some activities do
not evidence a desire-based increase in consumption over time, or increase for only a
short period of time and then fade, the math nonetheless remains the same:
 
The Neoliberal Narrative of Morality 121

Note that this analysis is similar to that used in the previous section to explain
addictive behavior: utility maximization with stable preferences, conditioned by
the accumulation of specific knowledge and skills. One does not need one kind
of theory to explain addictive behavior and another kind to explain habitual or
customary behavior. The same theory based on stable preferences can explain
both types of behavior, and can accommodate both habitual behavior and the
departures therefrom.50

Thus, they conclude that any “widespread and/or persistent human behavior can be
explained [and, correlatively evaluated as beneficial or harmful] by a general calculus of
utility-maximizing behavior.”51 In other words, they believe that one can in fact literally
“account” for tastes and can do so by searching for the mathematically representable
law beneath the behaviors. Addiction is the result, not the cause of the behavior. The
general rule of utility maximization functions as a law-like norm for the explanation
of any human behavior. In this way, tastes—or values—are no longer per se rationally
incommensurable; in fact, the “fact-value” distinction has disappeared, as all values/
tastes can be represented mathematically as facts—tastes—and along with actions
are subsumed into one scientifically analyzable norm, utility maximization. More
importantly, no longer are actions evaluated according to how they impact human skills
or health or flourishing or community; moral evaluation (positive/negative, beneficial/
harmful) are now solely represented and predicted based on the economic models.
Thus, there is an evacuation of the content and substance of morality—substantively:
there is no difference between listening to good music, heroin use, growing in love for
another person, or shopping. It is simply a matter of elasticity and utility curves.
Consider, for example, another of Becker’s signal foci, the economic re-evaluation
of crime, as captured in his essay “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach,”
included in his edited volume on this topic.52 Becker’s focus here are the ‘normative’
economic questions of public policy—that is, “how many resources and how much
punishment should be used to enforce different kinds of legislation? Put equivalently,
although more strangely, how many offenses should be permitted and how many
offenders should go unpunished?”53 He asserts that answers to these questions can be
found by reconceptualizing crime through a grid of economic intelligibility, shifting
away from its typical moral or legal connotations and redefining it as “an economically
important activity or ‘industry.’”
We see this in a series of steps. First, the phenomenon of crime and societal
responses and repercussions are appraised simply in market terms. Data on revenues
to offenders and expenses to society (of government law enforcement and direct costs
laid out by private citizens) generates a calculus of the “net cost or damage to society”
for a wide variety of offenses from “felonies—like murder, robbery, and assault . . . but
also tax evasion, the so-called white-collar crimes, and traffic and other violations.”54
Again, as with the tastes analyzed earlier, there is a flattening of moral valence, with
no difference for evaluative purposes between premeditated murder and running a red
light; only costs are considered.55
Second, there is a shift from act to agent in two ways. As is clear from the aforesaid,
by reframing crime as an economic object, society becomes the agent-consumer and
122 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

has to assess the return on investment for various approaches to law enforcement. But
equally, individual criminal behavior is explained simply through economic utility: “a
person commits an offense if the expected utility to him exceeds the utility he could
get by using his time and other resources at other activities. Some persons become
‘criminals,’ therefore, not because their basic motivation differs from that of other
persons, but because their benefits and costs differ.”56 No longer is criminal action
distinguished from other actions or analyzed on the basis of moral, anthropological,
or social valences; it is now evaluated solely from the perspective of the agent,
that is to say, society. Offenders are labeled “risk preferers,” as criminal activity is
transmuted into a matter of tastes.57 A criminal is no longer a person who pursues
vicious ends, but rather is conceptualized “only as anyone whomsoever invests in an
action, expects a profit from it, and who accepts the loss of risk.”58 And any particular
criminal behavior should be evaluated—individually and societally—by the results
of its yield curve.
Most importantly, we see that all behaviors are evaluable under the science of
economics, whether those behaviors were thought to be moral or immoral in the past.
As Becker himself states clearly in his conclusions: “The theory developed in this essay
can be applied to any effort to preclude certain kinds of behavior, regardless of whether
the behavior is ‘unlawful.’”59 We see the modern version of this in Freakonomics, the
hidden side of everything. Individuals are not the agents that they once were; their
behaviors are not their own.

Biology, Economics, and the Erasure of Freedom

In 1974, Becker stated that “a useful theory of criminal behavior can dispense with
special theories of anomie, psychological inadequacies, or inheritance of special traits
and simply extend the economist's usual analysis of choice.”60 Contemporaneously,
what the emerging neurosciences are beginning to categorize as that proxy for vice,
antisocial personality disorder, and looking for in our biology is really in Becker’s
mind best understood via models of economic choice. Thirty-five years later, in
“Habits, Peers, and Happiness: An Evolutionary Perspective,” he has begun to develop
something quite different—in fact, an “evolutionary” or biological perspective.61 Here
the literature of socio-biology informs his theory about the power of relative social
status vis-à-vis his posited “happiness function” discussed earlier. As he notes, interest
in SEP had been increasingly of interest to economists on two levels “both applied (i.e.,
the study of habits and peer influences over behavior and the analysis of happiness
surveys) and the theoretical (i.e., a search for biological foundations).”62 Becker and
Rayo bring these two literatures together, showing “how several nontrivial empirical
results can be rationalized using existing biological insights.”63
In light of this, Becker and Rayo assert unequivocally, that their “happiness function”
has “a strong biological foundation”64 and “measures the biological desirability of
alternative decisions.”65 Avoiding any shadow of teleology, they aver that “happiness is
not the goal of the evolutionary process. Rather, it is merely an instrument implicitly
used by an organism’s genes to guide his actions, with the ultimate goal of increasing
the likelihood that these genes are passed on to future generations.”66 Notably, in this
 
The Neoliberal Narrative of Morality 123

essay, they do not actually correlate biological insights with their happiness function;
that work comes in a subsequent essay, “Evolutionary Efficiency and Happiness.”67
Here, they presume their findings from “Habits” but take them one step further: “using
economic tools, we argue that the above features can be evolutionarily advantageous in
the sense of improving the individual’s ability to propagate his genes. Our goal, in other
words, is to provide a biological foundation for these traits.”68
Here they provide a “stylized” account of evolutionary biology, an account redolent
of the discourse of selfish genes and “fitness” current as the millennium turned.
Asserting that the happiness function (V) posited previously is in fact “innate,”69
they seek no timid goal; in fact, their aim is “to characterize the theoretical end point
of a natural selection process in which, via trial and error, the fitness-maximizing
happiness functions have come to replace all the rest.”70 Insofar as the happiness
function is simply a mathematized calculus of utility, they therefore are arguing for the
biological—in fact, genetic—grounding of utility. Like Zak’s Oxytocin Virtue Cycle,
happiness is grounded in biology.
Prescinding from the technical, mathematized presentation of their argument, one
thing is clear: the selfish gene is at work.71 This biological-genetic grounding of the
happiness function is important because, in the subtlest of moves, happiness/pleasure/
utility maximization are taken out of the realm of freedom and reason and become
“mere instruments” of deeper biological processes, now confirmed by the mathematical
laws of economics. In fact, as they state clearly:

The theoretical problem of finding the fitness-maximizing happiness functions can

be conveniently stated as a metaphorical principal-agent problem. As is customary
in the literature, the principal represents the process of natural selection, and the
agent represents an individual carrying a set of genes. In the present context,
the principal designs the innate happiness function of the agent, with the goal
of maximizing the propagation of the agent’s genes. Importantly, the happiness
function is only a means to this end: the principal does not directly care about the
agent’s happiness level. The agent, on the other hand, is born with the happiness
function designed by the principal and, via his actions, seeks only to maximize his
level of happiness. In the process, however, he inadvertently serves the principal’s
goal.72

The principal—nature, the gene—designs, has a goal, maximizes, and does not
directly care. The principal—that is, an economized biology—is the main actor; the
invisible hand has become biologized. The “agent”—the human person—is one who
unknowingly and “inadvertently serves the principal’s goal.”
Thus, while Becker and Rayo may prima facie describe the actions of persons as
voluntary, the person and her actions are no longer free. In fact, throughout Becker’s
corpus, “freedom”—that concept so sacred within classical economic theory—is
largely missing.73 This turn to the sociobiological grounding of economic theory
comes toward the end of Becker’s career, but the outlines of a tension between freedom
and biological/social control are present from the beginning. When speaking of theft
or drug use, Becker suggests that such activity may not be “free,” strictly speaking;
124 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

addiction (whether to heroin or good music) may compel a person’s behavior, as there
is always a desire for more. But insofar as an actor makes a choice—“chooses,” for
example, between taking heroin or not taking it, listening to Yo-Yo Ma or not—the
action remains voluntary if not free, a distinction that accords with Sam Harris.
Moreover, even beyond addiction, choices like tastes “are entirely stable and
predictable responses, determined (even predestined) by given circumstances and prior
behaviors.”74 As Kathryn Blanchard notes, “choice,” at least in Becker’s work, no longer
has a necessary relationship with “freedom.” It has become a word that refers merely to
the use of individual power. Yet that power is not freely exercised: “The human being
is always and everywhere under the power of a single, uncomplicated sovereign master
(to replace Bentham’s pleasure and pain): rational, [utility-maximizing] self-interest.
From such a master, economics offers no escape.”75 Our culture—and particularly those
who champion neoliberal economics—retains the rhetoric of freedom. But behind this
rhetoric, freedom has been redefined on market terms; society has been replaced by
isolated and competitive individuals; and choices are driven by self-interest (perhaps
genetic) rather than the common good. True moral autonomy—or free will—is but an
illusion.76 It is the market that is and must remain truly free.
Here is where Becker’s social location as a sociologist is not incidental to his
insights. The endpoint of all of these analyses, as mentioned earlier, is public policy.
Becker believes that economics and public policy go hand-in-hand; but for Becker, the
task of the state is not simply to protect negative freedoms. Rather, “economists can
[and ought] to advise policy makers on the best ways [using economic mechanisms]
to encourage more desirable behavior and discourage the less desirable—in other
words, they can enable social control of the sort that free-marketeers fervently
disavow.”77 Economics, in other words, becomes “the science of the systematic nature
of responses to environmental variables,” which can be optimized through behavioral,
psychological, and structural manipulation of the conditions of choice.78
But as soon as the improvement of social outcomes is paired with the improvement
of human capital, we have met a new nexus of governmentality, where, as Foucault
notes, “the problem of the control, screening and improvement of the human capital
of individuals, as a function of unions and consequent reproduction,” is inevitable. By
reenvisaging human action and behavior through an economic grid, human behavior
becomes subject to control not necessarily through direct oppression or exclusion
of those whose behavior lies outside the norm but by using “new techniques of
environmental technology or environmental psychology”79 that operate invisibly on
the rules of the game rather than directly subjugating persons.80
Neuroscience simply gives the most recent iteration of this vision. With the work
of Becker, Stigler, and Rayo, we see the diminishment of rational free actors, the
elevation of moral “tastes,” and the belief we find in Zak and Harris that we can create
conditions to get people to act in certain ways. And we can see that neuroscience
supplies the facts about this newly formed figure, evacuated of freedom and choice
and determined by an economized biology, whom we have called Homo capitalus.
Homo capitalus is a new being, quite different from Frank Knight’s Homo economicus
with its origins in the thought of John Stuart Mill. But before we tell the story of
Frank Knight we must describe how Milton Friedman—the great champion of
 
The Neoliberal Narrative of Morality 125

Homo economicus—set the stage for the artifactual Homo capitalus, an artifact of
scientific modeling.

Milton Friedman and the Economizing of the State

In some ways, the story could end here insofar as contemporary neoliberalism provides
the social imaginary that has inchoately perfused the neuroscience of morality. But as
in epidemiology, identifying the pathogen is only the first step. To stem a pandemic,
it is equally important to trace the etiology, to identify mutations in the agent, and to
locate the source of the malaise so as to eliminate or contain the microbe and chart a
new future. Thus, in our quest to understand this troubling account of morality, we
must track its intellectual and social history. Becker was not sui generis. His scientific
economics is deeply dependent on the economic theory of his predecessor, Milton
Friedman.81 The alignment between their works was recognized in 2011 when
the University of Chicago established the Becker Friedman Institute for Research
in Economics, in order to honor both men. Key innovations in classical economic
theory introduced by Friedman, as well as by his predecessor, Frank Knight, laid the
groundwork for Becker’s key moves. Yet, Becker fundamentally altered Friedman’s
approach. While Becker inherited Friedman’s commitment to economics as a tool of
social policy, he radically reinterpreted Friedman’s commitment to freedom as well as
Knight’s sacred figure of Homo economicus. In order to understand this mutation and
the ways that it has shaped the neurosciences, it is essential to review Friedman’s main
contributions to neoliberal economics.

Government, Competition, and Carving Out a New

“State of Nature”
Friedman is widely considered to be the most influential economist of the twentieth
century.82 He joined the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1946 and is credited
as the intellectual force that established the Chicago School of Economics. In 1976,
he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics “for his achievements in the fields of
consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of
the complexity of stabilization policy.”83 Among his many works, key items include
A Theory of the Consumption Function (1957), Capitalism and Freedom (1962), and A
Monetary History of the United States (with Anna Schwartz, 1963).
Like Becker, Friedman did not limit himself to strictly academic venues. From the
beginning of his career, he adopted the neoliberal strategy of spreading his ideas to
the masses via popular media. As early as 1946, he penned a popular pamphlet with
George Stigler entitled “Roofs or Ceilings: The Current Housing Problem”—critical of
postwar attempts at rent control, described by one author as “beautifully and cunningly
written,” that takes his free-market ideas to their logical and somewhat extreme limits.84
J. Daniel Hammond notes that for the early part of his life and career, Friedman did
not have an active interest in economic and social policy.85 Rather, it was only during
his first year at the University of Chicago, after he attended the first meeting of the
126 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

MPS and met Hayek, that he began to shift his focus from economics and statistics to
a more robust engagement with “the political and philosophical ideas that undergird
policy.”86 This engagement with popular audiences continued throughout his life; in his
retirement, he and his wife Rose D. Friedman created a ten-part series for PBS entitled
Free to Choose, forwarding his economic ideas, as well as a companion book of the
same title, which stands as the nonfiction bestseller of 1980.
Friedman identified himself with the nineteenth-century “classical liberal”
tradition, a position we will dispute.87 For him, liberalism “emphasized freedom as the
ultimate goal and the individual as the ultimate entity in the society”; laissez-faire, he
argued, reduced the role of the state in its interference with individuals.88 Rather than
the clunky phrase “19th century liberalism,” he coins the phrase the “new liberalism”—
thus, neoliberalism89—which he maintains is a retrieval of Adam Smith. But he also
clearly avowed that this was not a simple retrieval. Demonstrating Foucault’s thesis,
he notes:

Neo-liberalism would accept the nineteenth century liberal emphasis on the

fundamental importance of the individual, but it would substitute for the
nineteenth century goal of laissez-faire as a means to this end, the goal of the
competitive order . . . The state would police the system, establish conditions
favorable to competition and prevent monopoly, provide a stable monetary
framework, and relieve acute misery and distress. The citizens would be protected
against the state by the existence of a free private market; and against one another
by the preservation of competition.90

Thus, where the state had previously protected the individual from the market, now
the market stands between the individual and the state, protecting individual freedom.
In this way, Friedman claimed that economic liberties were indispensable for political
liberties; his foil here was socialism but, as we saw in the Interlude, toward the end of
his career, his economic principles became tools of despotism.
Friedman laid the groundwork for Becker in a number of ways. On the one
hand, as we will see, following Knight, Friedman played a key role in the twentieth-
century effort to establish economics as a science. In one of his seminal articles, “The
Methodology of Positive Economics” (1953), he championed the idea of “positive
economics.” Economist Julian Reiss names this essay as “undoubtedly one of the—or
perhaps the—most influential and most widely and hotly debated papers on economic
methodology.”91 Positive economics is characterized by three things. First, in keeping
with his forebears as well as the philosophical climate of the day, Friedman held that
positive economics—as an objective science—was value free; it was firmly premised on
the fact/value distinction. As he notes, it “is in principle independent of any particular
ethical position or normative judgments . . . [I]t deals with ‘what is,’ not with ‘what
ought to be.’”92
He takes it one step further, however, by emphasizing the ability of economics to
predict, which for him was the key mark of a true science. Thus, the distinguishing task
of positive economics is to establish the law-like generalization to predict consequences
 
The Neoliberal Narrative of Morality 127

depending on variables “in precisely the same sense as any of the physical sciences.”93
Just as moral philosophy will become “moral science” in the nineteenth century, the
economic branch of moral philosophy becomes economic science in the twentieth
century.
Third, while he accepted Knight’s premise that economics (facts) must be carefully
separated from ethics (values), Friedman rejected Knight’s position that given the
abstract, scientific nature of economics and its inability to determine ends and goods,
economics should remain separate from politics and public policy. For him, economics
could not be amoral. It was a positive science, but positive economics would be in the
service of what he called normative economics (policymaking). Normative economics
is “an art . . . a system of rules for the attainment of a given end.”94 While positive
economics must distinguish itself from its normative counterpart, the art of normative
economics is entirely dependent upon positive economics. Positive economics can tell
normative economics at what leverage points to achieve the desired goals.95
That he makes the distinction between positive and normative economics so early
in his career is notable. For as Krugman notes, one of the things that marks Friedman’s
career and locates him as “the greatest” economist of the twentieth century was that he
was a “policy entrepreneur” who sought from the 1950s forward to bring the findings
of economic science to bear on government economic policy, both in the United States
and internationally.96 As much as he was dedicated to the science of economics, he was
even more deeply committed to shaping public policy. In other words, for Friedman,
a key responsibility of economics was to provide the science to help shape the ends,
the goals of public life, which entails normatively selecting the ends he hopes to build
into policy. Thus, for Friedman, ethics begins to be subsumed under the purview of
economics via policy.
But the “norms” that economics and government seek to implement are of a very
specific type. Here public policy was not of the Keynesian variety, which saw government
as responsible for achieving certain content outcomes, such as a living wage, adequate
health care for all citizens, or full employment. For Friedman, Keynesian thought would
place government “planning” in the lead, moving society down the slippery slope toward
socialism and collectivism.97 Instead, the proper role for political economy in shaping
public policy was to ensure that the political domain internalized the proper formal
economic principle, namely, to facilitate competition. Government’s first principle—
its main end or norm—is to enable economic competition, as he noted clearly in his
1962 work “Capitalism and Freedom.” Economics has priority over politics.
Contrary to popular opinion of his day, Friedman held that economics and politics
did not easily meld together. One could not expect that democracy, as a political order,
would easily fit any economic system, for example, socialism. “[D]emocratic socialism
is a contraction in terms.”98 The new liberalism would understand that the principles
of liberalism were both political and economic. The idea that economics was one thing
and politics was another was a recipe for disaster. Economic freedom was a necessary
precondition for political freedom, or democracy.99 Thus, it is not politics that promotes
individual, social, or political freedom—economics is the primary engine of political
freedom.100
128 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

In other words, although Friedman vociferously championed the “fact-value”

distinction, his quasi-religious dedication to the self-organizing market based on
competition dictated the form of the political.101 His theory required a minimal role for
the state in all but a few areas, where he assigned it massive responsibility for intervention,
requiring the state to maintain permanent vigilance and active intervention to keep the
market free. Economics becomes the formal principle for the internal regulation of the
state. Competition becomes key; the state must create, within its domain and control,
the Hobbesian state of nature in order for men to be free. Finally, Friedman is credited
with expanding classical economic analyses (i.e., persons as rationally calculating utility
maximizers) to new questions within macroeconomics, paving the way for Becker’s
extension of microeconomic analysis to all areas of human life.
What we see here is what Foucault names clearly as a key feature of “economic
positivism.” As neoliberalism moves into its second phase, it creates an “economic
grid” against which the political can be judged.102 This grid anchors and justifies “a
permanent political criticism of political and governmental action.”103 Thus, positive
economics after Friedman sees as one of its roles a constant vigilance and critique
of government policy. This economic vigilance requires the government to leave a
zone of free activity for individual, laisse-faire in some sense, while at the same time
asserting governmental vigilance and intervention in a few key areas. Here Friedman
again differentiates himself from classical economics by identifying an error made in
what he calls “19th century individualist philosophy,” by which he means the Bentham-
Mill approach to political economy. The state must intervene in some areas but not
others. Neoliberal political economy must steer a path between Scylla and Charybdis.
Friedman notes:

A new faith must avoid both errors. It must give high place to a severe limitation
on the power of the state to interfere in the detailed activities of individuals; at the
same time, it must explicitly recognize that there are important positive functions
that must be performed by the state. The doctrine sometimes called neo-liberalism
which has been developing more or less simultaneously in many parts of the world
and which in America is associated particularly with the name of Henry Simons is
such a faith. No one can say that this doctrine will triumph.104

The goal is to protect individual liberties and to halt state overreach, while at the same
time the state must assert its powers in order to create conditions for competition and
free markets.

The Freedom of Homo Economicus

Contrary to Becker, who transforms the rational utility maximizer into a being
biologically inclined to utility maximization and so governable through inducement
and self-investment, here Friedman’s avowed commitment to classical liberalism is
firm, for behind his adamant antagonism to government intervention stands his deep
commitment to the freedom of individuals to pursue their own understanding of the
 
The Neoliberal Narrative of Morality 129

good. As he states clearly, “(F)reedom has nothing to say about what an individual does
with his freedom; it isn’t an all-embracing ethic by any means.” The goal for the believer
in freedom is “to leave the ethical problem for the individual to wrestle with.”105
Here a number of things come into relief. First, in spite of his avowed separation
of positive and normative economics, and in spite of his avowal that government
policy ought not seek substantive ends, Friedman’s rhetoric was shaped by a deep
commitment to a substantive good: the freedom of the individual, who is imagined to
be at his freest when exercising his power to act vis a vis wealth. It is a norm, by which
social arrangements can be judged. More than simply a value, Blanchard argues that
this commitment shaped Friedman’s conceptual apparatus: “Freedom, in Friedman's
mind, is not only the pre-condition upon which a laissez-faire economy can function; it
is also the goal toward which market mechanisms are directed,” a goal they will achieve
if governments do not interfere, except in the domain where it can enable the most
freedom, namely, by enacting policies that enable competition.106
Yet, this freedom of persons is the freedom enacted by the state that takes the
free market—that is to say, economics—as its principal form aimed at creating the
conditions of competition, which enables freedom of the individual. Thus, Friedman
holds to a classical liberal understanding of the person as Homo economicus.107 What
is more, Homo economicus ought not only be free of government; Friedman conceives
of Homo economicus as free from his fellows. Later in Capitalism and Freedom, he
returns to what he calls “the economist’s favorite abstraction of Robinson Crusoe,”
where he discusses the dynamics of economic exchange by envisaging now “a number
of Robinson Crusoe households on different islands,” which have to figure out how to
cooperate economically. The metaphor is telling. Although living in proximity to one
another, human persons no longer constitute a community; rather, they are “at their
core, [imperfect and] disconnected individuals . . . ‘a collection of Robinson Crusoes,
as it were . . . each of whom lives from himself.”108
In this sense, Friedman is a classical liberal as well. Freedom, for Friedman, is a
Kantian transcendental. It is an a priori condition for the possibility of human powers
to be exercised. Thus, Friedman’s anthropology strongly retains a notion of free will
and rationality. Politics secures freedom by holding back the power of those who
would wield power in order to enable freedom for citizens to determine and pursue
their own understanding of the good. Government had always to be on guard, lest it
begin to overpower everyone, curbing the freedom of all. Friedman is also Kantian
in that he does not think we have access to the good in any metaphysical sense; thus,
government should not try to enact the good, just create the right structures so that
individuals can enact their own goods. His utilitarianism comes into play within these
boundary conditions. Good, for Friedman, is the purview of the individual, not society,
nor economic science. The greatest good for the greatest number of people is possible
only within the framework of government that secures freedom.109
By limiting the scope of government policies designed to create the space of
freedom for the individual, the “new liberalism” creates a space for individuals, or what
Friedman calls “independent economic units,” to exercise their desires. By leaving
ownership and economic resources in private hands, maximal freedom and liberty
130 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

is preserved.110 The free actor must be free of government in order to produce his
own goods and his own good.111 Although he gestures here to “values” beyond wealth
accrual, in practice he effectively envisages persons as “economic units.” Friedman’s
“economic units” are the precursors to Becker’s “enterprise units.”
Friedman’s reduction of human anthropology to “economic units” is the first
mutation away from Knight’s Homo economicus on the way to the human being
imagined by Becker as human capital, Homo capitalus. Homo capitalus, like a piece on
a monopoly board, must have the game controlled by rules such that It can “self-create”
without intervention from It’s fellows, in fact, in competition with them and without
intervention from the powers of the state.

Goods and the Games People Play

Economics, for Friedman, was a science that could monitor the facts of power enabling
individuals to enact their own goods. The economist ought not to determine goods for
the individual, and government ought only to create the conditions for the possibility
for individuals to define and pursue their own goods. Freedom is content-less, value-
neutral, a necessary condition for the possibility of the production of individually
determined goods. But in the supposedly value neutrality of economic science, goods
are only discerned as the fulfilling of desires. Economic science does not recognize what
is good, only that people seek to fulfill the desires for those things that they determine
to be good. Political economy just sets up the rules according to which everyone must
adhere in pursuing the goods that they desire to pursue.
Foucault observes that under neoliberalism, both the economy and the state
become understood as a “game.” Both are regulated activities with rules that shape
the play, the outcome of which is not known by anyone. The individual players are
enterprise units in the game framed by the state.112 The economic or enterprise
units know what games they want to play, but the rules for all games are the rules
that are set out for all individuals such that they can play specific games aimed at
specific goods. Thus, it is no accident that “game theory” emerges as a component of
economic science, invented by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in 1944.
Game theory “the study of the ways in which interacting choices of economic agents
produce outcomes with respect to the preferences (or utilities) of those agents, where
the outcomes in question might have been intended by none of the agents.”113 “Man”
is just a piece in a game board enabled by economics as the form of the political that
claims to free humans. A number of economists, including Paul Samuelson and John
F. Nash, Jr., have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for their work in game
theory.114
It is certainly true that Friedman held that government should not tell us what games
to play, what goods to aim at. It is the job of government to create the space for multiple
games to be played, for different goods to be sought. Government should prohibit those
pursuing the goods of baseball from imposing those goods on those who would rather
be pursuing the goods of football. Economics just tells us the rules that should govern
all the games which various individuals are playing; it cannot tell us what games we
ought to be playing. Yet, by the time we get to Becker we see that economics becomes
 
The Neoliberal Narrative of Morality 131

the game of all games, in which the goods of all the games played by Homo capitalus are
thought to be the highest good, the good of investing in oneself so that one can play the
game of games, market economics. It should come as no surprise, then, that economic
games have become a staple methodology of the neuroscience of morality.
As Krugman notes, Friedman is “the best spokesman for the virtues of free markets
since Adam Smith. But he slipped all too easily into claiming both that markets always
work and that only markets work. It is extremely hard to find cases in which Friedman
acknowledged the possibility that markets could go wrong, or that government
intervention could serve a useful purpose.”115 Again and again, Friedman called for
market solutions to every problem—education, health care, the illegal drug trade—
deploying free market economic orthodoxy; yet Friedman did not take seriously the
way that economics could be gamed by market forces. Government was to be agnostic
about which version of the good life would survive market competition, all the while
elevating individualistic notions of the good life over shared communal notions of the
good life. This means, of course, that government was not to be at all agnostic about
what was to be the good life, having elevated competition and individualistic notions
of the good life to be the only norms.
In this sense, Friedman is following the path of economic science laid out by his
teacher Frank Knight. Knight had championed the strong Humean distinction between
facts and values. For Knight, it was the task of other disciplines, such as theology or
philosophy, to define the good. Economics sought solely to understand the economic
laws by which people enacted their notions of the good. Friedman also adhered to this
distinction, noting that economics could only tell us the rules of the game, not whether
the game was good. However, Friedman did not heed Knight’s warning. Knight had
stated that the economic science that understands the laws of “want satisfaction” of the
goods desired “may deteriorate the character of its participants: playing a game, even
in a sportly fashion, is not the same as seeking the Good. Thus, in market society, we
become something less than the people our ethical systems call us to be.”116
The character of the players may or may not have deteriorated. After all, without
a firm commitment to goods, one can never tell about character, except perhaps to
say that those with the most wealth—those who generate a positive yield curve and
win at the economic game of games that is political economy—would be deemed the
most moral, the most prosocial. What we have shown is that Becker’s Homo capitalus
depended upon Friedman’s way of imagining political economy as the setting out of
political rules that would ensure freedom of players to play the games they want to play,
to secure the goods they want to secure. However, we can also say that Homo capitalus,
enabled by Friedman’s robust Homo economicus, finds Its progenitor in Frank Knight’s
somewhat more circumscribed Homo economicus.

Frank Knight and the Severing of Ethics and Economics

As noted earlier, those who tell the story of neoliberalism often locate the first phase
as beginning in the 1930s with the ascendance of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich
132 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

Hayek’s development of Ordoliberalism. Alongside those developments, the Chicago

School was laying its foundations as well. For the notion of human capital and the
reconfiguring of the relationship between economics from ethics was not created ex
nihilo by Becker and Friedman. The groundwork for these innovations was laid by
their teacher, Frank H. Knight, who is generally considered to be the founding figure
of the Chicago School.117
Knight, whose prolific publishing career spanned the fifty-year period from 1917 to
1967, joined the full-time faculty at the University of Chicago in 1928. He is largely
regarded as one of the most influential economists in the United States from the early
1920s to the late 1950s, serving as the primary mentor for Friedman, Stigler, Paul
Samuelson, and many others more famously associated with the Chicago School.118
His first and most famous book Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit was published in 1921.119
His work on the distinction between risk and uncertainty would transform economics,
risk being an unknown that could be probabilistically calculated and uncertainty
being an unknown that cannot be modeled. He is also credited as one of the major
figures in establishing price theory as the center of the Chicago School.120 With his
colleague Jacob Viner, Knight taught the foundational “Price Theory” course (Econ
301) from the late 1920s to the mid-1940s, authoring the required text The Economic
Organization in 1933.121 With Viner, he also edited The Journal of Political Economics
for almost twenty years, positioning it as the primary champion in the field of theory
and application of a price-theoretic perspective on economics.122 He helped found the
University of Chicago’s famous Committee on Social Thought, the subsequent bastion
of Hayek from 1950 to 1972, and participated in the founding (and many subsequent)
meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society.123
Knight stands as an important link between the development of nineteenth-
century economic theory and Milton Friedman. Knight’s lifelong focus on ethics, and
his struggle to articulate the relationship between economics and ethics, place him in
continuity with Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, as we shall see. Given his constant
engagement with questions of moral philosophy, as well as differences between his
work and where it was taken by Friedman, Becker and others, one might claim, as
Ross Emmett does, that “ironically, the Chicago School can be said to owe everything,
and nothing, to Knight.”124 Or, as Emmett puts it elsewhere, Knight “remains in a
netherworld somewhere between the classical and neo-liberalism.”125
Yet as we will see in the next chapter, the focus of economic theorizing changes
dramatically from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, and Knight was a lever
making that shift possible.126 As we move from classical economics to neoliberal
economics, the object of study shifts from mechanisms and interconnections of
production, exchange, and social structures to ways these can be harnessed to enable
(or induce) choices of means for individuals to achieve individually chosen ends. Thus
Knight’s vision of Homo economicus created the conditions for the mutation into Homo
capitalus.
One clue that anthropology has shifted emerges in a new definition of economics
circulating by the 1930s, forwarded by British economist Lionel Robbins: “Economics
is the science of human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means
which have mutually exclusive uses.”127 Traditionally, the “science” of human
 
The Neoliberal Narrative of Morality 133

behavior was the realm of the field long known as moral philosophy. “Science” within
philosophy simply meant knowledge, not the restrictive, formal, law-like form of
knowledge understood by contemporary empirical science. But critically, as we move
into the twentieth century, the nascent field of economics claims human behavior
as its specialty.128 To do so, it needs to make a number of moves. First, it needs to
establish itself as a “science.” Second, it needs to differentiate itself from other fields
traditionally concerned with human behavior, for example, ethics. Third, it needs to
posit an account of ‘the human’ that permits a reproducible—and therefore predictable
and controllable—model of behavior. Once economics becomes a science, Homo
economicus is born, and once the science has separated itself from moral philosophy,
the groundwork is laid for Homo capitalus. We see all three shifts at play in the work of
Frank Knight. To highlight these, let us turn to a close reading of the first of his famous
two-part lecture delivered at Harvard in 1922, published as “Ethics and the Economic
Interpretation.” 129

Facts, Values, and the Birth of Economic Science

As a realm of scholarly activity, Knight championed a vision of economics as the science
that discovered and described the “laws” that governed human economic behavior.
As he states, “The economic man is the individual who obeys economic laws, which
is merely to say that he obeys some laws of conduct, it being the task of the science
to find out what the laws are.”130 Embracing human reason, the rational man “knows
what he wants and orders his conduct intelligently with a view to getting it.”131 The
economist does not study the ends, but the means to those ends. It is only as the study
of the means that economics can be imagined as a science.132 In positing this definition,
Knight is striving to bring economics up to what he perceives to be the gold standard,
that of the natural sciences, as in many respects “economics has been far behind the
natural sciences.”133
These “laws” and their related models discovered by economists are, in Knight’s
view, purely formal. “Economics deals with the form of conduct rather than its
substance or content.” Wealth stands in for all things that one might desire, whether
it be money, prestige, power, or any other good. Wealth is “merely an abstract term
covering everything which men do actually (provisionally) want.”134 In other words,
economics is for Knight solely a discipline of “instrumental rationality,” a deliberation
about means to achieve ends that are given and seem to be inscrutable. What ought to
be desired is not at stake in the science of economics; only the means are scientifically
discoverable and the task of science is to rationally weigh those means.
Knight imagines means in terms of “cause-and-effect relations” of human conduct,
delimiting “conduct” in a way very different from his Chicago School heirs:

Conduct is not co-extensive with human behavior; much of the latter is admittedly
capricious, irrational, practically automatic, in its nature. Different actions have
in various degrees the character of conduct, which we define with Spencer as “the
adaptation of acts to ends,” or briefly, deliberative or rational activity. Much that is
134 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

at the moment virtually reflex and unconscious is, however, the result of habit or
of self-legislation in the past, and hence ultimately rational.135

Conduct, or “human acts,” are those actions that are directed toward ends via
deliberative or rational activity.136
Conduct is teleological in that human actors generally reason to ends, but
economics must refrain from engaging with ends in any way. Thus, Knight is faced with
a conundrum. He wants to very clearly limit economic science to a descriptive rather
than a normative project. As a science, “dedicated to the search for truth,” economics
must eschew the temptation to evaluate the “ends” toward which human conduct is
directed, and even to be “purified of all prejudices as to the goodness or badness of
its [own] principles and results.”137 For economics to be scientific, any substantive
or subjective component of human action—including ends, means to those ends,
knowledge of ends and means, or preferences—must all be determined prior to the
work of the economist. The economist mimics MacIntyre’s description of the manager.
In order to carve out conduct from its ends, Knight draws a bright line between
economics and ethics.138 Are human motives, wants, and desires best treated by
the descriptive economic science? Or are they not values, or oughts, which are of a
different character, and thus not amenable to scientific investigation?139 Arguing
against fellow economists who he believes fallaciously encompass ends within the
purview of economics, Knight affirms Hume’s is-ought distinction, limiting the
domain of economic science to the analysis of conduct/facts/the “is,” relegating
ends/values/“oughts” to other branches of human knowing.140 One reason for this
demarcation is, he believes, that wants, desires, and ends are not stable; they are
constantly changing. Here Becker differs from his predecessor. Yet in trying to navigate
this fine line, Knight plants the seed from which Becker will sprout, claiming:

For the purpose of defining economics, the correct procedure would appear to
be to start from the ordinary meaning of the verb to economize, that is, to use
resources wisely in the achievement of given ends. In so far as the ends are viewed
as given, as data, then all activity is economic. The question of the effectiveness of the
adaptation of means is the only question to be asked regarding conduct, and economics
is the one and all-inclusive science of conduct. From this point of view, the problem
of life becomes simply the economic problem, how to employ the existing and
available supplies of all sorts of resources . . . in producing the maximum amount
of want-satisfaction, including the provision of new resources for increased value
production insofar as the present population finds itself actually desiring future
progress.141

The door is open now for Friedman and Becker. Insofar as the ends are given, all activity
is economic. Friedman and Becker run with the idea that “all activity is economic,”
laying the groundwork for the popularizers of neuroscience. In addition, the job of
defining—or rather, as we will see herein, interpreting—ends is the job of other non-
scientific disciplines, such as philosophy, theology, and history.142 Friedman mostly
 
The Neoliberal Narrative of Morality 135

accepts this second point, whereas Becker ignores it. What distinguishes Knight,
Friedman, and Becker is what they think the human actor is, a point to which we shall
now turn.

Is/Ought, Economics/Ethics
As Aristotle noted, all knowledge is of the general. It is derived in order to cover many
instances of a kind of object. If the point is to discover the laws of economic behavior,
which is now thought to be the model for all human behavior, then the human, the
“economic man,” is necessarily an abstraction appropriate to that model. Where
Friedman and Becker thought they had captured human behavior in their economic
models of behavior, Knight admitted candidly that he was dealing with an abstraction.
Put differently, economic science presupposes an anthropology, an account of who
or what the human economic actor is. Knight understood that he was engaging in
anthropological philosophizing. He unabashedly deployed the term “economic man,”
presuming the anthropology forwarded by John Stuart Mill of “the human whose sole
activity is choice, and who chooses based on a calculation of pure self-interest.”143 But
where the phrase Homo economicus was coined to criticize Mill's anthropology (as we
will see in Chapter 5), this figure as the focal point of a scientific economics becomes
for Knight, to a degree, necessary and positive.
Yet while validating Homo economicus—the human that obeys economic laws the
way that celestial bodies obey the laws of physics—as the model for the science of
economics, Knight recognized the limits of this anthropology. He admits the criticism
made by some that the economic man does not exist. Human actors do not check the
laws of the science of conduct and then act. Human actors “neither know what they
want—to say nothing of what is ‘good’ for them—or act very intelligently to secure
the things which they have decided to try to get.”144 Thus, Knight recognizes that
Homo economicus is necessarily an idealized abstraction useful only for the purposes
of scientific analysis: “a science of conduct possible only if its subject-matter is made
abstract to the point of telling us little or nothing about actual behavior.”145
Knight also comes across rather cynical about human reason and character. While
economics must treat the ends as givens, he believed human reason to be highly
imperfect, “a frail instrument, often corrupted by the baser elements in human nature,”
utilized to pursue baser human nature—self-interest.146 This weakness in human
nature complicates the study of conduct such that, in relation to the natural sciences,
economics still falls short. The data for the science of conduct is disanalogous to
natural science. Its data is provisional, shifting, and idiosyncratic to the individual,
rendering its generalizations fruitless. People act toward the end in front of them with
some vague awareness that the end is not the ultimate end.147 Human behavior is not
wholly rational, either in its end or in its means.
Despite these vagaries that are difficult to render rational, Knight envisages human
actors not only as agents seeking to satisfy particular desires or ends; rather, he envisages
them as endlessly caught up in the creation of desire itself. People desire not just more,
but better ends, or things that they think they ought to want.148 As we will see with John
136 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

Stuart Mill, Knight imagines choice in desires and the ability to give some ranking of
goods, with “‘higher,’ more evolved and enlightened wants.”149 As he notes:

Life is not fundamentally a striving for ends, for satisfactions, but rather for bases
for further striving; desire is more fundamental to conduct than is achievement, or
perhaps better, the true achievement is the refinement and elevation of the plane of
desire, the cultivation of taste. And let us reiterate that all this is true to the person
acting, not simply to the outsider, philosophizing after the event.150

Thus, behind all these wants—which are all, always at the same time, completely
economic and completely “ideal, conventional, or sentimental”151—lies “‘the restless
spirit of man’ who is an aspiring rather than a desiring being.”152
As we will see in the next chapter, Mill had a higher view of the human, while also
acknowledging the rather reductive nature of all sciences of conduct. Yet insofar as
aspiration is cast as a form of desire, Knight is left with a bifurcated anthropology—
the human person at once the rational utility calculating actor—the abstraction Homo
economicus that does not really exist—and the being with no basis to act, whose desires
“multiply in at least as great a ratio as the heads of the famous hydra.”153 This person
must be free to choose, pursue, and negotiate with others in society their own ends; yet
this “free” conduct can be mapped (and later predicted) by economic laws that are as
“universal as those of mathematics and mechanics.”154
What is more, in insisting on the formal nature of economic science, its agnosticism
regarding ends, and the correlative bifurcation of economics and ethics, Knight renders
ends as incommensurable preferences. Blanchard argues that Knight so reduces desire
that desire for friendship, beauty, or social approval originates in the same place as desire
for water or air. The mechanics behind the deepest and the most frivolous desires are
the same. The scientific discovery for the mechanics of shoe buying is not that different
from the mechanics of impoverished parents acquiring food for their hungry children.
As Knight states it, “If the Good is Satisfaction, there are no qualitative differences,
no ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ as between wants and that is better which is smaller and most
easily appeased.”155 “Put this way,” Blanchard notes, “it may seem absurd, and yet this is
precisely what economics does.”156 Knight readily acknowledges and laments the logic
that his economic science requires. Throughout his corpus, one finds frequent laments
of the moral and social failings of laissez-faire.157 Put differently, Knight conceives of
ethics as the pursuit of the good, and that economics as a science can give humankind
the tools to achieve those goods. But as we noted earlier, he is less sanguine about the
deleterious effects of market dynamics on human character, with self-interest-driven
want satisfaction paving a downward social spiral.158
He names precisely such a concern immediately following his panegyric account
of the person as an aspiring, desiring being. Every actor feels the difference between
what one should want, and what one really wants, and he notes the disconnect is more
felt by the unthinking actor than the sophisticated actor, who “argues himself into the
‘tolerant’ (economic) attitude of de gustibus non disputandum.”159 Contrary to Becker
and Stigler, Knight sees this flight of fanciful ends or tastes not merely as a fact, but as
a morally problematic fact, counseling that “[a] sounder culture leads away from this
 
The Neoliberal Narrative of Morality 137

view.”160 He stands slightly horrified at this insight, yet these implications are precisely
what are later drawn out to full strength by Friedman, Stigler, and Becker.

The Limits of Economic Science

Knight not only understands the limits of economic science as an abstraction but also
understood that economic science could get very messy if it moved into the realm
of ethics and social policy. For Knight, the solution to these problems lies not in
economics but rather in ethics and public discourse as nonscientific discourses. As
Emmett notes, after the 1930s, Knight began to turn his attention more to questions
of social philosophy and ethics, particularly “the role of social scientific inquiry in
the defense of free society.”161 George Stigler makes a similar point about human
capacity to build a free society with free individuals.162 As we have already noted,
Knight assiduously sought to put limits on the scope of economics, knowing well that
“economists’ knowledge . . . has almost nothing to do with real human beings or their
real-world problems.”163 And, over against the economics mainstream of the time,
dominated by American Progressives, Keynesian interventionalists, institutionalists,
and social gospellers, he was quite circumspect about the extent to which economics
could actually help to solve societal problems. Knight thought government could really
do little to help. Knight held that economic analyses could discover knowledge about
human economic behavior, but its science was valid only in discovering what the
economic laws are, not what they ought to be.
As Robert Nelson notes, Knight “doubted the possibility of the scientific
management of society through the manipulation of self-interest in the market or
otherwise.”164 The findings of economics—and particularly price theory—were
of “limited relevance” to public policy.165 While they could and should inform the
democratic processes of public discourse, the latter was the proper forum for
hammering out differences in ethical judgment regarding conflicting values. Here,
again, Friedman diverges from Knight. Friedman conceives of the public square
as a space of primarily—or perhaps, solely—of competition between isolated,
individuated Robinson Crusoes. Knight, however, worked with a deeply communal
sense of the human person. He understood that individual wants and “tastes and
appreciations” are taught and shaped by one’s culture.166 Social discussion, thus, is
not about bargaining from fixed individual preference positions to divide up the
economic pie. Rather, the whole point of political discussion is to change minds; as a
result of democratic deliberation, individual preferences should be constantly revised,
leading to the necessary convergence (“likemindedness”) of the values or ends the
community should pursue.167
In this, as we shall see in Chapter 6, Knight is more aligned with Smith, than he is with
Mill and Bentham, believing that economic and other social problems are, ultimately,
not structural or political, but religious or moral problems.168 The dissolution of society
is not primarily a problem of the economic order, but a failure in pursuing the correct
ends. Like Smith, Knight understood himself to be a moral philosopher, and most
of his writings are in social philosophy rather than technical economics. As Robert
Nelson notes, it was in his capacity as a moral philosopher “that the key figures in the
138 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

Chicago school of economics encountered him and in which he exerted his greatest
influence on its future development.”169
Yet while the real solutions lie in the realm of religion, philosophy, and ethics, in the
end, Knight, by reducing ends to wants and preferences, has rendered these disciplines
powerless. In claiming for economics the status as the science of human behavior, he
negates the possibility that any other claimants—religion, philosophy, ethics—could
have purchase on the truth. There is no rational, reasonable way to adjudicate between
ends. If ends are not “data,” if they are instead “values,” then they are not amenable
to scientific description and therefore not candidates for any sort of science or truth-
claims. Ethics is relegated to emotivist preferences.170 He opens the door for expressive
individualism. In so doing, however, he lays the groundwork for Friedman’s creation
of normative economics about what society should do to begin to displace ethics. With
Becker, ends become data, and the discipline of ethics disappears entirely, subsumed
within “a ‘glorified’ economics.”171 What remains in both Becker and the neuroscientific
narrative of morality are fragments and simulacra of prior moral traditions, deployed
rhetorically to mask the transmogrification of ethics.
In his drive to be scientific, Knight followed his predecessor John Stuart Mill. As we
shall show, he embraces the positive economic science, the is-ought distinction, and he
understood human freedom, not as something secured by state-enforced competition,
but rather as something within the will of humankind, a hardwired capacity to seek
and achieve certain goods rooted ultimately in a sort of natural law. Thus, behind
his abstraction of Homo economicus lies a more robust moral anthropology, a vision
that is lost in the work of Milton Friedman. Yet, Emmett argues, “Surprisingly, one
could argue that Knight also helped to set the tone for Chicago’s move to an applied
policy science.”172 No social problem could be viewed as out of bounds for economic
investigation, because one could not say in advance what knowledge might be
generated. Intelligent social action required, he argued, both education in price theory
among the citizenry and the economics profession’s commitment to keep their policy
discussion open until a fair degree of common agreement within the profession was
reached.173

The Imago Oeconomiae

In many ways, the cultural allure of Freakonomics is a result of Becker’s work to turn
all human behavior into predictable events responsive to subtle forces exercised by a
different kind of invisible hand. Becker, along with the infrastructure of the neoliberal
cultural strategy and the political influence of the Chicago School, helped to move
neoliberal thinking from an esoteric economic thought-community of whom many
were suspicious into something that now informs the self-identity of most of the
contemporary West. As more than one commentator has opined: we are all neoliberals
now.174 He did so by radically transforming what an older utilitarianism—and, indeed,
his economic predecessors—had thought to be idiosyncratic tastes, pleasures, pains,
values, and preferences into stable, equalized quantities. So stabilized, one could now
 
The Neoliberal Narrative of Morality 139

give a scientific account of human behavior—one mathematically mapped by the laws

of economics and grounded in evolutionary biology.
To do so required him to theorize rationality and freedom—and therefore the
human actor—very differently. Homo economicus was no longer a laissez-faire figure.
The human person remains, rhetorically, a rational actor, but rationality here is of a
particular variety. Unlike classical economics, where government is challenged to free
subjects from political control so that they can rationally deliberate and enact their
own goods, human rationality here is reduced to a process of calculation, an instinctive
drive to maximize utility. This biologically grounded law-like nature of behavior is
what renders tastes stable over time and similar between people. One’s taste for buying
locally grown produce or serving the poor is governed by the same consumptive
law of utility maximization as another’s taste for heroin. Once one digs down to the
deterministic laws of economics invisibly driving all behavior, actions are the result of
choices, which are voluntary, but no longer really free. And those choices, if rational,
will seek always to increase investment in the enterprise that is the now capitalized
human person so as to endlessly enhance economic outcomes.
The resonances between this most recent phase of neoliberalization and the
neurosciences should by now be clear. We will flag a few at this point and return
to a more careful analysis in our conclusion. But we note, of course, that like their
neuroscientific heirs, economists from Knight to Becker characterize morality no
longer as goods but hold to a theory of tastes and preferences. Morality has undergone
a thorough going economization, even where traditional virtue language is deployed,
with “vice” or harmful behavior being defined as failure to meet certain economic
standards and beneficial behavior as that which most fully adheres to the ideal
of “prosociality,” the market. There is hardly any difference between Sam Harris’s
understanding of volition over freedom and Becker’s. And like Becker and Stigler, he
believes that some external control—whether by governmental control or some other
social control through medical screening—of behaviors is necessary for the good of the
whole of a functional society. There is a shared focus on main features of SES or SEP in
the search for proxies for vice—education, income, marriage, addiction, criminality;
as well as direct engagement with those biological scientists seeking the formula for
prosociality, be it named wisdom or happiness.
By the end of his career, Becker has come to hold that the “invisible hand” of
economic science, the “hidden side of everything,” is grounded in the biological
aspects of human being. The neuroscientists of morality adopt this invisible hand,
forwarding a vision of the market grounded in our genes that subsequently shapes
our brains and therefore behaviors, with only a modicum of rational agency or control
on those behaviors. As such, the task of economics is to inform policies and practices
designed to invisibly shape and direct individual behavior; the neurosciences promise
to provide an ideal modality for controlling Homo capitalus.
For different reasons, their forebears would take umbrage at this vision of the
person. Yet behind their work lies Milton Friedman and Frank Knight. Where Becker
and Stigler focused on microeconomics, Friedman believed the macro-level work of
political policy not only could be used but also should be used to solve all kinds of
social problems and to encourage behaviors that would improve human flourishing.
140 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

With the positive science of economics, we could know the facts, and once we knew the
facts scientists might be able to discover where the problems were, and political and
social apparatuses could be deployed in order to solve those scientifically discovered
facts. Retaining a tentative hold on the fact/value distinction that he inherited from
Knight, the state here loses its freedom, becoming completely governed by the logic
and needs of economics. As was made visible in Chile, Friedman’s economics enabled
a macro biopolitics of state terror. From the economization of the state, it is a short
step to the economization of the human person; equally, it is a short step from the
loss of the freedom of the state to the loss of the freedom of persons. With Becker,
neoliberalism and its methodological individualism redirects its focus to covert,
micro-level interventions on embodied individuals. Thus, the arc of biopolitics that
begins in the seventeenth century becomes complete.
Haidt and Zak would certainly counter that they explicitly seek to distance
themselves from Homo economicus, particularly insofar as he stands alone, isolated,
rational, and selfish. But such protestations would be disingenuous insofar as the
anthropology informing their work is Homo economicus’ heir. Foucault, speaking
here of neoliberalism, could equally be speaking about the neuroscientists of morality
insofar as they are:

extending the economic model of supply and demand and of investment-costs-

profit so as to make it a model of social relations and of existence itself, a form
of relationship of the individual to himself, time, those around him, the group,
and the family . . . [It also] functions in their analysis or program as a support
to what they designate as the reconstruction of a set of what could be called
“warm” moral and cultural values which are presented precisely as antithetical to
the “cold” mechanism of competition. The enterprise schema involves acting so
that the individual . . . is not alienated from his work environment, from the time
of his life, from his household, his family, and from the natural environment . . .
The return to the enterprise is therefore at once an economic policy or a policy
of the economization of the entire field, of an extension of the economy to the,
the entire social field, but at the same time a policy which presents itself or seeks
to be a kind of Vitalpolitik with the function of compensating for what is cold,
impassive, calculating, rational, and mechanical in the strictly economic game of
competition.175

Here Foucault crystallizes the entire oeuvre of Haidt and Zak.

Although more inchoate in the work of the Chicago School, further analysis of
neoliberalism would also begin to make sense of the rhetoric that appears throughout
the neuroscience and popular literature, correlating poverty with vice. As enterprise-
units, whose inscribed purpose is to increase their capital value, each individual is
held responsible and accountable for his or her own actions, success, and well-being.
As David Harvey notes: “This principle extends into the realms of welfare, education,
health care, and even pensions . . . Individual success or failure are interpreted in terms
of entrepreneurial virtues or personal failings (such as not investing significantly
enough in one’s own human capital through education) rather than being attributed to
 
The Neoliberal Narrative of Morality 141

any systemic property (such as the class exclusions usually attributed to capitalism).”176
This responsibilization, where virtues and vices begin to be defined economically where
the whole moral weight rests on the individual, also traces its roots to the seventeenth
century. Here the seed of Homo economicus was laid, emerging ultimately in the work
of John Stuart Mill and his utility maximization principle. In fact, as we shall see, the
term was meant to be critical of Mill, who in turn was seeking to correct the work of his
godfather, Jeremy Bentham. It is to these two figures—along with their alliances with
Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo—that we turn in the next chapter.
 5

Springs of Action and the Political

Management of the Poor

We have arrived at the birth of Homo economicus, that supposedly free agent, who is—
or ought to be—unencumbered by government and society and able to make rational
decisions for his own good and in his own interest. It is this figure, we argue, that
in the late twentieth century mutated into Homo capitalus, effectively becoming the
anthropology animating the neuroscientific narrative of morality. Stable, static, dead—
this docile entity depleted of ontological and moral content, fit for the purpose of
modeling human behavior mathematically and scientifically, has minimal rationality
and less freedom, being subtly directed by the dictates of biological and social
pressures.1
But as our narrative of the twentieth century makes clear, Homo economicus is
not a timeless figure; he has never been static. He has morphed and shifted, mutated
and evolved over the past three centuries, constantly reconfigured to fit underlying
permutations in political economy, in tandem with—and in service to—the emergence
of economics as a science of society. Yet Homo economicus was born in a particular
place and at a particular time—on an island in the north Atlantic in the late nineteenth
century. His progenitors emerged in the mid-eighteenth century, a time when natural
and moral philosophy were giving way to the human sciences, at a moment when
both poverty (as a concept) and modern capitalism were emerging together, and when
the relationships and power between economics, persons, and the state was being
decisively reenvisaged. No matter how he morphs, these conditions of his genesis
continue to shape fundamental features of his nature. Thus, in order to understand
the anthropology animating the neuroscientific narrative of morality, it is crucially
important to trace the threads back to their genesis.
Three features of the context within which Homo economicus was sculpted are
key to understanding his contemporary character. The first is the assumption that
economics and moral behavior go hand-in-hand. This assumption only began to
emerge in the seventeenth century with the shifting social conditions and rise of the
Poor Laws described in the Interlude. But very quickly, it became a given of Western,
industrialized culture, framing debates on virtue and vice going forward. As late as
1875, for example, we find American abolitionist, entrepreneur, and early libertarian
Lysander Spooner arguing in his treatise entitled Vices Are Not Crimes that economic
realities play a role in an agent’s ability to acquire and/or enact virtue. “[P]overty,’ he
 
Springs of Action and the Management of the Poor 143

declaimed, “is the natural parent of nearly all the ignorance, vice, crime, and misery
there are in the world.”2 For Spooner, poverty caused ignorance and indebtedness,
it destroyed self-respect, and drove the poor to despair and drink. With echoes of
Dickens, he held that poverty and its effects did not primarily derive from individual
vice—as clearly his interlocutors held—but rather from social forces outside personal
control. Change social circumstances and vice would fade away. Yet both Spooner and
his interlocutors presumed a relationship between morality—primarily vice—and
economics.
Although eliding the question of poverty, this presumed relationship between
economics and ethics was, as we saw, an early target of Knight’s work. Knight saw
one of his main tasks as separating economics as the science of human behavior from
ethics. That he perceived such a need signals a second key feature of this history:
that by the turn of the twentieth century, ethics had been reconceptualized no longer
as moral philosophy but rather as a kind of moral science inextricably tied to the
emerging social science, economics. As Homo economicus was a fiction necessary
for establishing economics as a science, as we will see in this chapter, he was equally
central to reconfiguring ethics as a science.
Thus, the possibility of an endeavor like the neuroscience of morality stems from
our second theme: the development of the social sciences. Knight unabashedly
acknowledges his debt to John Stuart Mill, a key figure in the rise of the positive
social sciences. While Mill was accused of imagining the human actor as Homo
economicus—a name he never embraced—he also championed the science of ethology
(the science of character), a zeal for which he inherited from his father, James Mill,
and godfather, Jeremy Bentham. These figures—along with other theorists like
David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus—birthed the social sciences out of a fusion of
philosophical beliefs, economic commitments, and political machinations, instilling
in these fields largely unexamined assumptions. If, as we have noted, the neurosciences
are a fusion of neurobiology with the human sciences, particularly psychology and
economics, understanding the rise of the social sciences is critically important for
probing the assumptions that underlie this new field—and particularly its claims about
morality. As we will show, much of what we have encountered in the neuroscientific
narrative of morality—its conceptualization of poverty, its heavy dependence on SES
and SEP as stand-ins for community, its reconfiguration of virtue and vice into the
proxies antisocial or prosocial traits, as well as its core anthropology—all derive from
the historical precursors shared by the social sciences.
Third, these architects of the social sciences did more than simply advance novel
philosophical ideas. They sought to operationalize these ideas via the organs of the
state, with an intriguing focus on social control of the bodies and lives of the poor.
Thus, we find Mill warning against the reductive anthropology of political economy and
attempting to temper Bentham’s fervor for political and social reform. Yet his efforts
were largely in vain insofar as political economy as a form of biopolitics—or, as we will
call it, a biopolitical economy—had by then been firmly established. As Wendy Brown
notes, Foucault charts how in the mid-eighteenth century, the market became the “new
site of truth or veridiction,” a place from which the organization of society, especially
the poor, could find leverage points.3 Out of the Poor Law Reform of 1834 emerges
144 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

a new relationship between the state and individual freedom, “establishing interest-
driven homo oeconomicus as the subject it governs.”4 The social sciences of economics,
ethology, and psychology become key tools in the ongoing production of this new
regime of truth.
In this chapter, we begin with Homo economicus and Mill’s anthropology, calling to
mind that Mill was also engaged in the systemization of a positivistic social science.
We will show that Mill’s drive to systematize the social sciences found its origin in
Bentham’s drive to articulate the natural laws of social ordering for the purpose of
engineering society. With Bentham’s “springs of action” we see the origins of the Homo
capitalus already taking shape, but only among the impoverished. We will then explore
the way the Poor Law Reform of 1834 was a triumph of Benthamite social engineering.
To make this point, we will argue that two other social scientists—Ricardo and
Malthus, channeling Joseph Townsend—were pivotal figures in the transformation of
economics from the domain of moral philosophy into the domain of social science.

Mill’s Positivist Ethics, Positivist Social Science

John Stuart Mill (1806–73) has been called “the most influential English language
philosopher of the nineteenth century.”5 Firmly ensconced within the tradition of
British empiricism, Mill articulated key innovations in ethics, the social sciences, and
political economy that indelibly shaped these fields as they moved into the twentieth
century. Unlike the figures in our previous chapter, Mill was not an academic. Rather,
at the age of seventeen, he embarked on a thirty-five-year career with the East India
Company, a British joint-stock company that at one point in the nineteenth century
accounted for half of the world’s trade and oversaw a standing army of over 260,000
men in India.6 His career culminated in his role as Chief Examiner of Correspondence,
a position roughly equivalent to Undersecretary of State for the British Empire.7 This
position provided him the means to write theory and philosophy in the development
of classical economics. Toward the end of his life, he served a term as a member of
Parliament.
Mill’s work stands in the tradition of the British empiricists, from Bacon through
Locke and Hume, informed by the work of two key figures in his life—the psychology
of his father, James Mill, and the political economy of his godfather, Jeremy Bentham.8
James Mill (1773–1836) was a Scottish “political philosopher, historian, psychologist,
educational theorist, economist, and legal, political and penal reformer,” who was
educated at the University of Edinburgh and deeply influenced by leading figures
of the Scottish Enlightenment.9 James was also an early collaborator with, and close
friend of, Jeremy Bentham and David Ricardo. He labored as a prolific independent
writer and journalist for the first half of his career until he secured a position at the
East India Company in 1819, as a result of his three-volume History of British India.10
His background, his connections, and the remarkably intense education to which he
submitted his eldest son beginning at the age of three (when he began teaching him
Greek), profoundly shaped the work of the younger Mill.
 
Springs of Action and the Management of the Poor 145

The Possibility of a Moral Science

John Stuart Mill was an early voice in the social science of ethology—the study
of human behavior from a biological perspective. It would not be until Darwin’s
1872 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals that ethology would begin
to capture the imagination of the powerful. But Mill’s positivism in the area of
ethics paved the way for the transformation of moral philosophy into social science,
much in the same way that natural philosophy had become natural science in the
nineteenth century.11
Mill’s account of both knowledge and morality is related to his anthropology,
which was both informed by and yet different from his fellow social philosopher and
interlocutor Auguste Comte. Both Comte and Mill were positivists, holding that every
rationally justifiable statement finds its origins in empiricism and thus is scientifically
verifiable. Both Comte and Mill sought naturalistic accounts of human behavior, but
unlike Comte who grounded his approach in the community, Mill’s account began in
the psychology of the individual (particularly informed by his father’s psychological
work).12 Mill’s anthropology is different from Comte’s because Comte’s was a “Catholic
positivism, making little of the individual.”13 Mill’s positivism “is English and
Protestant, full of the consciousness of the individual, and resolute in the attempt to
know human nature on its subjective side.”14 Mill’s individual is Locke’s individual.
On Mill’s reading, the phenomenal self was grounded in the material of the brain.
However, he held that psychological awareness was ontologically different than brain
physiology. He still understood the human animal to be a part of the natural world;
thus, the human animal was dependent on the laws of physiology, even while self was
the product of its experiences.15
As a naturalist and an empiricist, Mill “consider[ed] every human activity as a cause
of effects and an effect of causes, and so a part of ‘nature’ in that wide sense of the
word in which it means simply the object of knowledge—the ‘facies totius universi.’”16
The “face of the whole universe” refers to the surface phenomena to which we have
access through our sense impressions. For Mill, echoing his Scottish Enlightenment
forbearers, sense impressions are our only source for knowledge or ideas; there can
be no a priori source for either. Sense impressions of nature and culture produce
experiences that are somehow recorded on the physiological body—the physiological
body existing prior to experiences. All knowledge begins in sense impressions. We,
as humans, read the “face” of nature and culture and are literally stuck in the surface
phenomena.
Consistent with his Scottish Enlightenment context, Mill holds that the mind is
known to itself phenomenally through its feelings and consciousness.17 Only in
attending to the feelings and phenomenal experiences can one begin to create a science
of the self—a psychology. As Charles Douglas notes, “[T]he feelings or consciousnesses
which belong or have belonged to it [the self], and its possibilities of having more,
are the only facts there are to be asserted of Self—the only positive attributes, except
permanence, which we can ascribe to it.”18 Mill’s empiricism shines through here. The
human only has access to the phenomena, to the original sense impressions, and our
sense impression of the memories of consciousness.
146 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

To Mill’s credit, he avoids reductive science; the self is not exhausted by its
mental states. Even while the human animal only has access to these feelings and
consciousnesses, he does maintain that there is a subject that stands behind the sense
experience of objects (the phenomenal experience, the face of the universe) and who
stands further behind the act of observing. As such, the self remains somewhat of a
mystery, ultimately enigmatic to itself in terms of its depth. This self, standing behind
and reading the surface impressions whether of the inner or outer world, is the source
of possibility for freedom in Mill’s account, as we shall shortly see.
Nonetheless, science can elucidate this depth of self to some degree. This science of
psychology (especially as developed by his father) made it possible to have a science of
character (ethology). Thus, just as we can predict the behaviors of planetary movement,
but not without some variation in the actual observations or perturbations (as Mill
calls them), we can also know the universal laws of character formation without
knowing all the particular details of the experiences of a particular person that have
formed his particular character.19 With the combination of the general laws and the
particularities of experience, one can know the whole of human action and feeling,
and attempt to construct a science of human nature.20 In addition, as he notes, all of
the causes within the internal life of the person—“the facts of each particular case”—
contribute to various actions and activities of the person. The psyche is forged not
only by its biological predispositions and desires but also in congruence with social
engagement and the cultivation of desire.21
The human animal, as part of nature, is the animal whose behavior is produced by
its psychological constitution (its natural features) and the social environment within
which that constitution develops. Human experience gives the content in the form of
feelings and consciousnesses, which are particular to each psychological individual. If
we know each contributor cause, we can predict behavior. Thus, a positive science of
the human is possible. If one knows the motives and the character of the individual’s
mind as well as the inducements, one can infer unerringly what the person’s actions
will be as readily as a physical event.22 This deterministic nature of human activity
means that, like the deterministic behavior of celestial bodies, human activity can
also be studied scientifically. This idea of philosophical necessity and of controlling
inducements animated much of Mill’s work in articulating laws for parliament—a
tendency he shared with Bentham, as we shall shortly see. For, if we know the kinds of
inducements that would animate desired behaviors, society could indeed plan on the
behaviors of its people, if not frankly control them.
In spite of his commitment to discovering the scientific structure of morality, this
kind of determinism—grounded in the biological constitution of the human animal
and the material social structures of society—weighed heavily on Mill, for he was also a
strong proponent of freedom. John Milbank suggests that Mill, as a positivist, does not
give a robust account of freedom and that it was only the German theorists that appealed
to the neo-Kantian subject as a means to preserve freedom—a subject that sits a priori
above the biological and social structures, standing apart from the political structures
and outside history.23 To a certain extent, Milbank is correct. However, Mill was aware
of this problem, and he notes in his Autobiography that his despair over the inability to
escape his deterministic tendencies persisted until he “gradually saw light through it.”24
 
Springs of Action and the Management of the Poor 147

Mill resolves the tension between his commitment to naturalistic determinism—

both biological and social determinism—and to freedom, by an appeal to the will and
an inner unity to human action. The “will is the child of desire,”25 biological desire.
Yet it is also capable of choosing among desires. In other words, the will is part of the
causal mechanism of behavior, but because it chooses among several desires, it is not
entirely determined. A person can learn to desire beyond the merely biological, or to
curb one desire in order to promote other (higher) desires. In learning to choose higher
desires, a person’s desire can mold his volition.26 One could, under the influence of the
will, have chosen one action over another, when the other action would have been
preferable. Mill preserves personal responsibility as a top-down control mechanism.
Where the person is determined from the bottom up by all the natural causes and
laterally by experiences that constitute the self, the will can come to exert top-down
pressure to adjudicate between a person’s various desires. Thus, she can freely control
her actions.
Moreover, one’s desires can be educated and self-fashioned; cultivated desires are
equivalent to character, a position that, as we saw, was taken up by Frank Knight.
One can have a habit of willing, which Mill calls purpose.27 The volitional self can be
cultivated, such that she comes to desire certain pleasures over others, like the pleasure
of reading over the pleasures of playing parlor games. The cumulative result—the
effect—of past volitions he names character. Character then serves as both the source
and product of voluntary conduct.28 Character is formed for a self and this formation:

is not inconsistent with its being, in part, formed by him as one of the intermediate
agents. His character is formed by his circumstances (including among these his
particular organization); but his own desire to mould it in a particular way, is one
of those circumstances, and by no means one of the least influential.29

Mill gives a kind of power to the individual’s will to self-form. “We are exactly as capable
of making our own character, if we will, as others are of making it for us.”30 Pressures are
not merely bottom up (biological pressures), nor are they merely horizontal pressures
(social pressures). Self-cultivation—top-down causation—is possible. Such causes are
in fact willed and formed by oneself. We can have a science of human nature, even
while the will—if we have been practiced at willing—may exert a greater pressure than
that by which nature or society has shaped the person to act. But it will be an imprecise
science because the willful self participates in the chosen action.
The science of psychology is to discover the laws of mind; the science of ethology is
to discover laws governing the formation of character. “Ethology is the science which
corresponds to the art of education in the widest sense of the term, including the
formation of national or collective character as well as individual.”31 Ethology is “the
exact science of human nature” because it hopes to participate in the formation of
willful selves capable of choosing higher-order desires.32 On the nature of this science,
Mill sets out to correct Bacon and his merely inductive method, which (as we will see
in Chapter 6) had rejected the deductive method as medieval flights of fancy. For Mill,
deductive science is possible and indeed useful, if aided by the inductive method. Via
Mill’s empiricism, ethology is just such an inductive science.33 With this science, we
148 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

can name the general components of the science of ethology—character formation,

nature, nurture, and a cultivated sense of what one wills, or prefers, among all the
desires one has. With this knowledge, we can educate the citizen.

From Ethology to a Positive Science of Society

Having discovered this science of ethology, Mill hoped to create the “science of man
[sic] in society—of the actions of collective masses of mankind, and the various
phenomena which constitute social life.”34 This positive science of society could
discover and delineate the natural causes of the human animal including the ways
in which the human person came to exert top-down choice on the system. In other
words, equipped with the universal laws of the formation of character, society could
then set up structural inducements such that the higher desires could be cultivated.
These inducements were thought to be the laws of social development, which could
themselves be derived scientifically. In other words, for Mill, the logic of the moral
sciences made it possible to have a science of society, all while preserving free will.
The legislator is the architect, following the laws of human nature in order to discern
the rules for building the ethical society.35 “Now, the reasons of a maxim of policy,
or of any other rule of art, can be no other than the theorems of the corresponding
science.”36 And ethics, in this schema, is the art that uses the science of ethology to
enact policies conducive to happiness. While Mill’s ethics was theoretically inclined,
it was aimed at the practical, which is the happiness of humankind, and indeed, “of all
sentient beings,” which is the ultimate teleological principle.37 However, the content of
the end, the precise telos toward which the science is deployed, is best known by the
art.38 The legislator, like the physician who takes health or absence of disease as a given
end, takes the overall happiness of the populace as his end.
Thus, we can arrive at the way that utilitarianism became palatable to Victorian
Britain. Rather than the crass mechanical model developed by Bentham, Mill articulates
a way to imagine human freedom in the face of governmental policy that imagines men
to be rogues in need of being ground into moral beings.39 Mill also preserves genteel
British mores by granting that the pleasures associated with some cultural practices
are better and ought to be encouraged over the crasser, bodily pleasures of the masses
of the poor. As noted by Alasdair MacIntyre, Mill’s moral theory was teleological, not
consequentialist, because it still had a robust relationship to the good. Mill’s science of
ethics still had some content with higher and lower goods and desires from which the
will could choose. But this science of ethics would later collapse into what MacIntyre
would call emotivism, or expressivism.40 While Mill never brings the ends under
critical scrutiny, only the means to achieve the given ends, there is still some freedom
to adjudicate between the various desires and to move toward the higher desires; but
just because he does not critically scrutinize the ends does not mean that Mill is not
surreptitiously introducing thicker goods.41 As he notes:

For the remainder of the practice of life some general principle, or standard, must
still be sought; and if that principle be rightly chosen, it will be found, I apprehend,
 
Springs of Action and the Management of the Poor 149

to serve quite as well for the ultimate principle of Morality, as for that of Prudence,
Policy, or Taste.42

Nonetheless, despite his desire to want to understand ethics in a thicker sort of way, we
see that he is still captive to the Humean position shared by everyone from Knight to
Becker to Haidt that reduces moral ends to matters of mere taste.
Thus, we do not have an argument for teleology, but rather an assertion of a
given, general end of happiness. In the next generation of thinkers, including for
Frank Knight, ends or tastes are further deflated from the thicker Victorian ethic
of individual freedom and cultivated (that is to say, “proper”) desires. One merely
has to perform the moral calculus to discern the approach one should take. Still,
Mill understood that there is a gap between a single figure applying the art of living,
deploying his freedom in the midst of biological and social realities, and the scientist
that can only deal in generalities, and the political engineer that would build the right
kind of society with the right kind of inducements. And insofar as one is dealing in
generalities, as science must, one is limited to general definitions of the human actor
so that one’s models for behavior are applicable. And generalities require necessary
fictions.

The Necessary “Fiction” of Economic Man

The term “economic man” (Homo economicus) was first coined by critics of Mill’s
anthropology, which he posited in his account of political economy.43 For Mill, political
economy was the social apparatus that draws on the biological and social sciences to
induce human beings to the proper desires that can meet the necessities of the greatest
number of people. Following Hume, he embraces the is/ought distinction;44 and, as
we shall shortly see, he follows Bentham in imagining the deployment of the art of
political economy.45 However, he warns that the definition of a science emerges only
after enough facts have been generated, and the definition arises at the end, not at the
beginning of an investigation.46 Even in 1859, with the publication of On the Definition
of Political Economy, he warns against an expansive and vulgar definition of political
economy, one that would encompass all aspects of human living. Yet, ironically, he does
just that. For Mill, political economy as a science is an abstract science, and its method
is a priori.47 Just as geometry posits an arbitrary definition of a line, political economy
posits an “arbitrary definition of man [sic].” The human is “a being who inevitably does
that by which he may obtain the greatest amount of necessaries, conveniences, and
luxuries, with the smallest quantity of labour and physical self-denial with which they
can be obtained.”48
Still, Mill did not use the term “economic man” or “Homo economicus.” Rather, the
term was deployed against Mill in mockery of this necessarily fictious and “arbitrary
definition of man.”49 While he offers neither a descriptive nor normative account of
this vision of the human person, it begins to gather steam in the work of economists
throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century. It appears that it is only shortly
after Mill’s death (perhaps 1888 or 1906) that the Latinate version of the term
150 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

“economic man” (Homo economicus) emerges to capture this arbitrary—but eventually

normative—anthropology.
However, like Knight, Mill himself did not imagine “economic man” to capture
a filled-out, complete, or holistic anthropology. Unlike Becker, Mill recognized that
political economy does not cover the fullness of human nature formed in society, but
only focused on human desires to possess wealth and the means to achieve it.50 Thus,
for Mill, to understand the human person solely as “economic man” would be too
reductive and restrictive, making an “entire abstraction of every other human passion
or motive.” It is, thus, a fiction that makes it possible “to obtain the power of either
predicting or controlling the effect [of certain causes].”51 In order for the science of
society to achieve the level of predictability, this fictive being was required as a model
to permit explanation. Ironically, as Wendy Brown notes, Mill made it clear that no
political economist has ever been so absurd “as to suppose that mankind are really
thus constituted, but . . . this is the mode in which science must necessarily proceed.”52
Mill would be surprised to find the unintended consequences of this fiction, where
the abstraction of science has come to stand in for the human actor, as it does for
Becker.
What is more, his detractors notwithstanding, Mill’s human person transcends
individual wealth-seeking behavior. In On Liberty, Mill wrestles with the question of
where to draw the line between state and individual sovereignty. And, as Brown notes,
Mill comes down on the side of the individual, “formulat[ing] us as little sovereigns
choosing our means and ends.”53 In other words, contra Becker, “the subject is not [yet]
circulating or fungible human capital instrumentalized by itself, society, economy, or
the state.”54 Persons are full-fledged human actors capable of maximizing utility or not.
They are not puppets subsumed into the machinery of society. The necessary fiction,
which is necessary for political-economic models, must not be conflated with the full-
fledged, willful agent making decisions about the art of living.
But as we will see in his forebears, for Mill this only seems to be true for those persons
with financial means. For as for Bentham and Hume before him (as we shall shortly
see), the poor for Mill were not truly free. He was kinder to the both the industrious
poor and the idle poor than they were—he did not accept Malthus’s harshness or
Bentham’s draconian workhouses. But he waffled with regard to state intervention into
their sexuality.55 He endorsed Malthus’s principle of population and hoped that the
poor could be enticed to moral restraint when it came to sexual activity. His early work
promoted separating the sexes in the poor houses so as to prevent sexual activity by
and even endorsed state involvement in birth control.56 While he later tempered his
enthusiasm for birth control, he still believed that irresponsible procreation on the
part of the poor was an offense against “the higher and middle classes” who “sacrificed”
to support them as well as being a crime against said offspring. Thus, state aid in the
form of employment or food could legitimately be tied to social, moral, and, failing
those, legal restraints against their procreation.57 Unlike Homo economicus, then, the
poor are not free.
Thus for Mill, identifying the human agent as a sovereign draws a political
boundary; although generally guided by the principle of utility, it is the subject, who
participates in cultivating his own desires, and not the state that ultimately weighs
 
Springs of Action and the Management of the Poor 151

costs and benefits in light of a range of possible ends, within his own sphere of action.58
Yet while Mill held to a thicker and fuller anthropology and did not envisage the moral
or economic agent as stick-figure puppet, he nonetheless created the conditions of
possibility for what it would become in the twentieth century by theorizing “man” in
his political economy. As we shall see, Mill did not entirely accept Bentham’s vision
of the human person. Here, however, we see something absent from Knight: different
relationships to freedom—and therefore different moral frameworks—for the poor
and those of means. This, he inherited from his godfather. Mill tried to save Bentham’s
project from simply being one of crass engineering. Yet in the end, he crystalized the
anthropology that lay behind Bentham, who had imagined society as an engineering
project, laying the groundwork for the biopolitics of morality.

Jeremy Bentham, Social Engineer

The inspiration for Mill’s science of ethology is, of course, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832).
Bentham was a philosopher and legal theorist who devoted his formidable skills and
energy to proposing and forwarding reforms across the sociopolitical spectrum including
reform of: parliament, the Poor Laws, policing, juridical administration, political
economy, financial questions, and the penal system.59 His impassioned commitment
to political and religious reform gained him recognition as “the foremost philosophical
voice of political radicalism” of his era.60 Yet his work is marked by deep contradictions,
captured most iconically in his famous proposal for the architectural structure of the
Panopticon, which we will discuss further herein. Even more, economic theorist Dierdre
McCloskey, among many others, ranks Bentham as foundational to contemporary
understandings of ethics. She opines: “Since 1790, most ethical theory as practiced in
departments of philosophy has derived instead from two other books published about
the same time, one by Immanuel Kant (1785) and the other by Jeremy Bentham (1789).”61
Mill inherits from Bentham the concept of utility that plays such a key role in
his creation of an ethical science. However, the concept was in vogue even prior to
Bentham, and the history of its use and meaning is not entirely clear. Bentham himself
thought he found the principle in the Italian criminologist and jurist Cesare Bonesana-
Becarria (1738–1794) and in the British chemist and natural philosopher Joseph
Priestly (1730–1804). Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) notes that Pierre-Paul Le Mercier
de la Rivière de Saint-Médard (1719–1801) articulates a principle of utility in 1767
and Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) articulates a version of it in 1725. Hutcheson’s
version is “that action is best which secures the greatest happiness of the greatest
number.”62 Hutcheson, whose influence on David Hume (1711–1776) is profound,
inspired Hume’s writing on utility. In fact, Hutcheson’s positive view of human nature
over against that of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) would shape both David Hume and
Adam Smith (1723–1790), and therefore shaped their way of thinking about the utility
of social relations.
Bentham, however, took Hume’s more qualitative and vague notion of utility and
gave it mathematical heft.63 He thought he really could enumerate all things, creating
152 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

laws of economics that would be akin to the laws of physics. Where Hume had a vague
understanding of utility, Bentham had a formula. The difference between the two was
the same as a vague notion of gravity in relation to the laws of gravitation. “Bentham
hoped for no less an achievement than to become the Newton of the moral world.”64 It
was Bentham, then, who set out to do what Hutcheson and Hume had failed to do: “to
introduce a mathematical calculation on subjects of morality.”65 Bentham’s positivism
enabled him to posit a mathematical quantity as a representative marker for the vague
realities that gave utility/pleasure to the human animal. Bentham therefore rearticulates
a “fundamental axiom” of utility: that “the greatest happiness of the greatest number is
the measure of right and wrong.”66
In conjunction with his work on utility, Bentham contributes three additional
components to our narrative. First, as he mathematizes utility, he likewise begins to
quantify or render measurable the fundamental empirical realities of pleasure and
pain, thus further laying the groundwork for Mill’s project in political economy.
Second, just as Newton had introduced both a science of motion and whole set of
uses to which that science of motion could be put, Bentham wanted to analogously
articulate the scientific principles of a social science. Third, he then hoped to create the
rules of legislation and morals that would guide the running of society. In other words,
Bentham is more like an engineer, and the utilitarian calculus would give the precision
he needed to get the social mechanics to work, laying the foundation for biopolitics.
Bentham accepted Hume’s idea that only the wealthy had true freedom, where Mill
asserted what we will see to be Adam Smith’s more nuanced notion of freedom to try
to save Bentham from crassly engineering people and society.

From Metaphysics to Moral Physics

Like Mill, Bentham sought to create a positive science of morality. As Leslie Stephen
notes, he thought that all other philosophical systems of morals failed because they
were illusory, and they were illusory because they had no external standard to which
they could appeal.67 Science for Bentham rests on facts, which means “[i]t must apply
to real things, and to things which have definite relations to a common measure.”68
And the most indisputably real things were for him those realities perceived through
the senses. Bentham denied that one could know what was going on in the world
beyond our sense impressions, firmly rooting him in the Humean skeptical empiricist
tradition, contrary to Jonathan Haidt’s misunderstanding noted earlier. For the science
of morality, the grounded senses are the senses of pains and pleasures. Here, Bentham
argued, was the measure of all of humankind’s activities, happiness. Pain and pleasure
are the senses that ground a science of morality just as sight and sound are the ground
for the natural sciences. All that is left is the quantification of the moral senses.69 For
Bentham, it was mathematics as a system that permitted one to make comparisons
among and between sense impressions, and, as noted by Mary Poovey, numbers had
the odd quality of being attached particulars and at the same time of being universal.70
Pleasure and pain were not only real, for Bentham—more real and readily accessible
to awareness than the things that stimulate pleasure or pain; they had the added
 
Springs of Action and the Management of the Poor 153

benefit of shaping conduct.71 Bentham referred to them as “springs of action.” The

“springs of action” were inducements to move in a certain direction. He divided these
inducements into two categories: the pathological springs of action gave “an account
of all the pains and pleasures which are the primary data”; it is not clear why this was
called pathological, except that it seems to refer to the actual physical pleasure or pain
experienced.72 The second category, the dynamical springs of action, gave “an account
of the various modes of conduct determined by expectations of pain and pleasure,” the
ability to foresee what will come into being.73 Just as science had begun classifying all
natural beings, Bentham believed he could use these springs as the basis for developing
a system of classification of all human actions. As Stephen notes: “To codify is to
classify, and Bentham might be defined as a codifying animal.”74
With the aid of James Mill, in 1817, Bentham published the Table of the Springs
of Action. The Table was a list of all the simple pains and pleasures and the actions
correlated therewith. The Table, however, does appear rather arbitrary. In fact, John
Stuart Mill was critical of the table because it did not refer to any specific psychologist
or theory of psychology. In fact, Stephen notes that the table of the springs of action “is
simply constructed to meet the requirements of [Bentham’s] legislative theories.”75 Even
a glance at the Table leaves one wondering how Bentham ended up placing something
as a pleasure or pain, or how one distinguishes between pleasures, or between pains.
The Table does not seem obvious or to follow any sort of rules. “Things present
themselves to Bentham’s mind as already prepared to fit into the pigeon-holes. This is
a characteristic point, and it appears in what we must call his metaphysical system.”76
However, the creation of the table reveals something about how Bentham thought,
namely, that he saw the human animal as something real that could be motivated to
spring into action via fictitious entities like justice and obligation mediated through an
intentional legislative and social agenda.
As a nominalist, Bentham held that words and numbers merely represent physical
entities; things such as essences, natures, or the usual topics of metaphysics are not in
fact real. That did not mean for him that all language names physical things. He speaks
of “fictitious” entities—such as space, time, quantity, quality—which themselves
have no physical substance. However, they are not non-entities. They cannot be
known except in relation to concrete material things, but they are not non-entities.77
Analogously, moral and political entities are fictitious entities. One such fictitious
entity is obligation, or justice, following Hume. Obligation is not a thing, per se, yet,
it has a kind of substance to it. Obligation or justice is derived from the principle of
utility, which finds its grounding in the physical realities of pleasure and pain. Thus,
Bentham redefines the traditional moral concept of obligation, concluding that an
obligation is nothing more than a way of saying that one will suffer pain if one does
not keep an obligation. Justice is, similarly, an important moral fiction; to identify an
action as just is to simply say that it maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain, which is
to say that it is useful.
Thus, just as space, time, quantity, and quality have no substance except for the fact
that they are relations of physical things, so virtue, vice, justice, duty, and obligation
are all fictitious entities that are mere words if they are disassociated from pleasure and
pain. The existence of virtue, vice, justice, duty, and obligation
154 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

is a matter of universal and constant experience. But other various names referring
to these: emotion, inclination, vice, virtue, etc., are only “psychological entities.”
Take away pleasures and pains, not only happiness but justice and duty and
obligation and virtue—all of which have been so elaborately held up to view as
independent of them—are so many empty sounds.78

The metaphysical reality of pleasure and pain serves as the concrete material substance
upon which politics and morals become effective in the world. These fictitious
entities—virtue, morality, obligation, justice—have relation to the only substantive
things we have, the empirical experience of pleasure and pain. Here Bentham joins
Hume in claiming that virtues are artificial.79
Thus, for Bentham, the science of morals is the measure of right and wrong, which
almost immediately coincides with goodness and badness at the moment of pleasure
and pain. The substantive goodness of pleasure and badness of pain is the closest
Bentham comes to any reality of goodness. On this point, Bentham embraced the
anti-metaphysical stance that had become explicit in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.80
Both Bentham and Kant inherited this anti-metaphysical stance from Hume.
Bentham despised what had been traditionally called metaphysics, which he took
to be an illusory science of things “transcending what is physical and belonging to
Nature.”81 For Bentham, metaphysics is a “sprig,” a small offshoot of logic.82 What
was needed instead was a system that used a mathematical standard to determine
right and wrong, in relation to pleasure and pain. He believed that his approach
avoided the failures of other systems, particularly the confusions of Cartesians and
Kantians.83 Pleasure and pain, as empirical experiences, become the ground for a
standard of measurement for morality. A science of morality is not possible without
measurement.
Here we see the roots of what MacIntyre has called emotivism or expressivism.
Bentham needs no further argument about the nature of the good than that it maximizes
pleasure over pain, because it is clear to all what pleasure and pain are.84 The logic
of his reflection on the metaphysical foundation of morals “appeared to Bentham so
obvious as to need no demonstration, only an exposition of the emptiness of any verbal
contradiction.”85 One seemingly has a standard that can be applied by one and all—a
ground to build the science of morality. The act of distinguishing between pleasures
and pains so as to differentiate them seems to be simply an act of naming preferences
(or tastes), even if Bentham believes pleasure itself to be a substantive good. It seems
difficult to adjudicate amongst the pleasures stimulated by “fictitious entities” such as
virtue, vice, justice, and obligation. Yet, his position is not mere preference because it
has some relation to that which Bentham thinks is substantively good, namely pleasure.
Our point here is that in the empirical experience of pain and pleasure one can
begin to elaborate some experiences and actions as better than others, with no clear
rational way to distinguish among them either from some “external” or “objective”
standard, or through some intersubjective standard, because pleasure and pain are in
the eye of the beholder, so to speak. Still, because we know the moral metaphysics is
grounded in the sense experience of pleasure and pain, we can move from the is of
sense experience to the ought of moral architecture, from science to artifice.
 
Springs of Action and the Management of the Poor 155

From Moral Physics to Social Engineering

Bentham’s views about the nature and ground of moral reality—namely, pleasure and
pain—enable his constructive project to get off the ground. Rooted in pleasure and
pain, and thus securing the basis for mathematical comparison, one can construct a
science of morals ordered to the greatest measure of good for the greatest number of
people. This telos provides the goal for the social engineer. Once we know how the
person works—what is the case—we can structure the social world with inducements
that make the greatest pleasure for the greatest number of people.
Here Bentham’s social engineering becomes clear. He was a Whig and a radical
reformer for his own day. Unlike his theological utilitarian predecessors and
contemporaries, for example, Hutcheson and Malthus, respectively, he sought social
reform along the lines of a secular and scientific method made possible by numbers.86
His moral project was to build the great society, to relieve the social unease created by
rogues and idlers, economically nonproductive men, especially the poor, and he sought
to do this through a science of legislative action. He believed that one had simply to
get the right sort of measures in place so as to create a world that maximized the sense
impressions of pleasure among the populous and that minimized the sense impressions
of pain. Correlatively, sanctions should be used by the legislature to increase pain or
decrease pleasure, as a means to motivate actors to behave accordingly to the maximize
happiness for the greatest numbers of people. Public authorities must induce motives
with the “springs of action” in order to get the right kind of action output in order to
get the right kind of society. All of Bentham’s scientific work aims at knowing which
laws to enact in hopes of enacting a society as it ought to be, measured and meted
according to the realities of pleasure and pain.
So, while in theory utilitarianism seems to be teleological, about the (greatest)
good, Bentham’s vision is primarily a philosophy of right by virtue of the calculus
that dictates what should be done: “the greatest happiness of the greatest number is
the measure of right and wrong.”87 His is a philosophy of right and not a philosophy
of good, as the good is pre-given in pleasure. The right legislation or social action is
the one aimed at pleasure and happiness for the greatest number. While he hoped his
system could articulate what ought to be on the firm foundation of what is the case in
the real world, it was oriented to the way the world could and should be made to be.
Stephen, quoting from Bentham’s Works, notes that “‘All the statesmen,’ so thought
the philosopher [Bentham], ‘were wanting the great elements of statesmanship’: they
were always talking about ‘what was’ and seldom or never about ‘what ought to be.’”88
Knowing the mechanism of action, and knowing what ought to be—the greatest
pleasure for the greatest number of people—one could engineer society.
Bentham sought reform not solely through legislation and social policy. In fact,
he is best known for his efforts to inculcate reform through actual material culture—
specifically, in the deployment of the Panopticon. The Panopticon was an architectural
innovation designed to employ the springs of action to induce men and women to
proper behaviors. Initially deployed for the creation of workhouses and prisons, this
social structure was eventually adopted in modified forms in industry, education, and
more.89 Bentham’s advocacy of the Panopticon is crucial for our story.
156 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

Bentham’s brother Samuel was an engineer and architect, and had spent time in
White Russia with Price Potemkin. In 1786, Jeremy visited his brother at the estate of
the prince (writing an essay while there, In Defense of Usury), where he was introduced
to one of Samuel’s architectural inventions, the Panopticon.90 Simon Werrett argues
that Samuel drew inspiration for the Panopticon from Russian absolutist culture,
especially in relation to work he was doing for Potemkin as he attempted to impress
the Empress Catherine the Great.
The Panopticon was to be built on Potemkin’s estate in Krichev in 1784, where
Bentham drew inspiration form the spatial structure of the Russian estate, with “the
family house, the noble at the centre, his peasant workforce surrounding him.”91 The
Panopticon put into one building—the Inspection House—the model Russian estate.
In conversations in 1786, the Benthams began to imagine how this Russian prototype
could solve the problems of unskilled serf labor and the undisciplined English managers
that had been brought to White Russia in order to modernize Russian manufacturing.
For Samuel, the Panopticon was about increasing economic productivity for nascent
Russian manufacturing.
It was around this time that Jeremy began writing letters to friends and imagining
a myriad of possibilities for the Panopticon design. Ever the social engineer, he began
to see uses for the Panopticon design everywhere. In his 1791 letter, we find Bentham
broadening its application in England, imagining its use for “grinding rogues honest,
and idle men industrious.”92 Where for Samuel, the Panopticon was envisaged as a
means to control workers, Jeremy translated it into the architecture of prisons for the
control of criminals. From there, he designed a factory staffed by convicts; it was a
short step from there to “using paupers on a large scale to run machinery devised by
his even more inventive brother, Samuel, for working of metal and wood” and for its
use in Industry Houses.93
For example, in his 1797 Pauper Management, Bentham proposed establishing a for-
profit, joint-stock company that would erect 250 Industry Houses, each five stories in
twelve sectors, which in total would employ up to 500,000 inmates.94 Bentham believed
his innovation to be more humane and economical than most of the workhouses that
had resulted from the 1601 Poor Laws. Yet this new design treated the poor as criminals
in much the same way as they had been treated in the sixteenth century before the
reform, limiting their food, freedom, and moral agency.95 He agreed with those like
David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, as we shall see, that hunger was the best “spring” for
scientifically and economically managing the poor. As Polanyi notes, Bentham held that

“In the highest stage of social prosperity . . . the great mass of citizens will most
probably possess few other resources than their daily labor, and consequently will
always be near to indigence.” . . . [nonetheless] from the utilitarian point of view
the task of the government was to increase want in order to make the physical
sanction of hunger effective.96

Where poverty was not sufficient to spring the idle pauper into action, hunger was
a much better taskmaster. After all, hunger aligns with one of the “two sovereign
masters” under which nature “has placed mankind”:97 pain.
 
Springs of Action and the Management of the Poor 157

In addition to his proposal for Industry Houses, Bentham was very involved with
other proto-social scientists (Ricardo and Malthus) in working toward the reform of
the Poor Laws. As noted in our Interlude, the poor very much occupied the minds
of many reformers of the day. Bentham, Ricardo, and Malthus all believed that no
prior legislative treatment of paupers and vagabonds was informed by science, and
thus all the Poor Laws prior to their proposed reforms were doomed to failure. While
the Panopticon was thought to be a humane reform of prisons and care for the poor, it
became for Bentham a total vision for liberal government.98 As a total vision, it became
part of his vision for advocacy of Poor Laws Reform. As Foucault notes, “Panopticism
is not a regional mechanics limited to certain institutions; for Bentham, panopticism
really is a general political formula that characterizes a type of government.”99
In the last thirty years of his life, Bentham spent a lot of time, not merely on the
principles of legislation and morals, but on political organization.100 Not only would
governmentality be the formal mechanism of legislation, but it would also be deployed
through the organization of persons, particularly persons who were rogues and were
idle. As Foucault points out, the Panopticon was partly about inducing those controlled
to internalize the disciplinary power of those who would control through observation.
With the assistance of Ricardo and Malthus, from 1795 until their deaths, Poor Law
Reform would occupy all three social thinkers. It is to the central role of the Poor
Law Reform that we now turn. After all, it is here that governance through political
economy focused on a morality defined by labor, work, population, and sex emerges.

Ricardo, Malthus, and the Engineering

of the Poor Law Reform
Jeremy Bentham died before parliament passed the Poor Law Reform Act of 1834.
However, his influence on that reform was deep. The reform was written according
to Bentham’s version of the theories of utility and his understanding of social science,
aimed at social engineering. Bentham spent much of his energy on thinking about the
Poor Laws since the attempted reform of William Pitt in 1796. However, before the
reform of the Poor Laws could be enacted, two other theories needed to be added to
Bentham’s “springs of action.” The two theories taken together—one promulgated by
David Ricardo and the other promulgated by Thomas Malthus—took aim at the vices
of sloth and lust found in the poor. The Poor Law Reform of 1834 saw the vices of sloth
and lust as essential leverage points for Bentham’s “springs of action.” While Bentham,
Malthus, and Ricardo would all die before the Reform was passed, they nonetheless
engineered it.
The first theoretical development was David Ricardo’s “iron law of wages.”101
Just as Bentham thought he had discovered a fundamental law of human behavior,
working toward a pleasant life, and just as Mill thought he had discovered the laws
of ethology, Ricardo thought he had discovered a law of economics, namely, that
wages tend to gravitate toward a minimum wage necessary to sustain life. The second
theoretical development came from Thomas Malthus. He proposed what he framed
158 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

as a fundamental law of population growth—the idea that the population grows

exponentially, while food sources grow arithmetically. This idea, we will show, was
rooted in Joseph Townsend’s fanciful but world-changing parable of the goats and the
dogs.
It should be noted that in the fourteenth century, Dante enumerated the seven
deadly sins, ordering them beginning with the worst: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed,
gluttony, and lust. It is thus that we find Satan—Dante’s exemplar of pride against the
divine—frozen alone in the bottom most circle of the Inferno. By the late Elizabethan
period, Herbert Spenser had changed the ordering to Pride, Wrath, Envy, Avarice
(greed), Lechery (lust), Gluttony, Idleness (sloth). In the reforms of both Ricardo and
Malthus, we see attempts to first theorize two of the seven deadly sins—lust and sloth—
and to numericize them. Thus, where Bentham had hoped to find compelling reason
to control the reproductive habits of the poor and to control their industry (to reform
their lust and idleness), Ricardo and Malthus proposed “scientifically” compelling
ways to bring these two vices under control with the Poor Law Reform of 1834. If
something was not done to halt the reproductive habits of the poor or to increase their
industrial productivity, or both, then the poor themselves would suffer under their
own behavior.102 We shall begin by engaging with Ricardo’s modest development; it was
Malthus’s theoretical insight that was foundational and would capture the imagination
of British society, even while they hated it.

David Ricardo and the Iron Law of Wages

David Ricardo (1772–1823) was a highly successful stockbroker and London financier
who retired a wealthy man at the age of forty-one and, under the urging of his good
friend James Mill, turned his attention to writing about economics. Authoring the
groundbreaking Essay on the Effects of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock (1815)
and subsequently the formidable tome Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
(1817) under James Mill’s tutelage, Ricardo is regarded as a “brilliant British economist
[who] was one of the most important figures in the development of [Classical]
economic theory.”103 Friends with the elder Mill, Bentham, and Malthus, Ricardo was
ranked in a recent survey of economists, as the second most important pre-twentieth-
century theorist.104 For our purposes, we will focus on Ricardo’s theory of the prices of
labor as it helps to make sense of Bentham’s influence on the Poor Law Reform.
Ricardo proposes that the price of labor can be divided into two aspects: the
natural price and the market price. The natural price of labor is the price that would
allow workers “to subsist and to perpetuate their race, without either increase or
diminution.”105 It was the minimum wages required by laborers to purchase food for
subsistence.106 Over time, the natural price of labor tends to rise, because food “has
a tendency to become dearer, from the greater difficulty of producing it.”107 In other
words, as the cost of living rises, those who work seek and need higher wages. Thus,
at heart, the natural price of labor is determined by the law of supply and demand (for
food), though this aspect of it is ignored by Ricardo and others. Rather, what bedevils
them is not the rising cost of food, but the slothful—the “undeserving” poor—who,
 
Springs of Action and the Management of the Poor 159

because they “refuse” to work, have greater problems producing food. As we will more
fully show later, when there are large numbers of the poor, the problem will only be
made worse.
The market price of labor—the cost to employers—is likewise subject to the law
of supply and demand. It tends to decrease when laborers are plentiful. “[L]abour,”
Ricardo notes, “is dear when it is scarce, and cheap when it is plentiful.”108 As market
prices of labor (or the wages offered) increase, more workers begin to gravitate to those
jobs, increasing the supply of workers in that locale and thus driving down wages.109
Thus, market prices tend to decrease relative to the natural price. Ricardo asserts that
the market price tends to conform to the natural price, namely, the price of food,110
but insofar as there is no necessary connection in his theory, the market price can
drop below the natural price. When this occurs, the lives of workers become “most
wretched.”111 The number of workers decreases (due to mortality) until the economic
balance is once again achieved. However, he continues to maintain that “a small supply
of labour, or a trifling increase in the population, will soon reduce the market price to
the then increased natural price of labour.”112
For Ricardo, the tension between natural price and market price is founded in
two sources: either bad government or an unchecked and increasing population. Bad
governments fail to develop and utilize all the fertile land so as to offer an adequate
food supply, and they do not educate their poor inhabitants in industry and morals.113
Poor morals result in more children being born and poor regulation of the passions
results in more children born within marriages.114 Without remedies that increase
industry through more efficient and efficacious land usage or without policies that
decrease the ranks of the poor, disaster looms.115
For Ricardo, writing in 1821, the Poor Laws, which went into effect in 1601, directly
conflicted with the iron law of wages. Ricardo conceived the iron law of wages as a
natural law of society, akin to the natural laws of physics. The idea was that the natural
mechanisms, aided by rational government, could harmonize the relationship between
the natural and market prices of labor. The 1601 Poor Law disrupted the favorable
harmonization of these laws in relation to workforce, capital, and technological
improvements by meeting the poor’s need for food and thereby decreasing the external
impetus to industry. Malthus, Ricardo claimed, had fully developed the mathematical
demonstration of exponential growth in population in relation to the linear growth of
food production, and the iron law of wages complemented Malthus’s discovery. The
Poor Laws, Ricardo avers, must be reformed, but prudently:

[A]nd every friend to the poor must ardently wish for their abolition. Unfortunately,
however, they have been so long established, and the habits of the poor have been
so formed upon their operation, that to eradicate them with safety from our
political system, requires the most cautious and skilful [sic] management.116

The poor have their part to play in restraining their own desires, but bad government has
“rendered restraint superfluous, and [has] invited imprudence, by offering it a portion
of the wages of prudence and industry.”117 In short, by supporting the poor financially,
government has promoted their idleness and has not promoted their industry. By
160 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

“industry,” Ricardo means that the poor must resist the vice of idleness and become
more productive for the economy. By “restraint,” Ricardo means prudential restraint of
the poor in terms of their lust, as suggested by Malthus as well.
In 1796, William Pitt, then–prime minister, proposed reforming the Poor Laws,
in part, by increasing gifts to large families so that they could better care for their
children. Following the contemporary wisdom that the wealth and power of the state
were measured in population, Pitt’s proposal was designed to encourage the poor to
have large families. Ricardo believed such an intervention would only increase the
numbers of mouths to feed and also increase the numbers of laborers, thus driving
the market price of labor downward. Ricardo’s proposed reform would not be so crass
as to penalize large families, but he maintained that the government must enact laws
that would incentivize the poor to keep their families small.118 By gradually removing
what he saw as positive incentives to poverty, Ricardo argued that the ranks of the
poor would be contracted. By dissuading the poor from dependency to philanthropy
and toward their own industry, the state will be more healthful.119 The systematic
charity offered by the state via parish churches as required according to the 1601 Poor
Law, and the casual charity given by men and women of means, was the problem.120
What lies at the heart of Ricardo’s concern is not a concern for the well-being of
the poor, but a concern for the well-being of the state. A more rational approach
to poverty would be an approach that followed Ricardo’s “iron law of wages” and
Malthus’s writing on demography, as we shall see, might result in a better health and
wealth for the state.

Thomas Malthus, Joseph Townsend, and the

Heartless Laws of Nature
Ricardo had envisaged a fundamental relationship between food cost and supply,
wages, and numbers of workers. One might wonder: why these three quantities?
Although they did not meet until 1813, it is clear that Ricardo’s thinking on these
matters was shaped by the work of Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) that had exploded
into popular consciousness before the turn of the century. Standing behind Malthus
was the less visible, but critical, figure of Joseph Townsend. Together, Malthus and
Townsend gave further theoretical support for the deployment of the proper “springs
of action” to increase industry and reduce the population of the poor. It is here that we
find the seeds of biopolitics.
Malthus was an Anglican cleric and demographer who rose to instant prominence—
or notoriety—with his first publication entitled An Essay on the Principle of Population
(1798). It was originally published anonymously, and it saw five more editions by
1826. As one commentator notes, “the uproar it caused among non-economists
overshadowed the instant respect it inspired among his fellow economists.”121 Karl
Polanyi marks Malthus’s Essay as the beginning of classical economics.122 In 1805,
Malthus was given a post as Professor of History and Political Economy at the East India
Company College at Haileybury. In 1821 with Ricardo and James Mill, he founded the
Political Economy Club, the purpose of which was to develop fundamental principles
 
Springs of Action and the Management of the Poor 161

of economics.123 He was also one of the first Fellows of the Statistical Society of London
(now the Royal Statistical Society) founded in 1834. His father, notably, was friends
with David Hume.
As he notes in the preface to the second edition of his essay, Malthus maintains
that “the only authors from whose writings I had deduced the principle, which formed
the main argument of the Essay, were Hume, Wallace, Adam Smith, and Dr. Price,”124
though he acknowledges that Townsend had recently treated the same subject. Since
the mid-1800s, critics and scholars have held, however, that Malthus more simply
appropriated Townsend’s work. Like Malthus, Joseph Townsend (1739–1816) was an
Anglican cleric as well as a medical doctor who studied at the University of Edinburgh.
His 1786 treatise A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, informed by his own work among
the poor in his own parish and abroad, inspired the work of both Malthus and Darwin’s
theory of natural selection.125
We begin with Malthus. With an eye toward the problem of the explosive increase
in the number of poor people over the prior century, the Essay on the Principle of
Population proposed a relationship between population growth and the economy.
The Essay in its various editions took aim at the age of marriage and the customs
and practices that supported the poor.126 His basic thesis was stated simply: “It may
safely be pronounced, therefore, that population, when unchecked, goes on doubling
itself every twenty-five years, or increases in a geometrical ratio.”127 However, food
sources do not increase exponentially, and thus hardships arise on the population as it
grows.128 Food, thus, is the limitation on population and the diseases that accompany
scarcity.129
The Essay sets out to prove three propositions:

1. Population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence.

2. Population invariably increases where the means of subsistence increases, unless
prevented by some very powerful and obvious checks.
3. These checks, and the checks which repress the superior power of population,
and keep its effects on a level with the means of subsistence, are all resolvable into
moral restraint, vice, and misery.130

The first premise, Malthus says, does not really need to be proven as it is obvious. The
other two need proof and he sets out to provide that proof.
In the sixth edition of the Essay, he describes how various checks on the population
have played themselves out in various societies in various parts of the world.131 He
divides these checks into two categories: positive checks and preventive checks.
Positive checks on population-increases arise either from misery or from vice, or from
a combination of the two, all of which shortens the natural duration of life.132 Under
the heading of misery:

may be enumerated all unwholesome occupations, severe labour and exposure to

the seasons, extreme poverty, bad nursing of children, great towns, excesses of
all kinds, the whole train of common diseases and epidemics, wars, plague, and
famine.133
162 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

These positive checks arise “unavoidably from the laws of nature.”134 Other positive
checks on the increases of population arise from vice, like promiscuity and “violations
of the marriage bed.”135 All of these positive checks curb population growth, because
debauchery leads to disease, misery, and death.
Preventive checks on population growth, according to Malthus, are voluntary, but
these are tenuously effective at best. If a poor, educated person has a “distinctive superiority
in his reasoning faculties,” it will enable him “to calculate distant consequences” and curb
population.136 Innate drives must be curbed, by moral reason. “Of the preventive checks,
the restraint from marriage which is not followed by irregular gratifications may properly
be termed moral restraint.”137 He notes that “[t]hese considerations are calculated to
prevent, and certainly do prevent, a great number of persons in all civilized nations from
pursuing the dictate of nature in an early attachment to one woman.”138 Early marriage,
which seems to keep one from sexual immorality, produces too many children. What
is needed is a reasoned curbing of sexual desire, and through proper moral restraint,
delayed marriage can prevent population overgrowth. Continuing, Malthus states:

If this restraint does not produce vice, it is undoubtedly the least evil that can
arise from the principle of population. Considered as a restraint on a strong
natural inclination, it must be allowed to produce a certain degree of temporary
unhappiness; but evidently slight, compared with the evils which result from any
of the other checks to population; and merely of the same nature as many other
sacrifices of temporary to permanent gratification, which it is the business of a
moral agent continually to make.139

Moral (sexual) restraint of the poor will be a much better check on population than the
positive checks of starvation, disease, and death. The implicit utilitarian reasoning of
“calculating distant consequences” is clearly at work.
Gertrude Himmelfarb charts a transition between Malthus’s first and subsequent
editions of the Essay. In the first edition, Malthus was enamored of naturalism and the
laws of nature. Here Townsend’s influence is undeniable. Clearly vexed by his clerical
responsibility for caring for the poor within his parish, Townsend’s short A Dissertation
on the Poor Laws decries the growing ranks of the poor, the growing tax burden on
those with means, and the epidemic of recalcitrant idleness and vice, debauchery and
drunkenness, especially among those supported by public means.140 In words dripping
with disdain, he notes:

Now it is evident that by raising the price of labour you must directly check the
progress of the manufactures . . . for in proportion as you advance the wages of
the poor, you diminish the quantity of their work. All manufacturers complain of
this, and universally agree, that the poor are seldom diligent, except when labour
is cheap, and corn is dear. It must be confessed that too many of them have some
little resemblance to the animal described by travellers [sic] under the name of
Nimble Peter; a creature so inactive, that, when he has cleared one tree, he will be
reduced to skin and bones before he climbs another, and so slow in all his motions,
that even stripes will not make him mend his pace.141
 
Springs of Action and the Management of the Poor 163

Townsend barely recognizes the poor as fellow human beings. Not only does he also
presage here Ricardo’s iron law of wages, he signals here what for Polanyi was his key
innovation: namely, Townsend grounds the cause of poverty, and all economics, in
nature. Not only does he opine that “it seems to be a law of nature that the poor should
be to a certain degree improvident,” so that there will always be bodies to join the
military and do “the most servile, the most sordid, and the most ignoble offices in the
community.”142
His treatise centers on a story he reports as fact—the naturalistic fable of the
goats and dogs. This story displays in narrative terms the basic premises of Malthus’s
theory. The fable is set on one of the Juan Fernandez islands off the coast of Chile—
the island that, perhaps not coincidentally, provided the setting for Daniel Defoe’s
story of Robinson Crusoe. Townsend tells how a pair of goats, set loose on the island,
populated the island prolifically, until their numbers were naturally checked by food
supply, eventually reaching a “degree of aequipose.” This process then continued to
cycle naturally in a somewhat idyllic fashion. Discovering that English privateers were
provisioning themselves via the goats, wily Spaniards “put on shore a greyhound dog
and bitch,” who likewise multiplied, they and their offspring feeding off of the goats.

Had [the goats] been totally destroyed, the dogs likewise must have perished. But
as many of the goats retired to the craggy rocks, where the dogs could never follow
them, descending only for short intervals to feed with fear and circumspection . . .
few of these, besides the careless and the rash, became a prey; and none but the
most watchful, strong, and active of the dogs could get a sufficiency of food. Thus,
a new kind of balance was established. The weakest of both species were among the
first to pay the debt of nature; the most active and vigorous preserved their lives. It
is the quantity of food which regulates the numbers of the human species.143

No breath is required for Townsend to move from his fable to his conclusion: human
population growth is food-dependent. No proof is required for the fundamental claim
here: competition is a law of nature.144
But his readers need no further argument. His fable is framed throughout the
Dissertation by his repeated assertion that it is hunger—and basically hunger alone—
which is the most crucial motivator. The Poor Laws of 1601 removed that natural
spring of action, and replaced it with a legal one, which only had effects to increase
the numbers of the poor. “Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency
and civility, obedience and subjection, to the most perverse,” the implication being
that humans are best treated according to their animal nature.145 As Polanyi notes,
Townsend’s parable and his claims provided an entirely new starting point for politics
and social engineering, appearing to avoid philosophical claims about the foundation
of society and grounding his claims about the poor in biological laws of Nature in a
new way. As Polanyi notes, Hobbes had claimed despots were necessary because men
were like beasts, but for Townsend, they were actually beasts. He continues, “From
this novel point of view, a free society could be regarded as consisting of two races:
property-owners and laborers.” The latter were limited by food. “No magistrate was
necessary, for hunger was a better disciplinarian than the magistrate.”146 Townsend sets
164 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

the stage for a biopolitical economy of hunger, the coercion of the human beasts for the
betterment of the propertied persons.
It is with Malthus, however, that Townsend’s vision gains momentum. Following
Townsend, Malthus clearly conceived of the poor as subject to the deterministic laws
of nature; the natural laws of population—the fact that arithmetic growth of food
sources and the exponential growth of population—dictate how society goes. As with
Townsend, the poor, for Malthus, lack any sort of capacity for moral agency. Like his
older contemporary Bentham, Malthus sought to develop a naturalist science of society.
His highly mechanical checks on the problems presented by the poor had a kind of
heartless mechanical solution to a seemingly insoluble problem. Nature is a heartless
mechanism. Just as the natural laws of physics were not concerned with human desires
or needs, the natural laws of society, the social physics as Adolph Quetelet would come
to call it, would crunch the poor under the mechanics of society.147
However, in the second edition of the Essay (published now under his own name
in 1803), Himmelfarb notes that Malthus introduced the notion of prudent restraint,
which gave to the poor some dimension of agency, some way out of the throes of the
machine of the natural laws of society. However, prudential judgment was not enough
to assure that society would avoid the catastrophe of the principle of population.
The poor needed moral direction. So, in subsequent editions, Malthus introduced a
stronger notion of moral restraint. Moral restraint shifts the burden of moral agency,
giving the poor the sense that they could prevent their own vice and misery—or, more
precisely, laying the blame for the condition at their own feet. “All that was necessary,”
Himmelfarb notes, “was that the poor understand that ‘they are themselves the cause
of their poverty; that the means of redress are in their own hands and in the hands of
not other persons whatever.’ The ‘moral agent’ was a free and responsible individual,
the master of his own fate.”148 The desire for improvement and the moral agency of the
poor, as Himmelfarb notes, was the novel element that would alleviate the plight of
the poor from being crushed under the mechanics of society. In short, Malthus would
introduce a moral intervention in order to lighten the darkness of the first edition.149
The poor were victims of the harsh laws of nature in the first edition; there was no
hope. In the second edition, the poor were given hope in that they are imagined to have
some agency. But if they failed, it was their own moral failing.
So, in the first edition, the poor were to be pitied because they were victims of the
harsh laws of nature; in later editions, the poor were themselves the source of their own
poverty. It was this intersection of the natural laws of population and the granting of
moral agency to the poor that the idea of the deserving poor was redefined from its
sixteenth-century concept; this class of poor persons deserved help from the political
establishment, because they had curbed their sexual appetites and put their bodies to
industrious work.
Moral restraint did two things. First, it granted agency to the poor, such that the
poor themselves could avoid the harsh “positive checks” against over population.
Second, it gave political economists a basis from which to engineer the future of
society. Just as Newton’s laws of motion had given a new understanding of forces in
nature150 and permitted novel engineering feats through the manipulation of those laws
of nature, Bentham’s laws of society would permit social engineering. Bentham’s laws,
 
Springs of Action and the Management of the Poor 165

complemented by Ricardo’s “iron law” of wages, and Malthus’s principle of population

inspired by Townsend’s hunger thesis, gave government leverage points for intervening
for the reform of the poor law. Malthus—like the reformed minded Bentham—was
introducing a kinder and gentler biopolitical control lever into society through his
notion of moral restraint.
Despite the fact that Malthus believed that his subsequent editions of the Essay
were less dark and presented a morally reasoned approach to the problem of the poor,
Malthus received much abuse even for the latter editions. The vehemence of the critique
against Malthus, especially by those in the literary community, makes evident that his
detractors could not gain traction against the actual popularity that Malthus enjoyed
from the economic and the political classes of Britain.151 In fact, many of his opponents
conceded that Malthus’s plan did grant moral agency to the deserving poor, even while
the literary classes did not like the moralizing attitude toward the poor. Despite much
abuse, Malthus was tremendously influential. He was described as “a sort of ‘darling
in the public eye,’ whom it was unsafe to meddle with.”152 As Himmelfarb notes, the
vehement critiques leveled against Malthus were in fact critiques against the morally
insensitive melancholia of the first edition, which depicts the seemingly deterministic
dimensions of the natural laws of society.
Himmelfarb notes that Malthus’s work had proven to be a major source for shaping
how British society conceived the poor.

The point is not simply that Malthus made converts in high places among
politicians . . ., philosophers. . ., historians . . ., and nameless and numerous
journalists . . . More important were the untold number of people who accepted
his thesis without making a public profession of it, sometimes without being
consciously aware of it.153

Thus, he captured the imagination of society, even the members of society that hated
Malthusianism, as Malthus’s position would later be called. Himmelfarb goes on to
point out that even the most vehement opponents of Malthusianism and Benthamism
“and the rest of the materialistic, mechanistic, ‘pig philosophy’” of that era, still loved
one aspect of Malthus’s philosophy, namely, that there was a deserving poor class that
worked, and an undeserving poor class that did not.154
With Malthus, we get the key to engineering: society could now place numbers on
these two sins—sloth and lust. Lust could be quantified by counting the numbers of
children born in a system where birth control was ineffective. Sloth could be quantified
by counting the numbers of non-working, and therefore undeserving, poor. What
differentiated the two classes of poor was whether the poor person asserted his or
her moral agency and embraced Malthus’s new formulation of moral restraint: delay
marriage (curb your lust) and work hard (avoid sloth); that is what is good for society.
As Himmelfarb notes, Malthus not only helped to find a “solution” to the problem of
the poor, he actually set the terms for society to understand the poor as a problem in
need of a solution.155 His framing of the question would shape the way that the Poor
Laws Reform of 1834 would shake out,156 and, as we have argued, the way that moral
thinking would go on to shape political economy of the next generation.
166 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

Social Machinations and the Bodies of the Poor

Though Bentham, Ricardo, and Malthus would not survive to see the Poor Law Reform
of 1834—Bentham dying in 1832, Ricardo in 1823, and Malthus in 1834—their
fingerprints were all over the law, and their spirit would animate the development of
economic, social, and moral thinking rippling down the ages to today. Taken together,
they, along with Townsend, give us the puzzle pieces that will provide the social milieu
out of which the biopolitical economy of neoliberalism is born and from which the
neuroscience of morality emerges.
Townsend would inspire Malthus, providing the biological restraint that hunger
puts onto the poor, the first fruit of pain, one of the twin taskmasters of humankind.
Ricardo’s iron law of wages and Malthus’s Essay on Population would give Bentham
the much-needed scientific grounding for understanding the best ways to leverage
the poor for industry and to turn rogues to honesty. Thus, the Poor Law Reform of
1834 found its inspiration in the reformers and helped to further moralize poverty.
Where the 1601 Poor Law—designed to solve the problems of the poor created by
the closure of the commons—set the trajectory for moralizing of the poor, the radical
reformers completed that task. While the radical reformers were hoping for a more
humane treatment of the poor, they had to first imagine them to be beasts along with
Townsend. Malthus would then humanize them, by granting them a modicum of
moral agency. The Poor Law Reform of 1834 helped to shape the cultural sentiment
that, with their new-found agency, if the poor remained poor, it was their own moral
failing. The poor were supposedly free to change their own plight, but all the while they
were caught up in the Panoptic vision of Jeremy Bentham. The poor were now split into
two separate camps: the deserving (those that might achieve wealth and thus actual
freedom) and the undeserving poor (those that have theoretical freedom, but rejected
Bentham’s social mechanics).
Mill would find his godfather’s systematic and mechanical thinking too crass and
would work to reform it. In his attempts to be more careful with a system of logic,
Mill would articulate his own positivist social theory, born of his father’s work in
psychology, and his own work in the science of ethology (character), a precursor to
economic science and the neuroscience of morality. By doing so, Mill put himself
in a position to articulate a more nuanced understanding of the science of society
and political economy. In addition, theoretically, he developed the idea of the self as
emergent from both its biology and its social formation, something we see in both the
economic science and the neuroscience of morality. Yet Mill’s notion of the self is a
being that, while constituted from bios and polis, rises above and chooses from among
a myriad of desires. Mill had a space for freedom that seemed to escape the social
mechanics of Bentham and his neoliberal and neuroscientific heirs. However, it is
probably better to say that his understanding of freedom was not reductive, which is to
say that his anthropology was more sophisticated than the one imagined by Bentham,
Ricardo, Malthus, and Townsend.
However much Mill might have worked to salvage political economy from the
lower anthropology of Townsend’s impoverished beasts, his heirs would latch onto
 
Springs of Action and the Management of the Poor 167

Homo economicus, the being that is the artifact of the positivist science of economics.
Thus, there are two beings here, one capable of making free and rational self-interested
choices, and those lesser beings whose capacity for agency and choice is erased by
poverty. The former would become Homo economicus, which we have argued is an
artifact of economic models and the laissez-faire state, which safeguards their inherent
freedom. The latter are undeserving beings whose morality keeps them in chains; they
are the vicious antisocial beings, deserving of our pity as long as they conform to the
biopolitical economy of the burgeoning neoliberalism, and should be set outside the
system, as suggested by Sam Harris and others that would promote genetic virtue.
What we see, then, are two beings one that rises to the level of “man,” the prosocial
economic man of Mill and the other, the antisocial, that roams among the beasts.
The radical reformers of the nineteenth century gave these beasts one possible path
toward humanization: they could choose to submit to a biopolitical-economic regime
that required them to negate their animalistic sexual desires and accept dehumanizing
working conditions in order to become human. On this model, the social mechanics
of the state promulgated in scientifically grounded legislation open a door for the poor
to exit from their beastly poverty and to enter the society. Thus, ironically by giving up
their freedom, they might gain entry into the ranks of the human. For by lifting oneself
out of poverty and no longer burdening the state, the state must leave one alone.
This promised freedom, though, is merely theoretical, for under the biopolitical
economy of Industry Houses and wage labor, it is unlikely that the poor would achieve
the wealth required for true freedom. In this system, we see the fingerprints of the
philosophical predecessor of the empiricists, namely, David Hume. Here we find the
seeds of the entrepreneurial and industrious souls who are the progenitors to Homo
economicus. As we will show, these entrepreneurial souls are conceived, not in the mind
of Adam Smith, but in the mind of David Hume, to whom we now turn our attention.
 6

Bacon, Smith, and the End of Virtue

As we have shown in the previous chapter, Mill’s positivist science and the birth of Homo
economicus were intimately linked. The same is true for the early modern thinkers from
Bacon to Hume to Smith. It is not surprising that these figures of the early modern
period, who shaped our political and economic philosophies, are the same figures that
shaped the new moral and human sciences. Science and politics, knowledge and power
seem inseparable in the work of these philosophers. As we outlined in Part I, both the
Chicago School and key figures in the neuroscience claim Adam Smith and David
Hume as their twin inspirations. In this chapter, we complicate this lineage, granting
the influence of Hume on the neurobiological narrative of morality, but arguing that
their true progenitor is that towering figure who stands behind Hume: Francis Bacon.
There can be little doubt that Bentham, Malthus, and Ricardo grounded their
principles of politics and economy in the empirical philosophy and the metaphysical
claims of the premier philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume. As
we have seen, Bentham accepts whole-cloth Hume’s metaphysical thesis about the
human inability to know causes. For Bentham, that did not mean that we are caught in
a morass of not knowing, as much as we must ground our knowledge in the one thing
of which we can be certain—human experience. The legislator must begin where all
empiricists begin, namely, in the ground of sense experience. From the very beginning
of An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham notes:

Nature has placed mankind [sic] under the governance of two sovereign
masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as
well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand, the standard of right and
wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne.
They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think.1

Pleasure and pain govern Bentham’s project of legislating morals. As with all
knowledge, Bentham would have us begin not in speculation or in final causes, and not
in virtue or in sympathy (where Adam Smith begins); rather, he begins exactly where
Hume begins, namely, in sense experience, in pleasure and pain, the ‘moral senses.’
Just as sense experience is the beginning of all knowledge, moral knowledge—moral
science—too must begin in the moral senses of pleasure and pain.
David Hume is best known for two related works, his A Treatise of Human Nature
(1739-1740) and his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), the latter
 
Bacon, Smith, and the End of Virtue 169

serving as a mature distillation of his youthful insights in the much earlier work.2 In these
works, Hume examines the epistemological foundation of human knowledge working
in a manner consonant with Francis Bacon’s New Organon. While Hume himself was
not a political operative, he wrote a massive six-volume political history of England. He
wrote on every topic from morals, to politics, to economics, to the empirical sciences.
His thesis in the Treatise is that all human inquiry, including moral inquiry, must begin
in sense experience, which should ground political, scientific, and economic enterprise.
Hume was not the only early modern thinker to write on the relationship of science
and politics. It is as true of the rationalists as it is of the empiricists. In the second part
of the Discourse on Method, the rationalist Rene Descartes (1596–1650) begins with a
metaphor for the mind by appeal to architecture of the city. The buildings and cities
are designed by a single rational architect, which holds the city together.3 Catherine
Pickstock depicts how, for Descartes, the ordering of human knowledge mimics a well-
governed city, appealing as he does to analogies “of architecture, city-planning, and
governmental structure to describe his method for the composition and organization
of knowledge.”4 As with a city, the mind must be rationally ordered and thus defended
from chaos. This citadel of one person, alone, ordering knowledge is the paradigm
of knowing for Descartes. Formal consistency is more important than embodied
and communal goods. Formal consistency permits mastery and control, rather than
dependency on the vicissitudes of organic emergence. Matthew Jones, among others,
has drawn our attention to the univocity of language and homogeneity of method used
by Cartesian science.5 The universally applicable mathesis—both in natural science
and in political governance—allows one not only to know geometry but to order all
knowledges and goods—including political and moral goods—according to the same
measure.
Overlapping with Descartes, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) attempts to deploy this
univocal Cartesian mathesis in order to actually build the new city, the great polis.
Hobbes—an acquaintance of Descartes—was also a geometrician. He also participated
in political life and was the secretary to the Lord Chancellor, Francis Bacon (1561–
1626). The geometer King, according to Hobbes, would create the space of the city to
cohere in a manner similar to the axioms of geometry. Within the geometric mathesis
of the city, a plebe might be protected from violence and chaos of the State of Nature,
where life “is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”6
The physician John Locke (1632–1704) thought of himself as a natural philosopher—
that is to say, a scientist; yet, we know him as a political philosopher. As a natural
philosopher, we find Locke speaking in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
about primary qualities that are properties or powers inherent in objects. Reason
and liberty are powers—properties—of human being.7 And in the Second Treatise on
Government, he states that men band together in society “for the mutual Preservation
of their Lives, Liberties and Estates,” which he calls “by the general Name, Property.”8
In both his natural philosophy and his political philosophy, much hangs on the ideas
of properties and powers. Properties adhere closely to the essence of things, including
humankind. As he notes, “man . . . hath by Nature a Power . . . to preserve his Property,
that is, his Life, Liberty and Estate.”9 Life is a property of human being; liberty is a
property of human being; estate is his property.
170 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

Still, as we shall see, the figure who cast the most influence on British empiricism
in general, and on David Hume in particular, was Francis Bacon, the father of modern
empiricism. Bacon, a political operative his entire life, is important not only because
he gives us a new inductive science, a new empirical science, though surely that is also
true. He is important because of the stance he strikes to nature, transforming early
modern philosophy into techno-science even before robust technological innovation
had begun.10 In other words, in addition to developing a new, inductive method for the
acquisition of new knowledge, it was Bacon’s stance regarding nature that transformed
both science and politics. For Bacon, knowledge, particularly knowledge of nature, was
useful for manipulating things.
As we have seen, this form of techno-science has come to shape contemporary
research into things like moral formation, all with an eye to controlling human virtue
and vice. We shall conclude that modern science is really a Baconian techno-science,
knowledge that does technical work according to a mechanical model of work. What
is more, modern economic theory is also a techno-science, aimed at understanding
human behavior such that it can be manipulated. Human beings have become the raw
material for a better, more productive polis, and thus a more moral polis. As we will
show, in contrast to a previous way of imagining behavior, Bacon is the founder of the
entire project to know and to master the powers in order to create the new Atlantis.
But in order to build this new Atlantis, human anthropology would have to be
evacuated of its moral content, its nature, its relationality, and its telos. Rather than
Adam Smith, who retained a robust moral anthropology, we find Hume’s self-interested,
utility-maximizing person of property, which seeds both Malthus’s and Bentham’s
bifurcated anthropology of the beastly poor and the free person-of-industry, which
morphs into Mill’s Homo economicus, which in turn gives way to the person reduced to
capital of the Chicago School and of schematic being of neuroscience. Rather than the
noble creatures of Bacon’s utopian new Atlantis, we find a pale and pathetic creature,
caught in the throes of political economy. While we are not arguing that Smith is the
right option for a more human science, there can be little doubt that his anthropology
is much more humane and not nearly as thin or reductive as Hume’s and that of
subsequent Humeans.

Hume and the Origins of Political Economic Morality

David Hume (1711–1776) is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers
of the modern period:

Kant reported that Hume’s work woke him from his “dogmatic slumbers,” and
Jeremy Bentham remarked that reading Hume “caused the scales to fall” from his
eyes. Charles Darwin regarded his work as a central influence on the theory of
evolution. The diverse directions in which these writers took what they gleaned
from reading him reflect both the richness of their sources and the wide range of
his empiricism.11
 
Bacon, Smith, and the End of Virtue 171

As we saw in Chapter 5, Hume exerted enormous influence over every theorist standing
at the dawn of modern economics, political economy, morality, and social science. As
we saw in Part I, it is almost as if Hume is still alive, being widely and frequently cited
by contemporary economists and neuroscientists.
Hailing from a strict Calvinist background in Edinburgh, Hume began his studies
at the University of Edinburgh at the age of ten or eleven, but left university early and
embarked on a program of self-education, discarding along the way any adherence to
religion.12 As a second son, his inheritance was meager, setting him up for an itinerant
life of occasional employment, in France, England, and Scotland. Publishing the
first edition of the Treatise anonymously at age twenty-three, he twice tried to enter
the professorate, but was turned down both times, in large part due to his emerging
reputation as an atheist and a skeptic; thus, he never held an academic post. MacIntyre
argues that Hume lived a sort of double-life—retaining warm personal ties with family
and friends in Scotland, while working hard in his professional life to “Anglicize”
himself and distance himself from his Scottish identity, changing the spelling of his
name from “Home” to “Hume” so the English could pronounce it correctly, writing his
works to give the impression that he was English, and living a scholarly and professional
life that “was by design to a large degree an English life.”13
As we have seen, Hume was a radical empiricist, locating the only ground for
knowledge in sense experiences, and when it came to matters political, economic, and
moral, particularly in the experiences of pleasure and pain. As a radical skeptic, he
abjured any possibility for knowing formal and final causes, as they do not simply
appear to sense experience. Thus, metaphysical knowledge of God or natures, including
human nature, is prone to wild speculation. Upon these fundamental commitments,
Hume builds his position on moral knowledge and the virtues. Hume claims that
humans denote those objects that induce pleasure as good and those that induce pain
as evil. While we cannot say anything about the nature of good or evil, we can say
things about pleasure and pain. As we will see, Hume is the intellectual power behind
the rise of empiricism, positivism in social science, utilitarianism in moral thought,
and is the key person influencing the thought of the popularizers of neuroscience.
Hume is key to the social imaginary out of which the neuroscience of morality is born.
Frederick Rosen traces Hume’s thinking on the origin of moral knowledge to Pierre
Gassendi (1592–1655), a French priest, philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician.
Gassendi offered a seventeenth-century reading of the Epicureans in order to argue
against Aristotelianism.14 At the heart of Epicurean philosophy is pleasure and pain,
the chief drive being the avoidance of pain. Gassendi put it this way:

Therefore to speak properly, Right or natural Equity is nothing else but what is
mark’d out by Utility or Profit, or that Utility which, by common Agreement, hath
been appointed that Men might not injure one another, nor receive any wrong, but
live in security, which is a real Good, and therefore naturally desired of everyone.15

Justice, for Gassendi, is not found in the facts of nature as Aristotle argued.16 Justice is
simply the securing of order through inflicting pain on those who did not respect the
rule against creating harm/pain for others.17 We see at work here the central feature
172 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

of empirically based ethics—namely, the avoidance of pain, and the position that the
chief advantage that one can give to others is to establish law that prevents pain and
promotes pleasure. The advantage, when this position is broadened to all, is called
utility. Thus, more broadly for Gassendi, as Rosen notes, it is utility and not justice (or
benevolence or sympathy) as we shall see in Smith’s critique of Hume, that establishes
all of morality. Utility—in its act of reducing pain and increasing pleasure—is that
which gives advantage.18
Hume took this lesson to heart, speaking of two virtues—justice and benevolence—
and their fruit—property. First, neither nature nor God establishes the virtues, for
these depend on metaphysical speculation about formal or final causes. While Hume
takes his more positive view of human nature from Hutcheson, for whom morality was
grounded in the goodness of nature, he rejects “natures” as the source of moral science.
In a letter to Hutcheson, he notes:

I cannot agree to your Sense of Natural. Tis founded on final Causes; which is a
Consideration, that appears to me pretty uncertain & unphilosophical. For pray,
what is the End of Man? Is he created for Happiness or for Virtue? For this Life
or for the next? For himself or for his Maker? Your Definition of Natural depends
upon solving these Questions, which are endless & quite wide of my Purpose. I
have never call’d Justice unnatural, but only artificial.19

Justice, a virtue, is not a product of nature, but of artifice. Justice is artificial, in that it is
established or constructed out of the best source of human knowledge, the empirically
derived moral sense experience of pleasure and pain.
More pointedly, the need for justice arises out of a particular source of pain—the
fact of scarcity. Hume’s consideration of justice in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles
of Morals begins with a reflection on abundance. In abundance, there is no need for
justice, because in abundance all that is needed is readily available to people. Things like
air and water, for example, are readily available, and there is “No laborious occupation
required: No tillage: No navigation.”20 In a state of abundance, “the cautious, jealous
virtue of justice would never once have been dreamed of.”21 But we do not, of course,
live in a state of abundance. Resources are scarce, and, as a result, we must find useful
ways of relieving the pain of scarcity.
What is the essence of reducing the pain of scarcity and enhancing the pleasure
of abundance? Utility. Utility, grounded firstly in the sense experience of pain and
pleasure, aims at increasing pleasure or reducing pain. These two sovereigns induce
happiness. Insofar as humans prescind from harming one another, so that they do not
inflict pain upon each other, justice is established. Thus, utility demands the creation
of that cautious and jealous virtue, justice, which might reduce the pain of scarcity.
Benevolence is justice’s counterpoint. While Hume does not articulate the
distinction between artificial and natural virtues in the Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding, as he did in the Treatise, benevolence also qualifies as an artificial
virtue. Constructed to bind people together, it too is grounded in utility, this time in
the service of securing pleasures. Benevolence functions in concert with sympathy and
approbation. Fellow-feeling or sympathy is the capacity of people to feel what others
 
Bacon, Smith, and the End of Virtue 173

feel. It is something that we have by nature, for Hume, even while we cannot say more
about human nature than that humans have this capacity. Sympathy does not solely
give pleasure; it is the capacity to feel what the other feels, whether pleasure or pain.
Sympathy moves us to act, to relieve that pain or to give another pleasure. In doing
so, we receive approbation from others, which generates within us a sense of pleasure.
Pleasure derives from giving advantage or being useful to the other. As Rosen notes,

connected with this link between utility, approbation, and pleasure is a sympathy
with the pain and pleasure of others that we share as part of our humanity. Our
sympathy with humanity, however, is not the source pleasure; our feelings of
pleasure through approbation of utility is the source of our humanity.22

Thus, it is utility that motivates benevolence.23 Benevolence is the virtue that aims
at utility by giving advantage to one’s fellows. Via sympathy we sense the feelings of
pleasure or pain of another and are moved from mere perception toward benevolent
motivations aimed at creating more pleasure or reducing pain for others. We thereby
receive approbation or praise for one’s actions, which increases our own pleasure.
Thus, the virtue of benevolence is driven by our own pleasure, the master of all moral
behavior.
The skepticism that shaped Hume’s metaphysical views also shaped his ethical
views; we need only pay attention to sense experience, and, if we go beyond that, we
move into the problematic speculation about natures, including human nature. In
Part II of section V of the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, which asks the
question, why does utility please? he states that the principle of utility is the origin of
morality, and he does not need any “abstruse and remote system.” In an explanatory
footnote, we see Hume’s anti-metaphysical stripe:

It is needless to push our researches so far as to ask, why we have humanity or a

fellow-feeling with others. It is sufficient, that this is experienced to be a principle
in human nature. We must stop somewhere in our examination of causes; and
there are, in every science, some general principles, beyond which we cannot hope
to find any principle more general.24

The search for causes stops at the level of sense impression; any search for metaphysical
causes, especially final causes or the search for natures, leaves one with wild speculation.
Pleasure and pain in others cause a sense impression of pleasure or pain in oneself, no
speculation necessary. In seeking to give the other advantage, one gets the pleasure
of approbation. Utility, while seemingly grounded in sympathy, actually reverts to
one’s own sense of pleasure; a kind of self-interest seems to be at the heart of Hume’s
morality.
Thus, the virtues of justice and benevolence—and indeed all the virtues—are derived
from utility, which is tethered to the sense experience of pleasure and pain. Contrary
to popular opinion, it is not benevolence, not the seeking of a good, that establishes
justice. According to Hume, people most often get it backward. Benevolence might
seem to mean that you give alms to the poor, either as a command from scripture
174 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

or according to nature. But benevolence is not properly grounded in experience. For

Hume giving to the poor does not lead to goodness, but—as we saw with Hume’s heirs
in Chapter 5—ultimately to laziness and debauchery. It only results in good for a few
people—the one who gives (and thus receives the pleasure of approbation) and the one
who receives the gift (and thus has a momentary alleviation of the pain of his poverty).
Only the giver and receiver experience pleasure, and that pleasure is experienced for
only a short period of time. If one pays attention to experience and to the reasons
emergent out of experience, one will see that benevolence, improperly grounded, leads
to the exact opposite of happiness because it encourages laziness. For Hume, we must
look beyond the immediate experience of pleasure of giving alms and seek to build
justice, which is best grounded in utility.
Benevolence grounded in utility, thus, does away with alms-giving. It was this
Humean way of thinking that drove the Poor Law reform efforts of Malthus, Ricardo,
and Bentham. Rosen notes, utility is intensely social through the artifice of benevolence.
But by placing benevolence before utility, the poor felt good in receiving and the rich
felt good in giving, but it was harmful because it made the poor lazy. With utility as
the originary principle, “beggars might become industrious, hard-working members
of society and alms-givers might invest their money in productive enterprises which
would provide opportunities for employment for former beggars.”25 Benevolence, alms
giving, was a practice not grounded in empirically derived knowledge, and, like the
radical reformers at the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, we
see that Hume thought the practice was detrimental to the polis as a whole.
It is no accident that the upshot of Hume’s revision of benevolence is the permission
to forgo charity toward the poor. For while the search for causes must forgo any wild
metaphysical speculation about final causes or human nature, the move to delimit the
search to sense impressions enables the emerging moral scientist to forestall the search
for any other causes—for example, the influence of the broader thought-community.
This becomes clear, however, when we probe his notion of justice more deeply. For
justice for Hume is not simply management of the sense experiences of pain caused by
scarce resources via the principle of utility. That it is centered on resources and scarcity
is important.
To make this point clearer, let’s return to the artificial virtue of justice. An essential
virtue for establishing a properly functioning society, Hume’s justice is “conceived
as the stability of possessions and property” for the industrious.26 He notes that the
hand of nature gives few enjoyments, and it is only by art and industry that “we can
extract [enjoyments] in great abundance.”27 Justice arises from utility, and gives him a
justification for property and inheritance.28 Property can only be taken by consent of the
owner which creates commerce, which again is useful to society. So, pleasure and pain
give rise to utility, which gives rise to justice, which gives rise to property and inheritance,
all in service to utility. Whereas for Locke property was grounded in nature, for Hume
property is born out of utility, and like justice and benevolence it is the result of artifice.
As with justice, there would be no place for property in a world of abundance.29
Only in scarcity is property necessary; otherwise, there would be no need to partition
goods where there is enough. In a land of plenty, “why give rise to property, where
there cannot possibly be an injury?”30 However, as noted by George Panichas, Hume
 
Bacon, Smith, and the End of Virtue 175

sees property as a mean between two extremes. In extreme abundance, “there is no

need for property because it would serve no purpose,” and in the extreme of scarcity,
property laws would be “useless to implement, because they would not be followed.”31
The fact that we live under neither extreme means that human desires outrun the
supply of desired goods. Thus, like justice, private property is essential for social
functioning.32
Yet as a product of human artifice, it is a necessary fiction. MacIntyre notes
in Ethics in the Conflict of Modernity that Hume believed in this useful fiction.33
This did not preclude Hume from maintaining that property was the proper and
philosophically obvious choice in the matter. By grounding private property in the
human desire for pleasure and the desire to avoid pain, Hume creates the illusion that
it is grounded in nature.34 MacIntyre makes an even more astute point; even those
that disagreed with Hume on nature and human nature still accepted his argument
about the necessity of private property. The empirical grounding of his argument
virtually sealed acceptance in empirically minded Britain of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.
So a picture begins to emerge. Justice is not about right relationships between
persons. It is not about mediating relationships or harmonizing the work of the
whole of the polis for the good of all. It is an artificial virtue, derivative of utility,
made necessary by scarcity, and related to the stable possession of property. Justice
is in the service of property; property is not in the service of justice. MacIntyre
adds one more component to Hume’s novel account of justice by unveiling Hume’s
implicit bias toward wealth. Hume, in his essay “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts
and Sciences,” asserts a correlation between pleasure or positive desires and riches,
stating: “Avarice, or the desire of gain, is a universal passion, which operates at all
times, in all places, and upon all persons.”35 Similarly, he notes that, in the Treatise,
“Nothing has a greater tendency to give us an esteem for any person than his power
and riches.”36 We even take satisfaction “in the riches of others, and the esteem we
have for the possessors.”37 As MacIntyre notes, Hume reveals his own esteem for the
wealthy:

[B]y referring first to the possessions of the rich “such as houses, gardens,
equipages” and the like, which “being agreeable in themselves, necessarily produce
a sentiment of pleasure in everyone, that considers or surveys them,” secondly to
our “expectation of advantage from the rich and powerful by our sharing of their
possessions,” and thirdly to “sympathy which makes us partake of the satisfaction
of everyone, that approaches us.”38

Hume clearly was bedazzled by the possessions of the rich and the powerful. What
is more, whenever Hume comments on economic questions, it appears that “there is
rarely a hint that the continuing and growing prosperity of the rich and powerful has
invited anything other than the applause and approbation of the less prosperous.”39
Elsewhere, MacIntyre makes clear how extensively Hume’s moral theory is grounded
in economic commitments. Not only does he reduce justice to the protection of
property; in Hume’s moral psychology, the foundational virtues and vices are radically
176 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

shaped—and in fact inverted—by possession-based social standing. As MacIntyre

notes:

Pleonexia has at last made a social world for itself to be at home in, acquiring
for itself that esteem that timē once conferred. Hume’s values and the values of
that English and anglicizing society for which Hume speaks represent a striking
reversal of what as recently as the latter part of the seventeenth century has been
inculcated in Scottish universities through the reading of the Nichomachean
Ethics and the Politics. And that reversal could not have occurred without the
social and economic changes of Karl Polanyi’s “great transformation.” But it
could not have been presented in an intellectually cogent manner without
Hume’s elaboration of a radically new way of conceiving both the relationship
of reason to the passions [reason being now the slave of the passions] and the
nature of the passions.40

It is precisely this inverted relationship between reason and the passions that
reverberates in the modern moral psychology and social science of Jonathan Haidt,
Sam Harris, and Paul Zak.
MacIntyre traces the same patterns in Smith noting that the sentiments they lauded
were shared by the cultivated eighteenth-century commercial and mercantile class,
but not necessarily shared by all human kind.41 As we will argue in the final section
of this chapter, however, while Smith was certainly a man of his time, he held to a
different anthropology than Hume, and his account of economic activity has a deeply
communal dimension aiming at common goods, as Aristotle and Aquinas understood
them. As a result, Smith has been called by some the “last of the virtue ethicists.”42
Not only are pleasure/good and pain/evil at the foundation of Hume’s moral
philosophy; he also asserts that the desire to gain more pleasure is a natural desire—a
natural cause which is immune to further philosophical scrutiny. In addition, he
likewise asserts that wealth is universally perceived as a source of positive sentiments,
and it is through wealth that benevolence becomes a possibility. Thus, Hume subtly
embeds economics at the very heart of his moral system. As MacIntyre shows, Hume
takes the political-economic status quo of mid-eighteenth-century British society
and assumes it is the natural state of affairs universally. The emerging British political
economy is naturalized and assumed to be the state of nature. Hume disguises “from
his readers the importance of certain facts about the condition of their social and
economic order.” By doing so, Hume “sustained the workings of the agricultural,
commercial, and mercantile economy to the profit of some and to the detriment of
others, others who are for the most part invisible to Hume.”43
Thus, it was the propertied, the wealthy, who could be seen as the most moral of all.
They had the material conditions of happiness and were indeed happy. They practiced
justice by protecting the stability of their property. They were envied, and, if we are to
believe Hume, they brought happiness to the poor through their benevolence. Even in
the absence of their benevolence, the poor still gain pleasure just by being associated
with their wealthy compatriots. Moreover, the wealthy had pleasure from approbation
for their philanthropy. Hume, here sounds very much like he would agree with Zak’s
 
Bacon, Smith, and the End of Virtue 177

virtuous cycle, mediated by oxytocin all generated by market economics, as well as

Becker and Rayo’s account of the happiness function.
Yet this brings us to another subtle problem for Humean thought: how could utility
work for the poor? The great mass of the poor had less pleasure and more pain than
their landed, propertied compatriots. The artifice of justice and the force of law would
have to create means of inducing utility in the poor. Although concern regarding the
poor laws had not yet reached the fevered pitch as it would at the close of the century,
scathing critiques of the poor and charity were already part of Hume’s milieu. Within
the social imaginary of his time, there were fables and beliefs about the poor, not least
Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits. Mandeville’s
Fable was a formative influence on Hume, as well as Hutcheson and Smith, and much
of the British scene from the time of its anonymous publication in 1705 and reissue
in 1714 and 1729. In this volume, social philosopher Mandeville included his satirical
poem, The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turn’d Honest, where he recounts the fortunes of
a colony of bees that was thriving as long as each pursued private gain. At one point,
the bees decided to live by honesty and virtue, and the economy of their hive collapses.
The moral of the story was that prosperity and social benefit were actually the product
of individual vices, and that most accounts of reason or virtue were simply fictions.44
In the Fable, Mandeville attacked not only traditional understandings of virtue, he
also displays the same contempt of the poor—as well as unpropertied laborers—that we
saw in Townsend. Gertrude Himmelfarb calls out a particularly pernicious statement:

Everybody knows that there is a vast number of journeymen weavers, tailors,

clothworkers, and twenty other handicrafts, who, if by four days labour in a week
they can maintain themselves, will hardly be persuaded to work the fifth; and that
there are thousands of labouring men of all sorts, who will, though they can hardly
subsist, put themselves to fifty inconveniences, disoblige their master, pinch their
bellies, and run in debt, to make holidays. When men show such an extraordinary
proclivity to idleness and pleasure, what reason have we to think that they would
ever work, unless they were obliged to it by immediate necessity?45

He likewise criticized what had become at that time a large network of charity
schools for pauper children and orphans that educated them for a life in service and
virtue insofar as institutions “inspired . . . by pity or compassion . . . had the effect of
encouraging the children in their proclivity to sloth and vice and incapacitating them
for a life of poverty and hard work.”46
Without stating it in such harsh terms, Hume’s account of utility reached the same
conclusion about the poor as Mandeville. Was there a way, however, that utility might
redeem them? For Hume, the solution lies in his argument for free will, which goes like
this: We see a person’s past pleasure-inducing and harm-minimizing actions, and we
infer a good character. We see a person’s good character, and we infer that his future
actions will be pleasure-inducing and harm-minimizing. Vice versa, we see a person’s
past harm-inflicting behaviors and we infer an evil character; we see an evil character,
and we infer future harm-inflicting behaviors. Yet, we do not have access to the causal
relation between the goodness or evil of the action and the goodness or evil of the
178 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

character. We only have empirical access to one billiard ball moving and then the
second billiard ball moving; we do not have access to the cause. In the same manner,
we see one pleasure-inducing action (the first billiard ball) and then we see the good
effects (the second billiard ball). We cannot reason to a causal free will from observing
the results of the actions.
Yet without seeing the cause, we do have a sense impression of pleasure when we
see the conjunction of a person’s pleasure-inducing/good actions and the good things
flowing from those actions. We give praise to the conjunction of good actions and
good effects, and we place blame to the conjunction of evil actions and evil effects. But
people could only be blameworthy or praiseworthy, if they are free. Thus, we can infer
that there is freedom of the will. The actors are deemed praiseworthy or blameworthy
because the conjunction of their actions and the results flowing from the actions are
experienced as pleasurable or painful in the observer, who can mete out praise or
blame. Thus, Hume posited the reality of free will based on an argument rising out of
his empiricism, his skepticism on causation, and the centrality of pleasure and pain as
the moral sense.
We can now return to the question of whether the poor had full agency. Hume
would have never agreed that the poor lacked free will, but his system still sets up the
poor as lacking robust agency. As we noted earlier, the poor were dependent upon the
wealthy at two levels—for their livelihoods and for the sense of pleasure they got from
being associated with the wealthy. Hume does not address what ought to be done for
the poor. He did, however, believe that the poor ought not to be valorized as virtuous.
As we already saw, alms giving by the rich to the poor would result only in momentary
pleasure for the giver and the receiver of alms, and induce laziness in the poor receiver.
Actually, dealing with the problem of the poor was a little too close to the ground for
the philosopher.
But in the end, he did not need to. All he needed to do was to set the wheels in
motion for the next generation of thinkers—Bentham, Malthus, and Ricardo—to
engineer poverty (or at least the poor) out of existence by grinding “rogues honest,
and idle men industrious”—in other words, to turn immoral and unfree men into
moral and prosperous figures, who would have a more robust free will. As we saw,
Bentham, Malthus, and Ricardo, deployed the emerging “sciences” to abstract from
poor individuals and to focus on poverty as the condition. Yet the seeds for imagining
the poor to be without agency were sowed by Hume. In a theory where wealth defined
freedom and the good (pleasure), Hume created a philosophical framework that
naturalized the moral superiority of the rich and cast the poor into an abyss of moral
turpitude defined by the unremitting pain of their existence. Hypothetically free,
within Hume’s framework, the poor could not be fully free because they were caught
up in their condition and in need of inducement to exit their state of uselessness. They
needed the wealthy—or the state—to elevate them out of the condition of poverty.
Thus, Bentham deployed a Humean metaphysics through the springs of action—
those various social mechanisms that would spring the poor past their laziness and
their overly active libido. Bentham, ever the engineer, would seek to solve the problem,
not ponder the meaning of the problem for something so obscure as “free will.” But it
was also Humean philosophy that inspired Mill, even while he attempted to correct
 
Bacon, Smith, and the End of Virtue 179

Bentham’s excesses, and it was Mill who inspired Knight and the economic imaginary
of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Of course, most contemporary economists
as well as those forwarding the neuroscientific narrative of morality would happily
acknowledge Hume as their starting point.
But we seem to be missing a piece. After all, it is the question of causation that
science attempts to explicate. Hume knew that knowing causes was nearly impossible,
and he was wise enough to be careful with attributing causes, even while he reduced
all rational and moral behaviors to utility maximization. What is at stake, then, is the
ontology of causes, the ontology of power. Morals are the behaviors one sees at end of
biological powers/causes and following techno-scientific powers over biology, as well
as the deployment and execution of biopolitical-economic powers. Or so, our Humean
economists and neuroscientists have led us to believe. Once one knows the truths of
reality, one can intervene. While this attitude is certainly true of Hume, it was the same
for Hume’s predecessor, the progenitor not only of Hume’s empiricism and skepticism,
but also the father of techno-science: Francis Bacon. To him we now turn.

Bacon’s Power Ontology: From the New Work to the New Polis
As many of the figures we have studied thus far, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) stood at
the nexus of philosophy, science, and political intrigue. Born into the penumbra of the
Elizabethan court, his life charted a rugged forty-seven-year course of positions in the
English government, parliament, and service to Elizabeth I and James I, eventually
becoming a member of the Privy Council in 1616, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal in
1617, and Lord Chancellor and Baron of Verulam in 1618.47 But political fortunes
can be fleeting; in 1621, he fell from the halls of power, impeached for twenty-three
charges of corruption, and was briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London due to
unpaid debts. He spent the last five years of his life finalizing his philosophical and
scholarly work.
Bacon sits at the origin of our story of economics—living and working at the end of
the sixteenth century amid the changes caused by the enclosures and the birth pangs
of the new economy. As a member of Parliament and political operative, he was deeply
involved in the social and legislative questions surrounding the poor. In 1597, he
introduced two bills against enclosure and depopulation, over against the interests of
the powerful landlord class.48 As noted earlier, he was a key member of the committee
who wrote the precursor of the 1601 Act for Relief of the Poor.49
Bacon’s Novum Organum sets out new directions for the interpretation of nature.50
It establishes a new epistemological agenda for science while also setting science on
a new practical orientation. Fundamentally, it helps to establish a new metaphysical
order, shifting the social imaginary away from the premodern lifeworld in which
the human had a place within the movement of the whole of reality, to our modern
landscape in which human beings are set apart as unimportant spectators.51 Bacon’s
new science was not just knowledge for knowledge’s sake; it is meant to be put to
work, to relieve the human estate, to relieve the human of its frailties. His optimism
180 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

regarding the possibilities of such a science led him to write a second, fantasy book,
New Atlantis. Here he imagines a utopian society—a new polis—built according to his
new science.
Bacon focuses on building because it is work, the new work, the novum organum,
that will transform the world. Bacon was most interested how natural, causal forces
could be studied and mastered through knowledge. The use of force—power—is the
means by which one controls the world—both natural and social. Knowledge of power
enables one to know what to do, in both the natural and social realms, in order to
efficiently cause new things to come into being. Bacon states:

[W]e want all and everyone to be advised to reflect on the true ends of knowledge
(scientia): not to seek it for amusement or for dispute, or to look down on others,
or for profit or for face or for power or any such inferior ends, but for the uses and
benefits of life, and to improve and conduct it in charity. For the angels fell because
of an appetite for power; and men fell because of an appetite for knowledge.52

Just two sentences later, Bacon continues by noting that his New Organon is a work
not for the laying down of dogma “but for human progress, and empowerment.”53
Knowledge is not to be sought for power, but it is nonetheless sought for empowerment.
Knowledge is power; but it ought to be a power to bring effects into the world for good,
not for self-aggrandizement. At the level of human action, the end/purpose of power
over nature is human progress.
Yet the relationship of knowledge to power is very complex and bidirectional.
Humans seek knowledge for empowerment, but first power must be exercised over
nature so that nature will reveal her secrets. Knowledge, in other words, originates in
nature rather than in the human mind. Knowledge derived in this inductive manner
originates closer to the source and is more trustworthy than that putatively derived
from speculative deduction. In opposing the inductive method to the deductive
method, Bacon states: “They [the deductive reasoners] defeat and conquer their
adversary by disputation; we conquer nature by work.”54 Inductive science is work done
on and to nature. Inductive science is born in the “bowels of nature” and not in the
minds of men.55
Knowledge—science—is work. Bacon, in explicating the relationship of knowledge
to its object, notes that the inductive method both describes and interrogates nature.
He refers to these two aspects of induction as the two parts of knowledge. Description
of nature—the first part of knowledge—freely follows the contours of its object.
However, much more can be learned when nature is “confined and harassed, when
it is forced from its own condition by art and human agency, and pressured and
moulded . . . since nature reveals herself more through the harassment of art than in
her own proper freedom.”56 The work of the new scientists requires the vexation of
nature; it must be harassed so that she gives up her secrets. For Bacon, then it is not
mere induction, observation, or experience that grounds his empiricism; rather, it is
the activity of manipulating and controlling reality so that observations can be made
against the controlled condition. Bacon is an advocate of experimental, not merely
experiential, science.57
 
Bacon, Smith, and the End of Virtue 181

This inductive nature of the new science likewise requires a radical rethinking of
knowledge as it relates to causes. Bacon notes:

The sorry state of current human knowledge is clear even from common
expressions. It is right to lay down: “to know truly is to know by causes.” It is
also not bad to distinguish four causes: Material, Formal, Efficient, and Final.
But of these the Final is a long way from being useful; in fact, it actually distorts
the sciences except in the case of human actions. Discovery of Form is almost
hopeless. And the Efficient and Material causes (as commonly sought and
accepted, i.e., in themselves and apart from the latent process which leads to
the Form) are perfunctory, superficial things, of almost no value for true, active
knowledge.58

By latent process and latent structure, he means something akin to the hidden
mechanism and hidden structure, which requires work to attain. Without such work,
Bacon fears that a simplistic reading of cause and effect will lead to deception and not
to true knowledge. He is skeptical, then, that knowing the causes is possible without
inductive, empirical work, a skepticism he bequeathed to Hume. Only careful attention
to efficient and material causes, which point to the deeper, more latent structure
and processes, will get us closer to true knowledge. One may start with empirical
experience of material causes and work one’s way back to the efficient cause. But these
themselves tend toward superficial and unstable claims. He continues noting that we
creep along by investigating material and efficient causes, with hopes of constructing
perfect knowledge, which is knowledge of the laws of nature, which he takes to be the
forms of nature—the formal causes. But arriving at formal causes is very difficult.
Thus, Bacon emphasizes different aspects of the four Aristotelian causes; he balances
them differently than does Aristotle. Final causes are precluded because we only know
the final cause if the motion is the result of human action. To seek knowledge of final
causes in nature would be to bias one’s observations and thus to confuse the seeker of
knowledge. Formal causes are truly laws of nature, and to know them is to know truly.
But knowledge of formal causes is difficult, and must be derived from a process that
works backward from material and efficient causes, toward the latent structures and
processes.59 So, in his division of the sciences, metaphysics is “inquiry after forms”;60
physics is the examination of material and efficient causes, along with the latent process
and latent structure, which point to the forms.
It is these forms that are the prize; it is here that knowledge becomes power: “[H]e
who knows forms comprehends the unity of nature,” and so he can “bring forth things
which have never been achieved.”61 Knowledge of formal causes, which takes inductive,
empirical work, gives one power—to “bring forth things” never before produced.
Productivity, utility is the aim of human knowing. For Bacon, this power that emerges
from science results in two practical arts. One art is subsidiary to physics and the
other to metaphysics: mechanics and magic, respectively. Each art gives “command
over nature,” magic the more so because it uses the forms—the laws of nature—to
give command over nature. Perfect knowledge, true knowledge is the power to control
nature.
182 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

Paolo Rossi reads Bacon in light of the Renaissance Magus, the master, who
seeks the secrets of nature, through astrology, alchemy, and necromancy, a form of
Gnosticism that arose in the Renaissance. There were those who studied black magic,
which sought to reverse the laws of nature, while those who sought the secrets of
white magic sought to align their own purposes with laws of nature. According to
Rossi, Bacon—Puritan that he was—sought the latter, but he purified his intentions
by making the project one that was aimed at relief of the human condition.62 Sophie
Weeks, however, claims that Bacon’s project should be read as “an instauration of
magic, rather than as an institutional and methodological preparative to the emergence
of modern science.”63 Whether one agrees with Rossi or Weeks, it still seems that, as
Rossi shows, the alchemical appeal to sacred texts rather than induction is the primary
criticism that Bacon levels against magic. Insofar, as the alchemist was experimenting,
Bacon approved. The goal, as hard as it is to achieve, was mastery over nature, whether
the results be achieved through mechanics or magic. In this sense, Bacon was primarily
trying to rehabilitate magic through the new work of knowledge.
With Bacon, then, we see in embryonic form the Newtonian understanding of
causes, of forces acting on bodies in locomotion. This understanding of locomotion
and of the forces that make movement possible achieves fruition in Newtonian physics
and would in time come to influence physiology in the nineteenth century. Claude
Bernard—eulogized as the Newton of physiological science—would analogously
understand the human body as a series of forces moving the material of the body. What
must have been magic to Bacon became for us merely what follows from knowledge
of efficient and formal causes, namely, technological control. Here then, we find the
inspiration of neuroscientists like Viding and Frith, Persson and Savulescu, Walker and
Douglas, as well as Sam Harris. The new method in science must vex or harass nature in
order for her to give up her secrets, the latent structures and processes of efficient and
material causation. In order to have control over it, one must first instrument nature in
order to know it. What Bacon calls forms of nature, or laws of nature, became for us the
forces behind the mechanisms—one thing falling on another in the latent, mechanical
process. Moreover, what was once the lofty metaphysical structures of Aristotle and the
occult magic of Bacon’s time would in time fall from its elevated perch and become for
us mere physics and mechanics.64
So, what of Aristotle’s fourth cause—the final cause, the telos? As we saw, Bacon
precludes the possibility of final causes except in the case of human action. In the rest
of the sciences, final causes only confuse if they are imagined to be at work from the
beginning of the investigation. Bacon only allows final causation back into his schema
of knowledge after severely limiting its scope and bringing it into the realm of human
control. Final causes make sense only if deployed in human activity, as a name for the
end that a human actor wants to enact. Thus, within Bacon’s schema, the final cause
provides the justification for the instrumentation of nature, that for the sake of which
knowledge is justified politically. The new science exists “to relieve the human estate.”65
In other words, in Bacon’s new empirical science, the pursuit of knowledge is
morally, politically, and epistemologically justified by its ability to bring about effects
in the world. How do we know that we know something? We know that we know
something when we can manipulate the beings of the world through the deployment
 
Bacon, Smith, and the End of Virtue 183

of knowledge and get them to act for our purposes. In fact, the definition of knowledge
under patent law today is precisely this; it can be patented as knowledge if we can
do something with the information.66 True science seeks to understand the power
of nature, of the laws of nature, of formal causation. True knowledge, patentable
knowledge, is that which can be deployed to control nature and bring about effects in
the world. This is power to be used for human empowerment.
Thus, it was not just Bacon’s method—induction—that caused a great shift in
science; it was equally his understanding of the laws of nature, the metaphysics of
formal causes—the power behind efficient causes. As early as Bacon, more than pure
observational science of inductive reasoners was at work. Indeed, we see the ordering
of knowledge directed at human ends. In other words, Bacon’s new work of science
was already on the hunt for mechanical manipulation of nature, to relieve the human
estate.67 Already at the time of Bacon, we find the diminution of robustly teleological
world, ordered by the hand of God. We find that all purposes of knowing, and thus
all purposes for that which is known, are subservient to human ends, subservient to a
post hoc political purpose added onto the true metaphysics of the laws of a mechanical
nature. According to Bacon, the justification for going forward on the quest for
knowledge is empowerment over nature in the crassest of all ways. The justification
for instrumenting nature is to harass her to give up her secrets so that she might be
coerced and ordered to human production. In other words, science is techno-logical,
in much the way that Heidegger means it; we must harness the power in nature in
order to control it for human purposes.68
The goal of all this knowledge is to achieve a new order, a new Atlantis, if
you will. Jacqueline L. Cowan has argued that the function of Bacon’s work, New
Atlantis, is to put into Old World terms what Bacon’s New World might look like.69
Following the familiar genre of a travel saga, the sailors happen upon Bensalem, a
perfect society with harmony between religion and science, organized according to
natural philosophical knowledge, and put to perfect use for the peace and harmony
of men. Bacon’s utopian New Atlantis valorizes the way that knowledge should be
achieved and deployed—its final cause, the relief of the human estate. Peter Lucas has
argued that New Atlantis was a work of science fiction that influenced how science
should go, with wonders achieved by organized and methodical state-funded natural
philosophy.70
The human mind, for Bacon, should be organized by work to uncover the hidden
mysteries of nature, not simply for the power one can wield over nature qua power, but
for the purposes of relieving the human estate, in order to build a great, peaceful, and
harmonious society, a new Atlantis that is no longer fictional. Like Hume, Bacon was
skeptical about the mind’s ability to unlock nature’s secrets, but, unlike Hume, Bacon
held that causes could be known through careful work. Where Bacon was skeptical
of final causes, Hume is skeptical of knowledge of formal causes. Both remained far
removed from the source of all knowledge, sense experience. If one cannot know final
causes or formal causes in nature, one certainly cannot know final and formal causes in
human nature. Thus, the skepticism of Bacon and Hume, taken together, denatures the
human. It is between Bacon and Hume in their skeptical empiricism that anthropology
begins to falter.
184 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

However, what is revealed through skeptical empiricism is a knowledge of a power

ontology, the means to control, to build toward relieving the human estate, according
to Bacon, and to protect the estate of powerful, propertied men. In other words,
skeptical empiricism gave birth to a kind of optimism that one could actually build
Bensalem. For Hume that meant the building of society according to the principle of
utility, grounded in pleasure and pain aimed at a society that protected the estate of
propertied men, those who are capable of pleasure and whose treasures, in their mere
perception, delight the poor who hope to be associated with such men.
Through the more careful empirical science of Ricardo and Malthus, and inspired
by Townsend’s parable of the goats and dogs and Mandeville’s parable of the bees,
we see the old world of Christian care for the poor, giving way to the New Atlantis,
where there would be no poor at all. Bios, hunger, is the chief experience of pain that
is should prompt the poor into industry. Bios is aimed at polis, and if one could only
build a proper social apparatus—call it a Panopticon—of control, those impoverished,
idle rogues that can be ground honest and industrious could enter into the class of
propertied mean of wealth, and those that cannot be ground, be cast among the beasts.
Some humans, after all, are prosocial and belong in Bensalem; others are antisocial—
thrown about by their biology and uncontrollable even by the Panopticon—and thus
should not be entitled to the protections of the state, as imagined by Sam Harris. By the
time we get to Paul Zak, Bensalem is the market.
Our thesis has been that at the heart of the popularizers of neuroscience, and at
the heart of the neuroscience of morality, is a problematic anthropology. The thin,
pathetic anthropology at the heart of neuroscience imagines humans as thrown about
by bios—genes, brains, moral tastes—which can be controlled through the proper
political economy, a biopolitical economy bent to grind the antisocial, and idle and
vicious rogues into honest, virtuous, and industrious prosocial producers. Thus, it is
this Baconian-Humean anthropology that is at the heart of the newest Atlantis, the
neoliberal political economy. But must it be that way?

Adam Smith: An Unlikely Hero

In Part 1 of this book, we traced the anthropology of the emerging neuroscience of
morality, suggesting that it adheres to the anthropology of the broader economic
imaginary, crystallized in neoliberalism. In Part II of this book, we have shown how
that this economic imaginary draws its inspiration from David Hume. But although our
contemporary popularizers of neuroscience tip their hat to Hume, they also, along with
their neoliberal counterparts, largely cite Adam Smith as their forefather. However, it is
not Smith who is the origin of their highly determined capitalized person; rather, that
figure filtered through Bentham, Mill, Knight, Friedman, and Becker is the offspring
of Hume and Bacon. Despite their homage, our neuroscientists and neoliberals are not
the heirs of Smith.
Here at the end of our study, we are going to make this case by sketching the fuller
anthropology that animated the work of Adam Smith. In fact, theologian Christina
McRorie argues that economics qua science needs a richer anthropology.71 We are
 
Bacon, Smith, and the End of Virtue 185

by no means claiming that Smith’s anthropology is the correct moral anthropology,

nor are we by any means saying that Smith’s anthropology is the best among several
options. Smith’s anthropology is more communal. Even while beginning in affectation,
he does not collapse into emotivism, because his understanding of human behavior
is tempered by reason. It is altogether more aspirational. We agree with MacIntyre’s
point that Smith and Hume are the products of their mid-eighteenth-century British
context, assuming it to be the natural state of affairs universally. However, there
is a stark difference between Smith and Hume that even prompted Smith to revise
his Theory of Moral Sentiments in order to better counter Hume.72 If there is to be a
possible alternative to the biopolitical power ontology of Bacon in our contemporary
techno-neuro-science, might Adam Smith—of all people—point the way?
Adam Smith (1723–1790) was a Scottish philosopher variously referred to as the
Father of Economics, the Father of Capitalism, and certainly one of the founders of
political economy. His first book, A Theory of Moral Sentiments, was published in
1759, during his thirteen-year term on faculty at the University of Glasgow. Generally
characterized as a work of moral philosophy, the book met with great acclaim, leading
him to eventually leave the university and spend the rest of his life traveling through
Europe as a tutor (with much better remuneration) or as an independent scholar. His
second major work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,
was published in 1776 to equal acclaim as his first book. It is generally characterized as
a work of political economy.
How to understand the relationship between these two texts has been referred to
classically as “the Adam Smith Problem.”73 On its face, the Wealth of Nations appears
to be detachable from Theory of Moral Sentiments. The differences in genre and focus
between the two volumes have led many to read the Wealth of Nations as a stand-
alone volume or to claim that in the intervening twenty years, Smith changed his
mind. Others read them in continuity, noting that he finished the revisions for the
sixth edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments shortly before his death in 1790, well after
the publication of Wealth of Nations.74 Economist Dierdre McCloskey argues that
the books are the first two components of an interrelated trilogy, one on temperance
(Theory of Moral Sentiments), one on prudence (The Wealth of Nations), and a third on
justice, which was to be a work of jurisprudence and was never completed.75
While studying at Oxford, Smith read Hume’s Treatise. Upon meeting him in 1750,
they became lifelong friends. Although Hume had essentially completed his major
philosophical works before Smith began writing, as Dennis Rasmussen notes, “almost
everything Smith wrote shows unmistakable signs of Hume’s influence.” Importantly
for our purposes, however, what we find is that “Smith almost never simply adopted
Hume’s views wholesale. On the contrary, he modified almost everything he touched
. . . when it comes to moral philosophy Smith’s views are generally more nuanced and
sophisticated than Hume’s.”76
Space precludes a thorough presentation of Smith’s work on economics. We turn
to him here primarily due to the frequency with which his name is invoked within
both neoliberalism and within the neuroscientific narrative of morality. In these
places, scholars and popularizers primarily pay homage to his moral philosophy,
and so this is what we will engage here. As we will see, Smith’s anthropology is more
186 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

holistic and thicker than Hume’s, such that it seems odd that so many of the positivist
economists would try to link themselves to Smith when it is Hume that they mimic. His
understanding of morality and virtue is likewise so much more robust than Hume’s.
We will say more on Smith’s position on the poor, particularly their relationship
to his wider anthropology, at the end of this section, but we do want to note here
that where the Poor Laws animated our figures in Chapter 5, Polanyi marks the
absence of this topic from Smith’s work: “In Adam Smith’s great work, poor relief was
no problem as yet; only a decade later it was raised as a broad issue in Townsend’s
Dissertation on the Poor Laws and never ceased to occupy men’s minds for another
century and a half.”77 Yet it was not absent from his mind. Smith was deeply critical of
the Settlement Act of 1662, which, as part of the Poor Laws, had tied the poor to their
local parishes, restricting their mobility and their freedom to choose their occupations,
those of their children, where they could live, and where they could work.78 He was also
greatly concerned about wealth inequality, insisting that “no society can flourish, the
members of which, in their great majority, are poor and miserable . . . [For Smith] it
was impossible that society should get wealthier and wealthier and the people poorer
and poorer.”79
For Polanyi, Smith marks the end of an era; in his era, indeed, the state was invented,
but he differed from the generation of Malthus and Ricardo, who held that economics
was a sphere of nature and not of community. Wealth for Smith was “an aspect of
the life of the community, to the purposes of which it remained subordinate . . . The
economic sphere, with him, [was] not yet subject to laws of its own that provide us
with a standard of good and evil.”80 In other words, unlike for Hume, Malthus, and
Ricardo, the economic sphere did not serve for Smith as a source of the moral law and
political obligation. He also explicitly excludes biological and geographic factors as
causal economic factors from the very beginning of The Wealth of Nations.81 Rather, for
Smith, the source of morality—and, indeed, the moral life—lies elsewhere.
Human nature was denatured by Hume. As outlined earlier, for Hume utility—
the advantage one creates for oneself (or an advantage that is created for another) by
reducing pain and increasing pleasure—is the ground of all morality. As we saw with
Hume, justice and benevolence are artificial virtues—not found in nature or in God—
constructed for the sake of utility. Sympathy was the ability of one human to feel the
pains and pleasures of another that prompted one to put oneself in the other’s place, to
imagine how the other feels and, by feeling the displeasure of the other’s displeasure,
was induced to act to the other’s advantage. Doing so elicits the moral approbation—
the moral approval—of others, which is pleasurable to oneself. Thus, Hume’s moral
scheme was primarily about one’s own pleasures. It is in being useful that one feels the
moral approval of others. This basis grounds moral judgment.
Paul Sagar argues that Smith’s account of the human in Theory of Moral Sentiments
was a direct response to Hume’s moral anthropology.82 Where Smith likewise begins
with sympathy, his account of sympathy is radically different from Hume’s. In fact, for
Smith, sympathy—not utility—is the ground of both his morality and his anthropology.
Kathryn Blanchard even names his vision of the human person, Homo sympatheticus.83
It provides a much thicker grounding for moral judgment, specifically via two sets of
virtues—propriety and “merit or demerit.” These virtues structure Parts I and II of the
 
Bacon, Smith, and the End of Virtue 187

Theory of Moral Sentiments, respectively.84 The virtue of propriety is born out of the
“sentiment or affection of the heart.”85 As McRorie notes, for Smith a person evaluates
“the propriety of her actions by imaginatively identifying with her fellow and deciding
whether we should act and feel the same in her shoes.”86 The virtues of merit or demerit
are essentially the judgment of praiseworthiness or blameworthiness, or what in
his time was referred to as approbation. One moves from being moved by others to
creating a new order that creates approbation, which creates cohesiveness with society.
In Part III of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith brings these virtues of propriety
and merit/demerit together to provide the basis for moral judgment, an activity
exercised by the impartial spectator. The impartial spectator is a work of the human
imagination that stands above one’s own interests to make judgments. The impartial
spectator must adjudicate between what one imagines the other feels and what the
other actually feels, between perception and reality. One can do this because one
has the ability to step back, to abstract from one’s own sentiments and the imagined
sentiments of the other. This sounds a lot like Aristotelian phronesis. One has to
set aside one’s own interests and like a judge make a moral judgment. Like all the
virtues, this activity of impartial observation is an activity that requires practice. Moral
judgment—like propriety and merit/demerit—is gained and honed by practice in
social settings. In making these points, Smith counters Hume’s claim that the virtues
are artificial by showing that, while they are of social origin, it is natural for the human
to gain them through practice.
The ground of these three virtues, and therefore moral judgment, is sympathy. As
McRorie notes, sympathy for Smith is not simply an emotion but rather a faculty, “a
design,” as she calls it, “akin to humanity’s operating system: it describes the instinctual
cognitive and affective ability to understand another’s motivations and feelings,
through imaginative identification with the other.”87 For Smith, sympathy is far more
complex and wide-ranging than Hume’s concentration on pleasure and pain. For one
thing, it is much more interactional—it is not merely putting oneself in the position
of the other and imagining what it might feel like. Sympathy for Hume is much more
of an I-It relation; for Smith it is more of an I-Thou relation.88 The being of the “I” is
intimately tied up with the “Thous” of a community. Moreover, it is not merely about
imagining what the person is feeling, but about imaginatively climbing into the other’s
skin, with careful attention to the situation, the other’s history and social location, and
then imagining how it feels. “Sympathy, therefore, does not arise so much from the view
of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it.”89 Much more is engaged
than mere impression—it is to feel another’s emotion “in your own breast.”90 Sympathy
is natural to the human; reason deployed by the impartial spectator is natural to the
human. And unlike the individualism of Hume’s system, sociality is likewise natural to
the human. Smith clearly has an understanding of the whole of human being taken up
in human activity—feeling, rational moral judgment, all contextualized in the social
relations of a human community.
This understanding of sympathy provides a more accurate lens for interpreting the
oft-quoted and oft-misinterpreted passage from The Wealth of Nations—the vignette
of the butcher and the baker. Coming right near the beginning of the Wealth of Nations
(book one, chapter two), Smith opines:
188 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect
our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to
their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities
but of their advantages.91

This passage is ordinarily interpreted to suggest that Smith reduced all of economics
and morality to self-interest. Robert Black, however, reminds us that, first, this passage
must be read in light of its immediate context (the first two chapters of The Wealth of
Nations) and in light of Smith’s corpus as a whole (particularly his notion of sympathy
in Theory of Moral Sentiments).92 What Smith is describing here is an instance of the
practice of the faculty of sympathy—the first step in the engagement between ourselves
and the baker is an act of sympathy, an act of imaginatively identifying with the baker,
understanding her motivations and feelings, and approving (if appropriate) her price
and actions. The impartial spectator has not yet been fully engaged in the deployment
of judgment. For in such situations, we must also view our own conduct through the
baker’s eyes, allowing judgment on the self. Thus, the first step in exchange is not self-
interest. Rather, it is putting oneself in the other’s place and identifying with her or his
interests. The ground of exchange is first and foremost social cohesion. 93
But sympathy does involve a judgement to be made. As Sagar notes, for Hume:

When we enter imaginatively into the situation of others, if we find a correspondence

between the way that we imagine we would feel were we them, and the way we
believe that they actually feel, then this correspondence automatically pleases. By
contrast if we find that there is a lack of congruence between how we imagine we
would feel, and how we think that they do feel, then we are pained (as in both cases
is the other party).94

Thus, for Hume, sympathy cannot move beyond utility and one’s own pleasure. But
for Smith, it is much more complex. For one thing, sympathy also allows judgment of
the self, as we reverse the vector, “plac[ing] ourselves in the situation of another man,
and view[ing] [our conduct and motives], as it were, with his eyes.”95 Based on the
feedback of his peers, who may come to see him as blameworthy or praiseworthy in his
judgments, the impartial spectator might modify his judgment.
As such, sympathy is integrally connected to justice. “There must, Smith contended,
be some pre-conventional internal corrective to the pursuit of self-interest, upon which
the conventional structure of operative justice was ultimately built.”96 For Smith:

Nature has implanted in the human breast that consciousness of ill-desert, those
terrors of merited punishment which attend upon its violation, as the great
safeguard of the association of mankind, to protect the weak, to curb the violent,
and to chastise the guilty.97

Thus, justice is the practice that nurtures a capacity that one already has for self-
judgment. It is born in the potency of a human nature developmentally and socially
nurtured. Justice, then, is not merely the protection of private property, nor is it merely
 
Bacon, Smith, and the End of Virtue 189

the curbing of one’s self-interest from without. Rather, it is the capacity to learn how to
curb self-interest from within, to allow the experience of one’s community—grounded
in the sociality of the human actor—to place limits on the self-interestedness. The
justice of the impartial spectator wells up from within as a practice between oneself in
congress with the other and with the larger group of others.
This faculty also allows judgment of the self, as we “place ourselves in the situation
of another man, and view [our conduct and motives], as it were, with his eyes.”98 In
Smith’s words about sympathy:

It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which
Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the
strongest impulses of self-love. It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which
exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant
of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct. It is he
who, whenever we are about to act so as to affect the happiness of others, calls to
us, with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions,
that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it.99

As Sagar notes, Smith directly addresses Hume’s “soft power of humanity” and “feeble
spark of benevolence.” Sympathy is not mere sentiment, mere preference, mere moral
taste. It is, along with the virtues it engages, partly moral and partly intellectual. One
has to imaginatively switch between what one imagines one would feel if one were the
other person, the way one believes the other person actually feels. Thus, the faculty
of sympathy in concert with the impartial spectator establishes and maintains our
connectedness with other persons, while also allowing us to judge ourselves. Reason
for Smith is not simply the capacity to calculate utility maximization; nor is reason
concerned solely with individual utility maximization. Rather, reason in the form
of a disinterested spectator “can counter the excesses of self-love, should one choose
to heed its voice.”100 There is no divide between emotion and reason, but a thicker
integration of the human person who perceives and acts as unified whole.
Freedom lies in our ability to heed—or not—this voice of the internal spectator. For
Smith, “God has put this into our design as part of the overall plan. This is a design with
which humans can cooperate in varying degrees; it facilitates moral action, without
commanding it.”101 As Blanchard notes, freedom for Smith is

freedom from the unbearable human experience of loneliness and lack of

sympathy; and freedom for the happiness that comes from flourishing human
social relationships that arise from mutual sympathy. Smith’s vision of humane
freedom can best be summed up as integrity—the wholeness that comes from
aligning one’s passions with one’s intellectual opinions about what is good and
appropriate.102

Thus, because of Smith’s thicker anthropology—the faculty of sympathy, which binds

persons to one another, always measured by the impartial spectator—freedom is
more robust for him and not something generated by those with industry to rise to
190 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

the level of the propertied classes. Freedom is never quite the freedom as imagined
by Friedman, a self-interested freedom; it is always a freedom (and a self-interest)
tempered by sociality.
Given this thicker anthropology, where the faculty of sympathy unites affect and
reason, permitting a self-reflexive critical ability to sit in judgment of oneself, and
balanced by sociality, virtue plays a critical role throughout Smith’s corpus. In fact,
Dierdre McCloskey has claimed that Smith is the last virtue theorist in economics.
Whereas traditionally, there were four cardinal virtues and three theological virtues,
McCloskey points out that for Smith five virtues were critical to the fully moral
person—love (or benevolence), courage, temperance, justice, and self-interested
prudence.103 McCloskey notes that while the 1759 edition of TMS has a virtue ethic,
his addition of Part VI in 1790 made that clear. “I have inserted,” he wrote on February
2, 1789, to his publisher, apologizing for delays, “a complete new sixth part containing
a practical system of morality, under the title of the Character of Virtue.”104 The virtue
of love—that is to say, benevolence—acted to adjudicate between the competing four
cardinal virtues. Smith developed this in conversation with the Christian philosophy of
Hutcheson, rejecting Hutcheson’s move to set aside self-love as anything but base. For
Smith, proper self-love, or proper self-regard, became an essential feature of his moral
philosophy. Fellow-feeling was grounded empirically in the observation that the actor
took pleasure in seeing others happy and in bringing about the happiness of others.
It is thus that Smith can claim, at the end of A Theory of Moral Sentiments, that
his system corresponds “pretty exactly” with Aristotle’s.105 Samuel Fleischacker
also pronounces Smith a virtue ethicist, with propriety as the mean between excess
and defect, or when he points to temperance, or his emphasis on habit, or virtuous
friendships.106 While we are not claiming that Smith is an Aristotelian, even if his view
aligns with Aristotle’s in many regards, we are claiming that his moral anthropology is
more robust and that what he offers has a virtue-based understanding of the practice
of moral judgment—both of which have been lost in contemporary economics and
neuroscience.107
These differences in his anthropology and moral philosophy inflect his economics.
Polanyi cites Smith’s very strong sense of community founded in the faculty of
sympathy as that to which both wealth and self-interest are to be subordinated. Thus,
he was not, as Stigler, Becker, and Friedman suggest, someone bent on maximization
of human self-interest, which required independence and isolation, resulting in utility
for society. He is not a utility-maximizing radical individual. Concerns for the well-
being of the community underlie the Wealth of Nations. As Blanchard notes, Smith was
disturbed by the economic trends of his day and the self-interestedness of the business
class. Smith objected to the use of governmental powers to enrich the mercantilists or
the monarch himself at the expense of the common good.108
Paul Mueller also suggests that Smith also has a much more nuanced account
of wealth and economic activity than we find in the Chicago School. Smith did
not promote the accumulation of wealth, so much as the production of goods and
services.109 His account of consumption did not promote consumption for its own sake.
Rather, for Smith, consumption is teleological—it can either contribute to a person’s
well-being or “be wasteful, extravagant, ill-conceived, and socially-damaging.”110
 
Bacon, Smith, and the End of Virtue 191

The telos of wealth had to do with the qualia of flourishing. Happiness consists in
tranquility and enjoyment, the latter foundational for the former.111 His praise or
criticism of wealth or consumption hangs on the tranquility produced. Consumption
is natural, insofar as it meets basic bodily and physical needs given to us by nature.112
As for Aristotle, consumption is titrated to natural needs. Smith is critical of any
consumption that is not directed to moral ends. Thus, it is not just consumption qua
consumption, but consumption within a teleological framework, that leads Smith to
conclude “that ‘every prodigal appears to be a publick enemy, and every frugal man a
publick benefactor.’”113
Unlike those economists who root modern economics in preference satisfaction,
Smith is rather more frugal and temperate. Smith splits the difference between the
utility-maximizing preference-satisfying spender, and, rather more like the Stoics,
separates happiness and consumption completely. Rather, frugality permits one to
consume within the teleological framework, which gives more happiness. One is not
frugal in order to accumulate; one is frugal in order to contribute to the good of the
community.114 Thus, for Smith, the human person is defined neither by economic
activity nor by self-interest.
These positions on the relationships between economics and human identity
also shape his understanding of the poor. Amartya Sen, in his Introduction to a
recent edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments, makes clear how Smith differed from
his counterparts that we have engaged thus far both in his concern for the poor and
workers, and in his egalitarian understanding of humanity. As noted earlier, Smith was
deeply concerned about poverty and inequality, and the punitive measures in the Poor
Laws, such as the Settlement Act. He advocated for public interventions on behalf
of the poor such as free education and poverty relief, and was always attuned to the
ways in which economic practices worked against the underdog and the workingman,
noting, for example, “When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen,
it is always just and equitable, but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the
masters.”115
More strikingly, Smith voices repeatedly a strong sense of the equality of persons
regardless of class or nationality (and perhaps even gender), tracing inequalities to
social rather than natural causes, what Sen refers to as his “strong epistemic inclination
to see people everywhere as being essentially similar.”116 Rather than seeing nature as
contributing between differences in the status of persons, Wealth of Nations suggests
that the difference “between a philosopher and a common street porter . . . seems to
arise not so much from nature as from habit, custom, and education.”117 Elsewhere
he elaborates on the stark differences in the living and working conditions between
“persons of rank and fortune,” who have leisure for educating and improving
themselves, and “the common people.” The latter have no time or resources for leisure,
and must start working “as soon as they are able to work” and therefore are bereft of
any opportunity for self-improvement “or even to think of anything else.”118
This egalitarian sensibility extends for Smith globally. He was deeply critical of the
oppressive actions of the East India Company in India, especially with regard to the
devastating famine of 1770; and he defended the Irish against British derision.119 As
Sen notes:
192 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

Smith is also incensed by the presumption of superior racial endowments of the

white man, and at one stage even bursts into unconcealed wrath: “There is not a
negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of
magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of
conceiving.”120

Thus, Smith differs in many ways from his contemporaneous counterparts. He remains
altogether more teleologically oriented, where persons are integrated into communities,
ordered not merely to self-interest, but to the happiness that comes from being integral
parts of larger communities. He is not just a virtue ethicist because he draws on virtues
as concepts, but because he champions—over against Hume and the Modern Moral
theorists—a number of crucial components of the virtue tradition. Where Hume and
Kant are primarily concerned with finding the ground of moral knowledge—Hume
grounding it in the senses of pleasure and pain, Kant in the reasoned categorical
imperative—Smith seems to have grounded moral knowledge in self-knowledge,
namely, temperance, cultivated by the reasoning of the impartial spectator. He does
not propose a test of right or wrong by appealing to some categorical imperative, or to a
moral calculus of the greatest good for the greatest number of people. He is concerned
with the one who would judge the goods possible on practical considerations over
against a scientifically derived set of rules, with an eye to communal flourishing for
others and self-flourishing in the midst of community.121 He would do so using the
habits of the virtues cultivated in community that at the same time move one toward
that the telos of friendship and community. In this, he is rather more like Aristotle
at the end of book 9 of the Nicomachean ethics, or Hannah Arendt in The Human
Condition. Humans only truly flourish as social animals.
If all these scholars are correct in their readings of Smith’s corpus an important
question arises: how has he become identified with the modern Homo economicus?
Here we turn to his relationship with David Hume. As Fleischacker notes, “Smith’s
thought circles around Hume’s: there is virtually nothing in either TMS or WN without
some sort of source or anticipation in Hume, although there is also almost no respect in
which Smith agrees entirely with Hume.”122 Marie Martin concurs: “For anyone familiar
with Hume’s moral theory, Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments reveals unmistakable
signs of the profound influence of Hume, not only in the views expressed, but in the
examples used, the descriptions of sentiments and in the criticisms of rival theories.”123
Where does he agree with Hume? First, Smith follows Hume in general in tracing
moral judgment, ultimately, to feelings. As Fleischacker notes:

The impartial spectator is supposed to be free of partial feelings—feelings that

depend on a stake it might have in a dispute, or on blind favoritism or dislike for
one party or the other—but it is not supposed to be free of feelings altogether, nor
to reach for a principle it might derive from reason alone, independent of feeling.124

Thus, according to Fleischacker, sentiment is the first step in a process of moral

deliberation. Sentiment is the glue that one has that binds a community, one to another.
Smith and Hume are in agreement here.
 
Bacon, Smith, and the End of Virtue 193

But at the same time, Hume and Smith diverge in two ways, particularly on the role
of utility and relatedly on the teleological nature of human being. As Fleischacker notes:
“none of Smith’s predecessors had developed such an essentially social conception of
the self. Hutcheson and Hume both see human beings as having a natural disposition
to care about the good of their society, but for Smith, all our feelings, whether self-
interested or benevolent, are constituted by a process of socialization.”125 Sentiment
can be cultivated; it is not merely a fact of human feeling as it is for Hume, or merely
biological in origin, the way that sentiment, moral intuition, or moral tastes are for Zak
or Haidt. In short, Smith’s anthropology is much more balanced between the faculties
of sympathy and reason, while also participating in and ordered to the social.
Thus, even though feelings or sentiments are starting points for moral judgment,
they are not merely instincts, originating in some amoral observable fact without moral
import, nor are moral feelings unmediated by the impartial spectator. For Smith, over
against Hume, there is no is-ought distinction in human nature. Some sentiments
are better than others (oughts—we should have them) and we must “learn to acquire
new sentiments or alter the ones we have.”126 Thus, sentiment—whether positive (as
in feelings of love) or negative as in feelings of repulsion—can be deceptive, and must
be refined through deliberation—a top-down control. One must judge the feelings in
order to know whether one ought to act on those feelings, for surely an initial sentiment
of love toward another is not sufficient to make an action morally legitimate; nor is
repulsion sufficient to know whether one ought to overcome repulsion in order to act
morally. Thus, we learn when to trust sentiment and when not to trust it. We are not
bandied about, thrown to and fro by sentiment. Sentiment can be educated toward
some good for Smith. Therefore, Smith and Hume diverge most significantly on the
question of utility, for utility is derived from sentiment in Hume in a very different way
than in Smith.127
Marie Martin outlines these differences in detail, noting that their positions are
diametrically opposed. For Hume, utility was not only the “foundation of the chief
part of morals,” but because sense impressions are disconnected from reason, the
calculative work of utility is more disjointed.128 Yet for Smith, utility is never the source
of virtue and rarely the source of moral approbation. Insofar as the faculty of sympathy
works in concert with the faculty of reason and the impartial spectator, his account is
more holistic, nuanced, and textured.129
Moreover, it is teleological as well. Hume following Bacon eschews teleology. Yet
for Smith, as Martin notes, “the natural world is ordered into a system of final causes
by a benevolent Providence.” All of nature, including human nature, has “some end or
purpose.”

Nature’s “economy” is such that we are endowed with no principles of thought or

action with any tendency to conflict with our welfare unless the same principle
has an even greater tendency to promote it. “This benevolent and all-wise Being
can admit into the system of his government no partial evil which is not necessary
for the universal good.” Smith’s famous economic doctrine of the hidden hand,
the beneficial but unintended consequences of individuals pursuing their private
interests, is merely one instance of his more general theory of final causes.130
194 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

The invisible hand, however, is not so much the invisible force of economic law, as it is
the hand of Providence. In fact, Lisa Hill argues that the logic of Wealth of Nations makes
no sense without an appeal to a divine being.131 Blanchard notes that although Smith did
not write as a theologian, his work is deeply influenced by his Scottish Calvinist tradition.
He uses the terms “God” and “Nature” interchangeably, but he is no Deist; instead,
behind his language “he has a particular being in mind who works to orchestrate human
happiness.”132 Thus, human economic activity—as well as human life as a whole—is
ordered to some good, a good that exceeds the individual good being pursued, and not
merely the communal/social good. It is gratuitous in its excess and gives rise to common
goods. Smith’s world is an ordered world, a world ordered and accompanied by God, a
world order to goods and the flourishing of humans and creation.
This returns us to McCloskey’s earlier comments about the centrality of love or
benevolence in Smith’s corpus. There can be little doubt that Part VI of the Theory of Moral
Sentiments is a celebration of the virtues of propriety, prudence, and benevolence.133
Added to the final edition in 1790, scholars understand Part VI to be a direct rejoinder to
Hume; in Part VII, he argues that all systems of morality can be reduced to one of these
three virtues. Though he does not state it outright, he presents his system of morality—
born in sympathy and in the judgment of the impartial spectator—as grounded in the
virtue of benevolence, a form of the theological virtue of charity.
Might it be, thus, that at heart, Smith’s anthropology is a theological anthropology—
an understanding of the human person based on the benevolent, charitable,
imaginative Creator, who always stands in sympathetic relationship with creation?
That is a longer argument to be made at another time. What seems clear is that Smith’s
economics are animated by his vision of the human, his anthropology. While Smith
begins in the affectation of sympathy, something that emerges in sense experience, the
reasonableness of the impartial spectator sits in judgment. Moreover, the affectation of
sympathy is what binds one to one’s community, which grows ever-wider from family,
friends, neighbors, outward to the whole cosmos. As he notes in Theory of Moral
Sentiments, one has for his own desire some feeling and hope for the flourishing of all
of the beings of creation. Smith’s anthropology is fuller, richer, and very different from
Hume’s, which, as we have shown, animates modern economic theory and the moral
anthropological models of the neuroscience of morality.

From Bacon to Becker: The Artifactual

Being of a Social Imaginary
Our narrative has now found its genesis. Part II has traced how the three intertwined
“sciences” at the heart of the neuroscience of morality—economics, the social sciences,
and ethics—emerged like dendrites from one animating center, Bacon’s empiricist
power ontology. Having cut natural philosophy off from final causes, Bacon supplied a
post hoc telos for the work of all modern quests after knowledge, a telos which appeared
anthropologically centered—the noble project of relieving the human estate—but
which in fact aimed at the welfare of the social body, the new Atlantis. Redescribing
 
Bacon, Smith, and the End of Virtue 195

power as the final common denominator for all motion, including moral and political
motion needed to build this new polis free of suffering and misery, Bacon tethered the
modern sciences to power, worked visibly upon the bodies of the poor from Mandeville
forward and then, in the twentieth century, invisibly upon all human bodies.
Where Bacon failed to ground the human in his natural philosophy of the new
Atlantis, Hume stepped in. Hume would supply what we might call the “scientific”
ground of anthropology in “empirical” moral senses. Yet, one would need to be careful;
just as formal and efficient causes in natural philosophy were now mere inferences, so
also would be appeals to utility and virtue, the latter of which we discover is simply
artifice. For Hume, we can say what is the case, but inferring the good beyond senses
of pleasure and pain is a bridge too far. One cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.”
Deploying Bacon’s power ontology, for Hume, wealth was the power—the agent of moral
and political motion—that transformed theoretical freedom into actual freedom, a
theme that the Chicago School in its various mutations will take up. Such freedom—and
therefore, moral agency—is only available to those in possession of this means of power.
Bentham—armed with Hume’s empiricism, Malthus and Ricardo’s empirically
derived theories, and Bacon’s vision for engineering a political economy that could
free the human from the bondage of misery to become self-directed moral agency—
synthesizes all the pieces and movements that give rise to the positive social sciences.
The result is psychology, economics, and the ethology or moral theory critiqued by
MacIntyre. Mill, while furthering the positivist arm of science, warns that his model
for the human actor is too reductive. Yet his warning is brushed aside. Knight, picking
up Hume’s “is” and “ought” distinction, drives a further wedge between empirical
economics and any moral reality that cannot be reduced to his economized model of
human action. Friedman employs this fully economized anthropology to subtly invert
the interrelationship of economics and politics, championing a vision in which society
serves the economy, with capital as the “spring” or driver of both human freedom and
human moral activity. The poor—so visibly animating Bacon through Mill—have
been more aggressively marginalized, siloed off under the aegis of psychology and
other sciences aimed at controlling the antisocial. Becker and company, accepting the
economic model as exhaustive of human action and accepting the Humean sentiments
as foundational for human action, completes the circuit: the freedom previously
stripped from the poor is now, likewise, stripped from those with means, who have
become mere animals who act under the sway of inducements. Thus, we arrived at
Homo capitalus—the neuroscientific model of the human actor, which animates the
neuroscience of morality.
 Concluding Un(neuro)scientific Postlude
Between Beasts and Angels

There is no doubt that science is becoming a servant of politics and industry, to the
great detriment of its cultural mission.1

We return once again to Ludwik Fleck. No more can scientific “cognition be

comprehended as a function of two components only, as a relation between the
individual subject and the object.”2 Indeed there are three components: “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 elemental power.”3
We began this study by unveiling the neuroscientific narrative of morality, probing
what its questions really are about, what motivates and shapes its quests to know the
nature of human moral action. Specifically, we asked this emerging thought-community
about its “discovery” of the neuroscience of morality. We have excavated and attempted
to articulate what would have to be believed such that the claims of neuroscience about
morality could be true. We have found that these claims presume certain beliefs about
the essence of morality, about the nature of the human animal, about what matters in
its surroundings, and about the role of science and the state in actualizing this vision
of the human person and its actions (moral anthropology). And we have shown how it
is that the sciences—biological, human, social, moral—have from the beginning of the
modern era worked together with the state in order to establish these beliefs as “true.”
Throughout this process, we have watched as these various philosophical-cum-
scientific thought-communities enabled society at large to imagine itself along the
lines of the abstract being proposed in their scientific models. We have also watched as
this social imaginary has reciprocated, seeding the thought-community of the sciences
with particular assumptions about morality, the human person, the community, and
the role of the state that have inchoately yet ineluctably shaped their quests. Indeed,
science generally and the neuroscience of morality particularly do not so much discover
a world independent of human thinking, as much as they enable particular aspects
of the world to come into relief. Thus, the most recent mutation Homo capitalus—
an artifact of scientific models of human behavior—has not been discovered by the
neuroscience of morality. Rather, this figment of the social imaginary that is neoliberal
biopolitical economy is so deeply interwoven into our culture that it inevitably shapes
the neuroscientific imagination. Unsurprisingly, then, the neuroscience of morality
subsequently “discovers” in the human brain and genome what it had already imagined
 
Concluding Un(scientific) Postlude 197

the human animal to be, as if looking in a mirror. Merging science with the desire
to relieve the human estate, the neuroscience of morality becomes an engineering
project—a bio-political-economic project of molding real, living human animals into
its image.
But this is not simply a twenty-first-century aberration. Rather, we have ended
our study showing how the seeds for this image of the human were planted at the
beginning of the modern project. Early modern philosophy set us off on a trajectory
of scientific questions—a scientific quest—that has arrived at this abstract being, this
figment of our imagination, this artifact of economic models. Due to the way in which
these thinkers were embedded in their own social imaginaries, the source of modern
notions of moral behavior has long been assumptions about economic behavior.
Once posited as “the hidden side of everything,” the economization of morality was
complete. And through biopolitical economy, these forebears of the neuroscience of
morality engaged politics and economics to alter the bios of real, living human persons
to fit the polis that they desired.
To this point, we have told the story in reverse, as we have traced the genealogy
of this mutant person naturalized by the neuroscientific narrative of morality. In this
postlude, we bring the strands of the story together, reprising it in brief and highlighting
the key conceptual moves and questions that catalyzed the various mutations of this
artifactual being. For it is those moves that will help us identify the central questions
that remain for us all going forward: what might be required for a different—and more
human—science? Where might we find a thicker moral anthropology that grounds
an account of morality that truly promotes human flourishing? And what sort of
community—and economics— might be sufficiently creative and refractory without
being dangerous to the well-being of real people?
In short, how might a more philosophically sophisticated science—that
understands itself as a product of a social history—reimagine its cultural mission?
Is a more human science possible, a science that understands human thinking to be
entangled both with communities and with the objects of its inquiry? Would not such
a science understand that one of its limitations is human thinking itself? Surely the
scientist—the subject that seeks to know the object of an enquiry—is entangled at
various levels of his or her thought-community; there is no god’s-eye view of the
object, no view from nowhere, among a thought-community. How might scientists
become more conscious of their thought-communities and how these both enable
and constrict their thinking? After all, our thought-communities not only enable us
to see our objects of inquiry better; they also blind us to other dimensions of our
investigations. In short, only by understanding how we are entangled with particular
social histories will we be able to see how deeply we are already committed to a wide
variety of beliefs, especially to a specific anthropology emergent from particular
thought-communities. Should this anthropology not be critically engaged? What
if scientists refused a reductive, economized anthropology? Would their science
then not only be more human and more humane, but more honest? Science, which
aspires to know and understand the world, must first know and understand itself.
In turning the critical lens on itself, we end by reflecting on the possibilities for a
more human science, one that admits upfront that we are always engaged in a moral
198 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

anthropology and that our practice of science is always enmeshed in a thick nexus of
social imagination.

Naturalizing an Artifactual Being

Thus, we asked at the outset: what would have to be believed about the nature of
morality in order for morality to be studied scientifically? The account emerging from
the neuroscientific literature barely resembled more traditional understandings of
morality. Gone are rules and principles, obligations and practices, means and ends,
and goods and evils. Occasionally, the neuroscientific narrative of morality retained
the language of virtue from the tradition, but in the end, it preserved only a vestige
of it, a simulacrum. Rather, we found that vice was no longer a category of behavior
but had instead been subtly embedded in lists of clinical symptoms, which coalesced
into a diagnosis, namely, antisocial personality disorder. We found a similar mélange
of clinical and traditional language in the neuroscience of wisdom, discovering not
surprisingly that virtue was simply the flipside of the diagnostics of vice—reduced
to prosocial attitudes and behaviors. Yet here, there was freer play with language of
wisdom, happiness, gratitude, and comprehensive lists of traditional virtues weaving
through the literature. The neuroscientific popularizers suggest that they had
“discovered” the sources of traits deemed prosocial—care, harm, fairness, loyalty, love,
and more—while also deploying language of psychopathy and antisocial behaviors,
with heavy emphasis on the importance of prosocial behaviors that create social
cohesion, exemplified par excellence in capitalist markets. Beyond this simple slippage
between traditional virtue language and clinical proxies, we also saw a puzzling moral
inversion where a few manifesting sociopathic tendencies were esteemed, admired,
and valued—as long as they were economically successful.
This led us to a series of questions: who is the person engaged in these actions?
How did “economics”—a domain that did not exist in its own right prior to the early
twentieth century—come to be so central to the neuroscience of morality? How was
it that this facet of social life came to define what matters in the surroundings or
environment of human actors? And whence the broadly held assumption that those
whose biology is defective must come under some sort of control, be it social, political,
economic, or biological?
The easy answer was that the neuroscientific narrative of morality is the heir of
David Hume—a debt that the field transparently and gladly acknowledges. But as we
dug deeper, we discovered that the roots of this narrative encompass far more than
Hume. We now see how the story we have recounted—from Bacon to Becker—has
shaped the ways that our broader social imaginary and, therefore, the neurosciences
understand the work of science, the human person, what is most important about
human behavior (morality), and its own role in collaborating with political agents in
fitting persons into this imaginary.
Thus we saw that the story begins not with Hume, but rather with Francis Bacon
and the particulars of his social context. Bacon reframed the scientific endeavor,
introducing a mutation into what was then “moral philosophy,” positing an empiricism
 
Concluding Un(scientific) Postlude 199

that bracketed final causes in order to obtain better knowledge about the nature of
reality. True knowledge could now only be known through empirical observation,
particularly through the work of experiments. In bracketing formal causes because
they bias observation, Bacon unmoored material, efficient, and formal causes from a
moral order. Connections between his new work of knowledge and the moral order
had to be re-established and linked to human purposes. The human will filled the
vacuum, with knowledge now directed to a single end: relieving the human condition
of all hardship. Captured in his vision of Bensalem, moral philosophers—who will
variously become natural, social, and ethical scientists over the next three hundred
years—were recast as those charged to collaborate with political processes to build the
new Atlantis.
Whence this new telos? It cannot be entirely incidental that as Bacon reimagined
the pursuit of scientific knowledge, a burgeoning social problem was roiling his
milieu—growing masses of impoverished people, dislocated, starving, living in misery.
From his position as chancellor to Elizabeth I, he sought to bring some relief to this
crisis. Consolidating a century-long attempt to address this symptom of emergent
capitalism, the 1601 Act for the Relief of the Poor lessened more overt, public, bodily
punishments and continued certain medieval commitments—for example, that caring
for the poor was an obligation of Christian charity and that the center of such charity
should be the local parish. Yet by codifying such efforts into law, the Act embodied and
empowered new and emerging “truths” about the poor—that some were “deserving”
of public assistance because they could not work; that those who were able to work
did not deserve public support; that whether deserving or not, their sexuality had to
be controlled and that the most appropriate place for the poor was an institutional
setting—an almshouse for the deserving, a workhouse for the undeserving, and a
house of correction for those who refused to work. For a primary impetus of the Act
was not simply charity; it was to remove the threat posed by the poor to the civil order.
Forthwith, moral philosophy, the natural sciences, and the social sciences are all
heirs to Bacon and the Baconian context. Mandeville, too, sees the telos of moral
philosophy as building the new Atlantis, in his case “Publick Benefit.” This end is not
achieved by empirically harassing knowledge from nature nor by the charitable relief
of human misery. The poor, in fact, vex Mandeville, not only the undeserving poor
who resist being commodified into the abstraction of labor, but equally poor orphans
and hardworking craftspeople who, regardless of their efforts, are conceptualized
and castigated as—in their very essence—creatures of sloth and vice. Standing at the
birth of capitalism, Mandeville has no place for pity or compassion, and traditional
virtues—such as even honesty and thrift—will run an enterprise into the ground. The
public good will be achieved, in Mandeville’s myth, only by self-interested pursuit of
prosperity. Where Bacon severed knowledge from the moral order and tethered it to
a new telos, Mandeville takes the next step—using that telos to invert the moral order
itself. In his new regime, what were formerly considered virtues are now vices, and
former vices—especially envy, greed, and self-interest—mutate into virtues, a morality
that for all practical purposes is available only to those with means.
Mandeville’s inversion was operationalized by Hume, who radicalized Baconian
empiricism. Where Bacon had bracketed final causes, now even formal causes are
200 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

suspect, far removed as they are from sense impression and derived by speculation on
material and efficient causes. Thus, for Hume, Bacon’s post hoc moral justification of
knowledge was unmoored from sense experience. Following empiricism to its logical
conclusion, morality would need to be grounded in sense impression, in the experiences
of pleasure and pain. The only moral principle derived from sense impression and the
calculus of pain and pleasure is utility. Utility, thus, becomes the sum total of morality.
In a deft sleight of hand, the conventional virtues are now simply those habits that have
been artificially fabricated post hoc in order to advance utility. They do not themselves
derive from a natural order.
But if not rooted in the materiality of nature, they are for Hume rooted in a
materiality—that of property. Hume’s account of justice, benevolence, utility, and
ethics is predicated on an economic vision—one of a fear-inducing scarcity which is
the primal source of pain and the right to property which provides a bulwark, against
that pain—at least for “the industrious.” Justice is reduced to the protection of property;
benevolence toward the poor is, ultimately, socially harmful. In fact, charity enslaves the
poor; freedom is only theoretical for those without money, the means of enacting their
own freedom, and charity makes it worse. In the end, as with Mandeville, in Hume’s
moral psychology, the traditional virtues and vices are inverted by possession-based
social standing. Thus, Hume—that forebear of twenty-first-century ethics, economics,
and neuroscience—subtly embedded the emergent economics of eighteenth-century
Britain at the very heart of his moral system.
The plight of the poor did not go unnoticed after Hume’s death, as Adam Smith
continued to reflect in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. In fact, new legislation for the
care of the poor was introduced in 1795, but it did not pass. It set off a conversation
between those with a more traditional notion of charity and the empiricism of the
radical reformers Joseph Townsend, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and Jeremy
Bentham. Industry, not charity, becomes the chief virtue. But as Malthus “discovered,”
overpopulation of the poor meant they would outrun their food source and increase
their own and the public woe. Thus, they must learn to control their lust, delay their
marriage and childbearing; they must be motivated to work, to curb their propensity to
sloth—then, they too could rise to the level of the truly free, and therefore, potentially
the truly virtuous person. From this point forward, a bifurcated human agent emerges—
with some persons reimagined as labor and others as free—abstracted beings whose
moral and ontological status is defined relative to their access to wealth. What was
needed was a political economics, one that could control the vices of the poor and at
the same time transform them into prosocial producers for the wealth of the state. If
the poor cannot control their bios, the result is disastrous for the state; if their moral
tastes can be shaped appropriately by the Panopticon of the political economy, the polis
wins. Thus is born a biopolitical economy.
This agent is industrialized by Bentham. Intoxicated with Hume’s skeptical
empiricism, Bentham truly believed that all government prior to Hume was making
decisions in the absence of true, empirical knowledge. Accepting Hume’s claim that
the twin sovereigns of human behavior were pleasure and pain, he believed that these
levers could be operationalized to advance human industry and morality. He adds
to the Hume–Malthus foundation the belief that the poor could be lifted out of the
 
Concluding Un(scientific) Postlude 201

un-freedom of their poverty with the assistance of his principles of legislation and
morals, reshaping existing government institutions with the utility-based springs of
action that could, at last, grind rogues honest and idle men industrious. Equipped with
the right scientific facts, via Ricardo (the iron law of wages) and Malthus (the law of
population), he envisaged building the great society that would elevate people from the
enslavement of poverty to the true freedom of wealth.
Thus, Hume’s empiricism reshaped moral, political, and social philosophy—with
the emerging subfield of economics—grounding them in a new positivism. After the
momentum created by Bentham’s radical reform movement, each is transformed into
a science. Just as physics and chemistry emerge from natural philosophy in this period,
psychology, sociology, and economics emerge from moral and political philosophy. Yet
they all remain deeply intertwined. The bifurcated, economized anthropology shaped,
for example, the emerging natural science (or was it a social science) of phrenology,
finding in skull bumps the vices of the poor and the virtues of the rich. Moreover,
from Bacon to Bentham, wealth became deeply enmeshed with the emerging
understanding—the imaginary—of the state. It equally shaped the imagination of
ethics. Continuing, but again mutating, the long-standing connection between ethics
and the polis, the emerging moral/social/economic scientists allied themselves with
political processes in order to ensure that individual human behavior serves the ends
of “the wealth of nations.”
John Stuart Mill softened Bentham’s mechanical science of society and brought a
form of rationality back to his forebears’ pleasure-seeking actor. Yet in attempting to
extend his father’s psychology to the science of character—ethology—he cemented
Hume’s radically empiricized, economized philosophy into the twin paradigms of
utilitarianism and what others would mockingly call Homo economicus. A towering
intellect, Mill knew that the models he was generating in ethology and in economic
science were inadequate to the reality of human agents and human action. Yet the
freedom Mill championed was for those with the economic means to rationally
maximize their utility; the poor—though to be assisted by the state—remained unfree,
so unfree, in fact, that the government should control their reproduction. Hume’s
bifurcated anthropology, intertwined with utility, grounded in property, advances.
And despite his misgivings, in giving shape to this scientific artifact “economic man,”
Mill inadvertently set the trajectory for the twentieth century.
Mill’s Homo economicus provided Frank Knight with the scientific model, par
excellence, for establishing economics as an empirical science once and for all. Like
Mill, Knight seemed to truly wish to avoid reducing persons to economics; but instead,
he completed the process by intentionally severing the science of economics from the
moral philosophy he deeply knew still needed to be present. Economics could only
discover the “is” of human action; the “ought” must be derived elsewhere. Knight,
who would never have wanted to unmoor the facts of economics from the values of
morality, nonetheless facilitated the process.
Yet Knight stands as an outlier from both his forebears and heirs in one key respect:
he has no use for the springs of actions. In severing economics from ethics, he equally
sought to disconnect it from social policy. Here Knight forwards half of the Baconian
vision, forging an economics devoted to unearthing the laws, the formal causes, of
202 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

economic reality. Scientific economic knowledge ought not, for Knight, be re-tethered
to an imported, post hoc final cause. Indeed, the human condition must be relieved,
but for Knight, this is the work of other disciplines.
This distance from social policy might be one reason that, for Knight, the poor
are suddenly absent from our narrative. Of course, Knight is working in a different
context—no wrangling over the Poor Laws in the United States. And as wealthy
and poor alike are devastated in the Great Depression, long-standing canards about
the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor are momentarily sidelined until after the
Korean War, neoliberals standing as a minority voice. But equally, Knight stands at
a moment—and facilitates—the descent of ethics into emotivism. For insofar as
anthropology is now fully economized, to unmoor ethics from economics is to cut
any last threads between ethics and reason, a loose-end Mill valiantly tried to hold
onto. Morality, now wholly and solely circumscribed by bodily experiences of pain and
pleasure, ironically becomes, at once, utterly subjective but also now only discoverable
by the new fields with jurisdiction over the human—the biological and social sciences.
Where economics can discover the “is” of human action (i.e., what humans do) it will
be for psychology, sociology, and biology to harass nature more thoroughly to discover
the internal causes of human action, the ultimate substrate upon which the springs
of action can be worked. And the poor, sequestered in the successors of Bentham’s
institutions—mental hospitals, prisons, or racially segregated communities (of low
SES)—become the subjects of such research.
And so, Homo economicus won the day—only one half of Hume’s bifurcated
anthropology advances through twentieth-century European and US neoliberalism.
From this point forward, economics and ethics alike presume a vision of the human
person who has the material capacity to choose between goods. Now, armed with
only pleasure and pain, Knight’s heirs would derive a full political economy. Milton
Friedman completed it. For Friedman, Homo economicus was not simply a reductive
scientific model—he was the true nature of the rational, utility-maximizing being,
advanced as part of a larger project to subtly—or invisibly?—allow economics to
become the dominant form of political reason. Freedom is founded in economic
success; one’s own moral good is secured in economic success. Economic success both
enabled one’s moral vision to be exercised and was the sign that one had achieved full
moral agency. For Friedman, economic rationality is where the individual actor would
assert, not merely his tastes, but his full moral vision.
As for Mill and Knight, Friedman believed Homo economicus retained some
freedom and agency in economic success/moral action. With Gary Becker, however,
the un-freedom of the bifurcated other half of human nature now subsumes the whole.
Becker simply elevates the animality of Mandeville’s bees and Hume’s moral sentiments
over any form of rationality, reimagining the traditional telos of virtue—happiness—as
a mathematical utility function and vices (such as crime and addiction) as virtues as
long as they generate a sufficiently elastic demand curve. As for Hume, virtues and
vices here are artificial names for different aspects of utility. Becker’s engagement with
moral concepts evolves over his career, culminating in the claim that the happiness
function and other “moral” (economic) behaviors are rooted in human biology. But
Becker shifts the location of the invisible hand, now embedding it in human biology,
 
Concluding Un(scientific) Postlude 203

enabling economics to become the new form of reason simpliciter and to become
the ontological category for the human person. Biological forces, biological desires,
intuitions, and tastes are what drive the human animal. And knowing the bio-psycho-
social levers of these drives, the role of economics is to guide public policy to enable
society to encourage behaviors conducive to the endless furthering of the market,
endless profit for those with property. The economization of the person is complete.
Human actors are now subject to the hidden side of everything—biological and social
powers and forces—of which they are simply voluntary but unfree conduits. Thus, with
Becker, the trajectory begun with Bacon is complete: Homo economicus has reached its
terminal mutation: it has become Homo capitalus.
Becker and his lineage lie at the core of the neuroscientific thought-community.
The popularizers of the neuroscience of morality are correct in demurring that their
systems have left Homo economicus behind, for what the narrative offers is an apologia
for Becker’s even more abstract, less rational, and less free, artifact. Put differently, in
the neurosciences, one finds an anthropological mutation, where capital—a force in the
power ontology—has become the ontological category with human as its modifier. This
completes the trajectory Polanyi names, where now not only those who “labor” but the
human in toto has been transformed into a commodity. It is an artifact most recently
mutated by neoliberalism but bequeathed to us by early modern thinkers in their quest
to develop scientific models that then set in motion a cascade of transformations in
how we think about the nature of human persons and the nature of their actions. This
imagined abstract being stands-in for the real human being. But via the rhetoric of the
popularizers with the backing of neuroscience, many believe it to be true and allow
themselves to be reshaped in its image.
Zak, who identifies as a neuroeconomist, marries neuroscience and economics. The
invisible hand of the market is the moral molecule oxytocin. Oxytocin provides not
only an evolutionary basis for markets, but also a defense of markets as necessary for
the promotion of group happiness—the overarching goal of utility. Via oxytocin, which
binds people together, Zak envisions a world in which all are wealthy and happy in the
market milieu. Like Becker, Zak has little space for rational choice, but instead finds
humans act on things that they find pleasurable. Thus, Zak has a biological basis—that
is to say, a bottom-up basis—on which to describe the “up” of human behavior and
to narrate the neuroscientific basis of social organization. By increasing that “spring
of action” oxytocin, which biologically promotes the greatest pleasure for the greatest
number of people, the neuroeconomics can help engineer society while relieving the
human estate.
We see this equally within the esoteric thought-community of the neuroscience
of morality, where those like Gianaros and Manuck, Caspi, Sadeh, and others seek to
correlate antisocial traits and low socioeconomic status. Low SES/poverty affects genes,
which confer maladaptive brain states, which leads to bad or antisocial behaviors—
again, a bottom-up causality in which poverty via biology makes antisocial persons. And
in what does SES consist? Hollingshead’s measure, as with most of its analogs, assays
essentially two variables: marital status and employment—or sex and idleness, the twin
vices of Malthusian theory and the Benthamite Panopticon. Thus, the neuroscientific
narrative of morality clinically operationalizes and measures what Townsend and
204 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

Malthus imagine as determinative in the human environment, a trajectory which

sprang from Hume’s fragmented anthropology—in which the poor remained locked
in their beastial un-freedom and only the achievement of wealth gave one actual
freedom. Alongside Hollingshead, and catalyzed by the methodological individualism
of emerging neoliberalism, the catecholamine hypothesis of behavioral disorders met
with SES to provide further scientific backing for the Malthusian naturalization of the
connection between poverty and vice.
But not only do politics, economics, and morality emerge from the (socio)biological.
Behind these studies an assumption reigns: antisocial (anti-economic) persons disrupt
the social fabric, diminishing the flourishing of all. Although correlating biology and
SES, our neuroscientists repeatedly aver that their quest is motivated by a desire to
get to the root of violent or criminal behaviors. They share a conviction that those
whose biology is defective must come under some sort of social control (Meyer and
Lindenberg, Viding and Frith, Raines, Walker’s Genetic Virtue Project), political
control (Harris, Gianaros, and Manuck), or economic control (Zak). Bios produces the
right polis—the market. If one cannot flourish or be happy in the naturalized market,
then there must be some biological problem.
Thus, the neuroscientific narrative of morality is an exercise in biopolitics. Harris is
very much like Bentham. Harris holds that society should apply social controls in order
to help those with antisocial behaviors to reform, and if they cannot be reformed, they
should be removed from—though not punished by—society. After all, they are victims
of defective biology. In fact, good political systems do just that; they create horizontal
social controls that override the failings of biology. For Harris, insofar as there is no
such thing as free will and since his proposed interventions aim at alleviating harms
and promoting pleasures of society as a whole, social control cannot be a violation
of human freedom. Yet, unlike Bentham and Hume, Harris believes that oughts are
scientifically discoverable. He has a modicum of a teleology that bucks the trends of all
is empiricist predecessors. Yet, Harris’s position does not mean that he departs from
that of Becker. For like them, he has no significant notion of free will, and any behavior
that is pleasure-inducing can be found in brain states. And while Harris does not call
pleasures addictions the way that Becker does, he does not propose a society built
toward pleasures, but rather a society regulated by government that might prevent
harms. Thus, government can promote certain behaviors over others, but the limit for
what gets one kicked out of society are behaviors that result in harm to others. Thus,
the regulative function of society is just to prevent people from causing unpleasurable
or painful experiences.
Haidt has a slightly more willful Homo capitalus. Armed with the knowledge
of moral foundations, Haidt believes we can tweak riders so they can better learn
how to control the elephantine emotions. His current projects are aimed at better
cooperation, and for this he notes that markets are miraculous, that corporations
are example of hives (Mandeville’s bees) united into one mind. Groups and group
cohesion are a product of our biology, and we would do well to have the proper
political economy to get humans to behave. Because serotonin levels or feelings of
moral disgust/moral anger/loyalty/love emerge automatically from the emotional
centers of the brain, and because the elephant is only marginally under the control
 
Concluding Un(scientific) Postlude 205

of the rider, little of moral behavior is under rational constraint or rational control.
If causation in behavior is mostly bottom up, and if there are errors in bottom-up
control, then one can only conclude that we must put into place social controls that
will encourage certain behaviors or eliminate others. As slaves to their passions and
to precognizant factors that shape behavior, humans thus must be ruled if they are
to flourish. Some sort of external political intervention from the polis is necessary
if markets cannot provide happiness in order to bring defective bios under control.
Social mechanisms ought to be put into place to control those biological mediated
behaviors, either through a market that promotes prosociality or through a politics
that restrains the elephantine human.
For Zak, control of behavior is through markets, which increase oxytocin, which
induces pleasure. In fact, market economics is the means to shape moral communities
without the drastic visible hand that Harris proposes. Once we understand how
oxytocin works individually and socially, we will know how to create a society that
is more prosperous and prosocial. Zak also has an evolutionary story of society that
supports his biologizing of economics. In a story that echoes Comte, the human animal
has successively transcended mother, family, clan, and religion, all of which are limited
by their ideologies and thus do not secure care for the whole of humanity, and has
now reached an apex where market economic relations created by neoliberal political
economy—because of the way that they increase oxytocin levels—provides the best
organization of society. He very much seeks to harness the power of the market. There
is a balance between the biological oxytocin-mediated factors that drive our behaviors
and the social organizational factors that markets produce. Oxytocin binds us together,
and market trade and fellow-feeling spur behaviors that will produce stable and
growing economies. Thus, capitalism is a biologically grounded social practice that
provides the (morally) best route to human flourishing, or so the story goes. Zak and
Haidt have translated their putatively descriptive programs into business schools,
promoting ventures that promise a monetary return on investment.
As the popularizers tell it, this vision settles a long-standing problem in
evolutionary biology, the putative anomaly of cooperative behavior aimed at group
rather than individual survival. Moreover, since the antisocial human cannot control
the biologically determined behavior, some sort of biopolitical control becomes
necessary. But whether overt or subtle, the political and economic order acts as the
regulative condition for the possibility of moral control of the animal emotions that
govern human behavior. What the neuroscience of morality has putatively discovered
is that moral behavior is really a species of political economy.
Thus, we have ended our study claiming that early modern philosophy set us off on
a trajectory of scientific questions—a scientific quest—that has arrived at this abstract
being, this figment of an economized imagination. This neoliberal lifeworld of WEIRD
countries is the social imaginary in which the thought-community of the neurosciences
finds a home. It is no wonder that their ideas about the nature of the human actor
and its morality resonate so deeply with the contemporary thought-community of
mainstream society. They share a common history, and common assumptions about
the nature that the scientists are on the quest to find. They understand each other
because they share a common imaginary.
206 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

Shaped by their own socioeconomic imaginary, the early modern thinkers we have
engaged likewise reimagined the human actor in order to alter the bios of real, living
human persons to fit the polis that was desired. The project to improve the human
condition came at great cost to the well-being of many. And today, as we have argued,
the offspring of this biopolitical-economic imaginary has built a city where antisocial
venture capitalists can flourish, while human persons, human nature, and nature are
consumed and destroyed. Does any hope remain for a more human or humane science?

Toward a More Human Science

The human is the animal that by nature is cultured. As Bernard Stiegler has pointed
out, the individual human stands in a mutually co-constituting relationship with its
culture.4 Neuroscientists are likewise cultured, standing in a mutually co-constituting
relationship with their culture. And the culture that makes neuroscience a possibility
is a culture tethered to neoliberalism. Shaping our social milieu, neoliberalism and the
neurosciences together are the most recent chapter in the longer story of the social
sciences, including economics and neuroscientific precursors, that has shaped how
moral behavior is imagined. Neuroscience—the fusion of neurobiology with the social
and psychological sciences—now stands as the human science, par excellence. Or, as
Amy Guttmann has claimed, it is the science that “strikes at the very core of who we
are.”5
But the neuroscience of morality is not alone in this. In fact, we would venture that
a similar story to the foregoing could be told about almost any contemporary scientific
endeavor. Given the nature of neoliberalism, it is unlikely that any contemporary
scientific domain is not likewise enmeshed in the neoliberal imaginary and does not,
therefore, participate in and further the biopolitical economy. Still, there is something
significantly different about neuroscience, because it claims knowledge of what it is to
be human. As such, the science-biopolitical complex as a whole “strikes at the core of
who we are”—it strikes out on a quest to discover who we are while simultaneously
striking into “nature” a particular image of the human, forging Homo capitalus into our
psyches and onto our bodies via the machinery of biopolitics.
What would it take for science to become un-enmeshed, to free itself from
economization and the politico-philosophical commitments of the neoliberal
age? What would it take to reorient it and to begin to move toward a more human
science? That this problem has been 400 years in the making renders the solution to
our situation extraordinarily complex. It is, after all, difficult to think outside of the
regnant social imaginary. But every quest begins with a first step, a first question. We
propose here that the first step is for those who seek knowledge—as individuals and as
collectives—to begin to reflect seriously on the activity of knowing in general and of
doing science in particular, to become more cognizant of what is required or makes it
possible for any one scientist to perceive or think about reality and the objects of her or
his inquiry, and for any particular scientific community to understand the deep ways
in which it is enmeshed with our contemporary culture on so many levels. And since
we do not limit our understanding of the word sciencia to those working in the “hard”
 
Concluding Un(scientific) Postlude 207

sciences, we direct this conversation equally to those in all fields on quests to elucidate
any knowledge related to the nature and identity of the human person—particularly
knowledge of morality. As such, we direct this conversation to philosophers, ethicists,
medical practitioners, social workers—all who engage in this quest on a theoretical or
practical level.
Our inquiry has been informed deeply by the work of Ludwik Fleck. Whereas Fleck
emphasized the communal dimensions that sustain these bodies of knowledge, Ernst
Cassirer (1874–1945), the neo-Kantian philosopher, adds another facet. He notes
the human animal is not like a bacterium or a slug or a lizard, merely responding to
signals of a glucose source or a threat source. Rather, the human animal is animalum
symbolicum, the symbolic animal. Reality is mediated to the human animal not merely
by physical signals, but rather by symbolic forms that exist within human culture.
Cassirer names five symbolic forms: mythology/religion, art, history, language, and
science. Every culture has something of each of these symbolic forms. Each form serves
a purpose. Every culture has its founding mythology, which creates its fundamental
beliefs about nature. For the ancient Greeks, it was the raw power of nature that is
represented by the gods. For the early moderns like Thomas Hobbes, it was the state
of nature, where human life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Mythology,
according to Cassirer, becomes religion when the moral dimension is added: life is this
way, but it ought to be another way. An example might be the founding myth of John
Rawls, who imagines human life as selfish, brutish, and prone to chance, and for whom
the founding morality (religion) is the mythology of the original position, where one
imagines that one is set behind the veil of ignorance, thus in a position to define the
forms of justice (morality) based on what would seem fair if one was in the lottery of
life. Science is a symbolic form that mediates reality through mathematics. One cannot
merely see a quark, but its existence is “observed” indirectly, and is mediated in (and
to) the human mind by mathematical symbols. Each symbolic form has work to do
in a culture, and it has a scope of activity that is appropriate to it. Tyranny emerges
when one symbolic form becomes the symbolic form by which all other symbolic
forms must be understood. Science has become the symbolic form par excellence for
contemporary WEIRD cultures, with modern neuroscience assuming pretensions of
explaining the very being of the human animal.
As we have argued, the quest of science is a human quest to know. The first step
toward a more human science, then, requires science to acknowledge that human
knowing is a social activity embedded in a cultural context. The activity of the scientist
who seeks to know is grounded and instantiated in not only their primary scientific
thought-community but a multitude of scientific and cultural communities—and,
indeed, within a social imaginary, which is itself inchoate and dynamic. So, for any
one scientist, all of these dimensions are brought to bear in both active and passive
elements that stand in the background but are yet in play to some degree. Some of these
elements will be recognized as biases, and there may be an attempt to control or to
mitigate them. Some of these elements will go unnoticed, shaping the questions asked
and the answers found, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. When
shared by a number of scientists, these elements constitute a thought-style that binds
them together and shapes the work they do, particularly their desire for knowledge and
208 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

the questions they pursue. Thus, what is possible for any one person within a science to
perceive and to think about reality is always in relation to some thought-community.
As particular scientists venture forward into the unknown, they not only draw on
the thought-style of their community but also engage their own creativity. Catalyzed
by both of these sources, they desire to know the unknown. This desire to know is
aspirational in two senses. First, it is particular—it asks particular questions made
possible by virtue of their thought-community. Second, it is teleological, which is to
say that the desire to know aims not only at what is but also at what ought to be. There
is a sense that we ought to know the truth. The scientist herself desires to move from
the place of what-is-known to bring what-is-unknown into being-known. The act of
venturing out beyond the limits of a thought-community, while always tethered to it,
is the act of imagination.
Scientists desire to know reality as it exists in itself, independent of any one
individual’s perception or knowledge of it. Yet, knowledge of reality is limited.
Moreover, scientists want to index their findings to a reality that exists independent of
any human observation—the “mind-independent object.” Yet, the object has its own
integrity, its own being. This unknown can emerge into the realm of what is known
only through symbolic mediation. Just as a scientist synthesizes a particular scientific
thought-style and her own creative aspirational desires to know, the knowledge of the
object of an investigation is a synthesis of the object’s integrity as a separate being and
the thought-style deployed. A particular scientists’ thinking is enabled by and at the
same time is limited by his or her community’s shared style of knowing. That style
both enables and disables perception, enabling us to see some aspects of an object,
but blinding us to others. So, knowing is the synthesis of a particular scientist asking
her particular questions about particular objects. As importantly, however, insofar
as some aspect of an object can be known, knowledge is possible because the mind-
independent being lends itself to the synthetic work of the scientist. Put differently,
what appears to be the case to any sociohistorical thought-community is provisional
at every level. It is provisional by virtue of the limitations of the thought-community,
by the limitations of the creativity and aspirations of the scientists, and by the fact that
the object may not lend itself to the particular kind of activity of a thought-community
and its scientist (or the scientist and her thought-community).
As discussed in the Prelude, findings of an individual scientist—new pieces of
knowledge—are then taken back for assessment by the thought-community, to see if
they confirm or resist settled opinions. If the findings do not conform to previously
held knowledge, the scientists have to ask, should the prior knowledge trump the new
evidence, or does the new evidence call into question what the thought-community
holds to be true? As we have seen, scientific thought-communities have been oriented
toward the practical, pursuing knowledge not only as a good in itself, but in order to
change reality. In other words, science has been more like engineering projects than
mere knowledge-projects. Thus, not only is a scientific thought-community aimed at
discovery, it is aimed at both the good of knowledge and the possible instrumental
goods that might flow forth from our having gained the knowledge. Thus, in some
sense, science is not only about constructing knowledge in conversation with a
thought-community, but it is often also about constructing social realities.
 
Concluding Un(scientific) Postlude 209

Thus, we can conclude a few things. As we have shown, not only is a thought-
community a moving and fluid thing as it seeks what is and what ought to be, but it
also both makes possible and delimits its members’ access to any object of inquiry.
Moreover, these objects are also fluid and dynamic, ever-changing not only in terms of
the individuality of the particular being that is observed but also in the evolutionary
sense of the fact that the object-being is itself moving along some historical trajectory—
it is becoming and/or unbecoming. Thus, the sociohistorical drive to take up with
reality is fluid and the being with which it takes up is fluid. Knowledge, then, is unstable
and is itself in motion.
In the case of knowledge, the truth of the matter is that we are ignorant, however
much we may know. All knowledge opens onto other knowledge. All scientific findings
open spaces for new scientific findings. We desire to no longer be in the state of
ignorance, because not being ignorant is good. But knowing is provisional and can never
fully sate the desire; thus, acknowledging this provisional nature of our own knowledge
is also good. To realize that the thing known is itself in a state of becoming (and/or
unbecoming), and thus that our state of knowledge is itself temporal, is also good. To
know is a good; to know that one does not and can never fully know is an essential good.
The scientific impulse then is a metaphysical moral enterprise. The human act of
knowing is teleological, aiming both at our best imagination of real goods and at what
we imagine ought to be. Yet once we are aiming at goods, at a telos, we have slipped into
the realm of the moral—for it is in relation to goods that virtues and vices are defined.
It is only once one knows the telos (and knowing the telos is itself imperfect) that one
can say what a virtue or vice is. Both are always aimed at goods, with the vices tending
to miss the goods at which one aims. Beyond this general character of science, the
neuroscience of morality explicitly seeks to discover the virtue of the human animal,
that feature that makes her unique among the animals. As best we can tell, the human
animal is the only animal that can say “it is good” or “it is good to know the reality of
my own being.” But no being can exhaustively know its own being, for she would have
to be outside herself in order to know herself.
But if we follow Bacon and sever the relationship between science—as the pursuit of
knowledge—and the telos of knowing (after all a telos is not known in the same way as a
rock), what follows is a trajectory that, given the particular history we have described,
has culminated in the biopolitical economy of neoliberalism. We have pointed to the
danger that comes with the social engineering project that is the biopolitical economy.
This imaginary has produced a worldwide system that has led to the destruction,
not only of other cultural imaginings, but of vast numbers of people and the very
ecological reality that produces all beings. The neuroscience of morality aims to be
the science par excellence, the scientific standard to which all other sciences and forms
of knowledge should bow. But it is simply channeling a grounding produced by the
regnant social imaginary. Between the scientist and the object of her investigation,
“there exists a third thing, the community.” As Fleck notes, and as we have argued,
the neuroscientific thought-community is “creative like the subject, refractory like the
object, and dangerous like an elemental power.”
The empiricist mantra, “there is nothing in the mind that is not first in the senses,”
is true in one sense.6 Inspired by Fleck, we have challenged the neuroscientific version
210 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

of this mantra. Wojciech Sady suggests that “Fleck reversed this maxim: there is
nothing in the senses that is not first in the mind.”7 In other words, the content of
a culture—the languages, ideas, and concepts—makes perception possible; it is that
through which all sense experience is interpreted. Thus, we receive our thought-styles,
which mediate reality through symbolic forms. In other words, our truth claims are a
synthetic and a participatory event. They are a synthesis between culture, which has
particular symbolic forms and are manifest in thought-communities, and the objects
of inquiry. Teasing apart what the researcher as an individual brings to the table, what
culture contributes in terms of its symbolic forms, and what reality brings to the table,
is a difficult, if not impossible, task. It is the cultural task of science to mediate reality to
the human mind in just this way. But because science—in the main—has forgotten its
social ground, it thinks it observes reality unmediated by the senses and unmediated
by the thought-styles existing in thought-communities. When science forgets this
cultural dimension of its project, it errs.
This then is the end of our story: the neuroscientist does not discover the mind-
independent nature of her nature, but she aesthetically and ethically must create it.
Because it has not recognized that human science is a cultural endeavor, and that
the culture itself must be rigorously interrogated, the result of the late modern,
neoliberal biopolitical economy has been aimed at control. If we hope to shift science
away from its biopolitical captivity, we must come to understand that it is a creative
and imaginative project that must always work from the unstable ground between
knowing and not knowing, recognizing that our knowing can never exhaust the
remainder of reality that escapes our findings. The objects we encounter are free;
they can only be ensnared so much; something of their being always slips between
the cracks of our attempts to know. As scientists, our attitude should be that of the
artist, who attempts to paint the light, but whose canvas only captures something of
the light, never the light itself. In fact, in our humility, we should come to recognize
that the net by which we know is not only constructed by our thought-community,
but that the net itself is constantly changing. And that which we seek to ensnare
with our nets is itself quite independent of the net and ever-changing. We must
become poets and mystics, humble and unsure, lest we harm that which we think
we have fully captured. We should proceed knowing that our projects are marginal
projects—beginning at the margins of a very particular, and in our case WEIRD,
thought-community—especially as we seek to claim some sort of power over those
beings that live at the margins of our world. The neoliberal biopolitical economy is
the moral landscape in which we now live; but it is possible to imagine human nature
differently.

Acedia or Joy: Fuga finis or the Freedom of Humility

In an essay on the context of medicine (another practically oriented science), Robert
Spaemann, a Catholic theologian said that without a good end, we become spiritually
lethargic. Spiritual lethargy was, in the history of the tradition of virtues, a vice—acedia.
 
Concluding Un(scientific) Postlude 211

To keep the ultimate end of the human being in mind requires the exercise of the
deeper powers of the human being. Without this exercise, hence, as a consequence
of the fuga finis, the human being aimlessly roams around, so to speak, in the
infinite quantity of what can be known.8

There is a kind of spiritual lethargy that emerges if there is no sense of the ultimate
end of the human, aspirational as it may be. How could one—how could a thought-
community—choose among so many possible ends? The flight of ends, the fuga finis,
means that we are doomed to wander about, directionless, pulled hither and yon by any
number of ends. With regard to knowledge, Spaemann means that we can be correct
provisionally about some domain of reality, one of “the infinite quantity of what can
be known,” without having discovered something that is true. In the spiritual malaise
of our time, we take one approach to knowledge—the modern scientific approach, one
approach in the infinite quantity of what is possibly known—to be the whole of what
can be known.
Given that knowledge as sociohistorically instantiated is provisional, and given
that the knower herself is creative and driving to sate her desire to know more, and
given that objects of knowledge are in fact in motion and ever becoming, there are
an infinite number of correct ways that one can take up with reality. That one can be
correct about various domains or through various strategies taken toward “the infinite
quantity of what can be known” does not mean that anything goes. Put differently,
while the economic sciences in some reductionistic circular way may occasionally
stumble upon a mathematical curve that appears to have predictive value if enough
variables and “externalities” are ignored, in our spiritual acedia, our culture takes this
sociohistorically derived economic theory as if it represents the totality of knowledge
of human behavior. We believe that this science has discovered our true nature, our
true being. And, to make matters worse, that totalizing vision is implemented via
policy to engineer a globalized WEIRD biopolitical economy that overruns nature,
including human nature, destroying it. In the spiritual lethargy of our time, we cannot
imagine our being otherwise. Acedia overwhelms imagination.
In the philosophical narrative we have told, Hume won the sociohistorical day in
that his thinking, grounded in the industrializing culture of his day, both produced
and conformed to the way that property, wealth, and freedom were linked together.
Yet, even in his own day, Adam Smith—whose name is invoked by the Humean culture
of biopolitical economy—took aim directly at Hume and proposed a very different
anthropology, consisting of a very different notion of community. Certainly, the human
is animal. Yet, its being stands out from its animality. Hume and the Humeans—of
yesterday and today—fail to recognize that this being exceeds both their thinking
about it and the sum of her parts. Desire, grounded in biological need, leaps beyond
the limitations of the body for congress with other beings.
Reality is mediated to human knowledge through intermediaries in the give and
take of thought. It finds its origin in the give and take of community. The poetic
imagination, which is also the scientific imagination, is not something that arises
simply in a brain, but also emerges from these mediations in the give and take of
individuality and community, combined with the give and take of symbolic forms—
212 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

morality and/or science, for example—emerges from communities of thinkers.

This poetic imagination engages in poeisis with the object of her questioning, and
represents it in the artifactual productions, say, pieces of art or journal science. This
poetic imagining is a god-like gift that exists well in excess of the body, the brain,
necessitating culture, language, community, in order for it to achieve a modicum of
knowledge. Knowledge exists, most certainly, but the being of our knowledge does not
exist in the same way that the being of the object exists. Thus, the human is outside
herself in knowing, which participates not only in her knowledge, but in the being of
the thing in reality. For an older social imaginary, this ability to be outside one’s body
in consciousness of the world outside made the human not merely animal, but angelic
or god-like.
While this language of “god-like” or “angelic” hails from an older social imaginary,
the imaginary of our day elevates one symbolic form—that of science—setting it apart,
making it sacred. At the dawn of the early modern period, the new social imaginary
bracketed that older social imaginary, where the human was not merely animal, but
closer to the angels, and creatively, imaginatively, and communally took up a different
way that we stand outside our own being, namely, the scientific attitude. Yet that
scientific attitude is no less a product of animality, community, symbolic form—
science. And by elevating that symbolic form above all others, by allowing it to establish
its mythologies and its moralities, that is to say, its religions, it has become scientistic.
In doing so, it has said, there can be no angels, ignoring the very angelic ground of its
own origins in human consciousness. Consciousness, which is always emergent from
culture and symbolic form, always emergent from community and aimed outside itself
desirous for food, for comfort, for flourishing, for more community, is also emergent
from brains, surely. Consciousness—emergent from brains and culture (community
and symbolic form)—turns to engage, top-down, its animality and its way of being
community. Consciousness makes us like the angels.
The power of imagination, which is a power of brain, body, culture, community,
society, and history, is what is most needed now. Smith recognized a problem in Hume’s
skepticism; he challenged Hume, claiming that the human was and must needs be more
than animal desire, lest he perish. This challenge was leveled at Hume’s belief that the
only thing of which one can be certain is pleasure and pain. In his focus on its animality,
Hume let the communion that precedes it in language, society, and history, sit idly by,
bracketed from thinking, in service to some fanciful notion of truth. And thus, the
particular eighteenth-century, British form of social organization lays hidden—and is
taken to be the natural—in the history of our culture, which naturalizes a particular
form of social organization. Polis emerges from bios, we are told, in a kind of linear way.
Had nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century thinkers paid closer attention to
Smith, neoliberalism and its attendant biopolitical economy might never have been.
Yet, that is not to say that Smith is our hero. But he provides one example, standing at
the moment this particular trajectory took a different route, pointing to the priority of
communion as productive of a form of being human.
Yet, there are other exemplars, both recent and ancient, to which we can turn. In
the West, thinkers like Thomas Aquinas or Augustine had a different way of imagining
desire and will, ordered to communion with the whole of being, which is the highest
 
Concluding Un(scientific) Postlude 213

good. Yet, the human does not know the highest good. The emptiness of not knowing
results in the desire to know and to be known. But to know and to be known is both
distinct from and in communion with the whole. At the same time, the whole is already
known within the depths of one being—in one’s desire, one has some knowledge of
what is not known. The human even knows that she can have no being worth having
without city or culture or the community. For how else could she put words to that
emptiness and that desire? She desires communion with the community of the cosmos,
and beyond cosmos she desires communion with the highest good that is ontologically
other than all there is.
Aquinas and Augustine also knew that our thinking about the whole of the cosmos,
and our thinking about the summum bonum that is outside cosmos, can lead to tyranny,
selfishness, and evil. Building the city into whatever one takes the summum bonum to
be is very likely to build the wrong city, a city that takes one’s own community to be
the community par excellence. Building the city out of one symbolic form—say the
positivistic scientistic one that emerged in a small little culture in the midst of the
north Atlantic somewhere between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries—is to
build a city of devils, where human nature and nature are consumed and destroyed; or
so we have argued.
What is needed then is, as Spaemann suggests, a sense of the ultimate being of the
human, what we could be if we realized our own being, which is communal, symbolic,
embodied, desirous of being at one with the whole of what is. We must have a vision of
our own being, acknowledging that our knowledge of ourselves will always be limited.
There is no way of imagining ourselves exhaustive of our being. We must understand
that any vision—including an individual’s own vision—is itself sociohistorical, and
thus a provisional vision of the city, falling short of what is true of the reality of one’s
own being, and the being of the whole. Thus, we must have other intellectual virtues
(understanding and wisdom), which must themselves be understood as the virtues
of a particular sociohistorical moment, that will keep our knowledge (Scientia) from
making claims that purport to be exhaustive of the fundamental truth about the
fundamental reality. For who can claim to possess the whole of being in one’s own
mind, including the being of knowing of the whole?
After all, in human congress with all that is, we will come upon those who have
different sociohistorical thought-communities that take up with reality in very different
symbolic forms, with different languages, arts, histories, mythologies, religions, and
sciences. They will find different meanings to flourishing and they will have different
visions of the summum bonum. If we understand our own vision of the good life to be
provisional, even while it can also be good and beautiful, we will bracket our own way
of being, to entertain others, to eat with them and commune with them. We will hope
to see what others see and to know what they know to be good and true and beautiful.
After all, other ways of being-in-the-world are part of the community of the cosmos.
Thus, we will need the virtue of prudence (practical wisdom), so as to enact the
provisional vision that we imagine is the best for our own thriving and the thriving of
our communities. We must know how to integrate our animality (through the practice
of temperance) and to assert that others in our community must also flourish for
oneself to flourish (justice), and when that is not possible, we must work courageously
214 Biopolitics After Neuroscience

in the face of threats to our own being to enact that vision of the city in which all can
flourish, and where flourishing is aimed at the telos of communion of the whole with
the whole of being.
Thus, following Spaemann, we can say that what is most needful is a perspective of
the true nature and telos of the human, an anthropology. Only with an anthropology—
with all of its contingencies—standing in the background, can we know what practices
are necessary to begin to flourish in our time, to recreate economies and communities
and science and knowledge that will protect and promote human well-being, despite
the biopolitical economy of our own sociohistorical moment. After all, we have argued
that the biopolitical economy of neoliberalism has an evacuated anthropology that, in
replacing the imago Dei with the image of Mammon, has done great harm to untold
persons and creation. Yet, even in having a more robust and adequate anthropology, we
will only have an anthropology, not the anthropology. Under the biopolitical-economic
regime of neoliberalism, we are told that it has the true anthropology, that the figment
of its imaginary is the whole truth about human being and that we must conform to
and implement its form of being-in-the-world for the entirety of the world. This has led
to despair, leaving us wandering aimlessly in the great quantity of what can be known,
overwhelmed by the city that is being built by neoliberal regimes of truth and power.
The only remedy to the destructive arrogance of neoliberalism, and to the
subsequent spiritual lethargy that it engenders, is an aspirational vision of what it
means to be fully human. What is most needed is the virtue of wisdom, not as imagined
by neuroscientists. True human wisdom is a violation of the great principle of non-
contradiction. To know oneself, one has to know that one does not know, even oneself.
For the human, to know is, at the same time, to know there is a great quantity that one
does not know. After all, the desire that we have to know not only reveals something
true about the objects to be known, but it also reveals inchoately what is not known.
To know is to not know. In every instance of our knowing, we must have wisdom to
see that we do not know fully, and that we will never know fully. In this interplay of
knowing and not knowing, all that is left for us to do is to seek justice cautiously for
all beings, for one does not know with certainty; to do so mercifully, because excessive
harm can flow from what we know and do not know; and to walk humbly, head bowed,
with the mystery of it all.

Fin
 Notes

Introduction
1 Barbara Oakley, Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister
Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008).
2 Dean A. Haycock, Murderous Minds: Exploring the Criminal Psychopathic Brain (New
York: Pegasus Books, 2014).
3 Kent A. Kiehl, The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience
(New York: Crown Publishers, 2014).
4 See Adrian Raine, The Psychopathology of Crime: Criminal Behavior as a Clinical
Disorder (Cambridge: Academic Press, 1997); Adrian Raine, The Anatomy of Violence:
The Biological Roots of Crime (New York: Vintage Books, 2014); James Fallon, The
Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain
(New York: Current, 2013); Simon Baron-Cohen, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and
the Origins of Cruelty (New York: Basic Books, 2012); Michael Stone, The Anatomy
of Evil (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009); Peter DiDomenica and Thomas G.
Robbins, Journey from Genesis to Genocide: Hate, Empathy, and the Plight of Humanity
(Pittsburgh, PA: Dorrance Publishing, 2013); Michael Shermer, The Science of Good
and Evil (New York: Henry Holt, 2004); Barbara Sahakian and Julia Gottwald, Sex,
Lies, and Brain Scans: How fMRI Reveals What Really Goes on in Our Minds (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2017).
5 Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Christian B. Miller, eds., Moral Psychology: The
Evolution of Morality: Adaptations and Innateness, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2007); Moral Psychology: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity, vol.
2 (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books, 2007); and Moral Psychology: The Neuroscience of
Morality: Emotion, Brain Disorders, and Development, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Bradford
Books, 2007).
6 Patricia Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
7 Ralph D. Mecklenburger, Our Religious Brains: What Cognitive Science Reveals about
Belief, Morality, Community and Our Relationship with God (Nashville, TN: Jewish
Lights Press, 2012).
8 Matthew Liao, Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University
Press: 2016); J. D. Trout, Why Empathy Matters: The Science and Psychology of Better
Judgement (New York: Penguin Group, 2010); Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Moral
Psychology: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Brain Disorders, and Development
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Darcia Narvaez and Allan Schore, Neurobiology
and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture, and Wisdom (New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 2014).
9 See “The BRAIN Initiative,” Obama White House Archives, https://obamawhitehouse​
.archives​.gov​/BRAIN. The BRAIN Initiative website can be found at https://
braininitiative​.nih​.gov/. See also the next generation of NIH BRAIN Initiative
216 Notes

embodied in the public–private partnership: “the Brain Initiative” at https://www​

.braininitiative​.org/.
10 A. Paul Alivisatos et al., “The Brain Activity Map Project and the Challenge of
Functional Connectomics,” Neuron 74, no. 6 (June 2012): 970–4.
11 Emily Underwood, “A $4.5 Billion Price Tag for the Brain Initiative?,” Science Insider,
June 5, 2014.
12 See Maria Popova, “‘Brain Culture’: How Neuroscience Became a Pop Culture
Fixation,” The Atlantic, August 18, 2011, a review of Davi Johnson Thornton, Brain
Culture: Neuroscience and Popular Media.
13 Rafael Yuste and Cori Bargmann, “Toward a Global BRAIN Initiative,” Cell 168, no.
6 (2017): 956–9; Suparna Choudhury et al., “Big Data, Open Science and the Brain:
Lessons Learned From Genomics,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (2014): 239;
A. Paul Alivisatos et al., “A National Network of Neurotechnology Centers for the
BRAIN Initiative,” Neuron 88, no. 3 (2015): 445–8.
14 “The BRAIN Initiative.”
15 The therapeutic promises of the BI are at the forefront: NIH, “BRAIN Priority Areas,”
https://braininitiative​.nih​.gov​/strategic​-planning​/brain​-priority​-areas; Thomas Insel,
Story Landis, and Francis Collins, “The NIH BRAIN Initiative,” Science 340, no. 6133
(May 10, 2013): 687–8. However, the therapeutic applications of the HGP were less
than expected: Nicholas Wade, “A Decade Later, Genetic Map Yields Few New Cures,”
The New York Times, June 12, 2010.
16 Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on the BRAIN Initiative and American
Innovation,” White House Archives, https://obamawhitehouse​.archives​.gov​/photos​
-and​-video​/video​/2013​/04​/02​/president​-obama​-speaks​-brain​-initiative​-and​-american​
-innovation​#transcript.
17 Ibid.
18 PBS Newshour, “President Obama Announces BRAIN Initiative,” News Broadcast,
YouTube, April 2, 2013, https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=Ol4SUlpXxXc.
19 Obama, “Remarks by the President.”
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 For a detailed version of this history see: M. Therese Lysaught, “Love Your Enemies:
Life Sciences in the Ecclesially-Based University,” in The Ecclesially-Based University
in a Liberal Democratic Society, ed. John Wright and Michael Budde (Grand Rapids,
MI: Brazos Press, 2004). See also: see John Beatty, “Origins of the U.S. Human
Genome Project: Changing Relationships between Genetics and National Security,”
in Controlling Our Destinies, ed. Phillip Reid Sloan (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame
Press, 2000), 132; Robert Cook-Deegan, The Gene Wars: Science, Politics, and
the Human Genome (New York: Norton, 1994); Diana B. Dutton, Worse than the
Disease: Pitfalls of Medical Progress (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 9;
Timothy Lenoir and Marguerite Hays, “The Manhattan Project for Biomedicine,” in
Controlling Our Destinies, ed. Phillip Reid Sloan (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press,
2000), 30; Lily E. Kay, “A Book of Life? How a Genetic Code Became a Language,” in
Controlling Our Destinies, ed. Phillip Reid Sloan (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press,
2000).
24 PBS Newshour, “President Obama Announces BRAIN Initiative,” at 5:37.
25 Ibid.
 
Notes 217

26 Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, “Gray Matters: Topics
at the Intersection of Neuroscience, Ethics, and Society,” https://bioethicsarchive​
.georgetown​.edu​/pcsbi​/node​/4704​.html; Misti Ault Anderson, “Bioethics Commission
Releases Final Neuroscience Report as Part of BI: Focuses on Controversial
Topics That Must Be Addressed If Neuroscience Is to Progress and Be Applied
Ethically,” https://bioethicsarchive​.georgetown​.edu​/pcsbi​/blog​/2015​/03​/26​/bioethics​
-commission​-releases​-final​-neuroscienc​/index​.html.
27 Emily Underwood, “US BRAIN Initiative Gets Ethical Advice,” Science Magazine, May
14, 2014.
28 Anderson, “Bioethics Commission Releases Final Neuroscience.”
29 NIH, “The Human Genome Project,” https://www​.genome​.gov​/human​-genome​-project.
30 See Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2003), 30.
31 At its most basic, the term “political economy” refers to the intersection of political
life and economic life. More specifically, it refers to a movement that arose in the
eighteenth century, as Europe and, specifically, the emerging British empire, were
transitioning from mercantilism to capitalism in order to facilitate, as Wendy Brown
notes, the “economical governing of the polity, rather than to the politics or powers
of economic life”; see Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015) Kindle location 1320. See also Michel Foucault,
Birth of Biopolitics (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 15–16: “[P]olitical economy introduces
a new and particular regime of truth into governmental rationality,” transforming the
market from a site of justice to a site of veridiction.
32 Robert W. Doty tells this story in “Neuroscience,” in The History of the American
Physiological Society: The First Century, 1887–1987, ed. John R. Brobeck, Orr E.
Reynolds, and Toby A. Appel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
33 See the website “Milestones in Neuroscience Research,” https://faculty​.washington​.edu​
/chudler​/hist​.html. This same framing is reproduced in the Wikipedia page on the
“History of Neuroscience,” https://en​.wikipedia​.org​/wiki​/History​_of​_neuroscience
(Accessed October 15, 2021).
34 “Scimago Journal Rankings,” https://www​.scimagojr​.com​/journalrank​.php​?category​
=2801.
35 See also Popova, “‘Brain Culture’: How Neuroscience Became a Pop Culture Fixation.”
36 See, for example, Thomas Douglas, “Moral Enhancement,” Journal of Applied
Philosophy 25, no. 3 (2008): 228–45; Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu, “The
Perils of Cognitive Enhancement and the Urgent Imperative to Enhance the Moral
Character of Humanity,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 25, no. 3 (2008): 162–77;
Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu, “Getting Moral Enhancement Right: The
Desirability of Moral Bioenhancement,” Bioethics (2011): 124–31; Mark Walker,
“Enhancing Genetic Virtue: A Project for Twenty-First Century Humanity,” Politics
and the Life Sciences 28, no. 2 (2009): 27–47.
37 John Z. Sadler, Values and Psychiatric Diagnosis, International Perspectives in
Philosophy and Psychiatry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
38 Eddy Nahmias, “Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will?” New York Times, Opinion
Pages, November 13, 2011, https://opinionator​.blogs​.nytimes​.com​/2011​/11​/13​/is​
-neuroscience​-the​-death​-of​-free​-will/.
39 Sam Harris, Free Will (New York: Free Press, 2011).
40 Daniel Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
218 Notes

41 Jerry Coyne, “You Don’t Have Free Will,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March
18, 2012, https://www​.chronicle​.com​/article​/Jerry​-A​-Coyne​-You​-Dont​-Have​/131165.
42 Jeffrey Rosen, “The Brain on the Stand,” The New York Times Magazine, March 11,
2007, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2007​/03​/11​/magazine​/11Neurolaw​.t​.html.
43 Tom Chivers, “Neuroscience, Free Will and Determinism,” The Telegraph, October 12,
2010, https://www​.telegraph​.co​.uk​/news​/science​/8058541​/Neuroscience​-free​-will​-and​
-determinism​-Im​-just​-a​-machine​.html.
44 Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler, “The Value of Believing in Free Will,”
Psychological Science 19, no. 1 (2008): 49–54.
45 Bruce Rogers-Vaughn identifies this same trope, noting:
“I began to notice how much blaming was occurring in our society, particularly toward
those who were not succeeding in the ‘land of opportunity.’
On cable and online news outlets, pundits could be heard villainizing the less fortunate.
Apparently if people were poor, or were struggling in some way, it was their own
damned fault. Even those in the shrinking middle class were often portrayed as less
than sufficiently successful, as deficient in some fundamental way” (Caring for Souls in
a Neoliberal Age [London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016], 3).

46 See “The Big Show with Bill Cunningham” (January 4, 2009) at Lauryn Bruck,
“Cunningham on the Poor: ‘They’re Poor Because They Lack Values, Ethics, and
Morals,’” Media Matters for America, January 15, 2009, https://www​.mediamatters​
.org​/bill​-cunningham​/cunningham​-poor​-theyre​-poor​-because​-they​-lack​-values​
-ethics​-and​-morals. The “law of unintended consequences” originates in Adam
Smith’s Wealth of Nations and was cited as the reason that laissez-faire markets are
necessary. See also: Chuck Colson, “Credit Where It’s Due: Morality, Poverty, and
Evangelicals,” March 18, 2010, https://www​.christianpost​.com​/news​/morality​-poverty​
-and​-evangelicals​.html; Bill O’Reilly, “The O’Reilly Factor,” June 11, 2004, cited in
Gabe Wildau, “O’Reilly: ‘[I]rresponsible and Lazy . . . That’s What Poverty Is,’” Media
Matters for America, June 18, 2004, https://www​.mediamatters​.org​/bill​-oreilly​/oreilly​
-irresponsible​-and​-lazy​-thats​-what​-poverty; Teddy Goodson, “Does Charity Breed
Poverty?” Blue Virginia, May 23, 2010, https://bluevirginia​.us​/2010​/05​/does​-charity​
-breed​-poverty; Larry Elder, a conservative black talk-radio personality, offers an
extended version of these sorts of remarks in his 2008 book Stupid Black Men: How to
Play the Race Card and Lose (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008).
47 See, e.g., “Talk Poverty,” https://talkpoverty​.org​/basics/.
48 See, e.g., Clancy Blair and C. Cybele Raver, “Poverty, Stress, and Brain Development:
New Directions for Prevention and Intervention,” Academy of Pediatrics 16, no. 3
(April 2016): S30–S36; and Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain,
Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (London: Penguin Books, 2015).
49 See for example, Paul Zak, The Moral Molecule (New York: Dutton, 2013).
50 American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders, 5th ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2013), 301.7..
51 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study of Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 23.
52 Ibid. On his presentation of the choice between Nietzsche or Aristotle, see chapter 9,
109–20; on his understanding of emotivism, see 11–35. Recently, MacIntyre has
shifted his language from emotivism to expressivism. See Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics
in the Conflict of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 17–19.
 
Notes 219

53 MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflict of Modernity, 92.

54 Due to its prominent role in popular discourse about morality, we embarked on
this study expecting race to be a central focus of our research. Yet although race is
undoubtedly one of the dominant social imaginaries in US and Western culture,
literature on the neuroscience of morality is eerily silent on this topic. Despite the
centrality of “urban populations” and socioeconomic status mapped by zip codes
in the studies we will cite, despite observations regarding high rates of antisocial
personality disorder within prison populations and so forth, the racial demographics
of study subjects or the differential implications for people of color of findings from
these neuroscientific studies was—in our reading—never mentioned. The only
place the neurosciences seem engaged with the question of race is in the search for
neuroscientific bases for prejudice, social segregation, and how people perceive and
respond to race. See, for example, Bradley D. Mattan, Kevin Y. Wei, Jasmin Cloutier,
and Jennifer T. Kubota, “The Social Neuroscience of Race-Based and Status-Based
Prejudice,” Current Opinion in Psychology 24 (December 2018): 27–34. These studies
map, of course, onto our larger thesis, locating the “cause” of racism in our biology—
our brains, usually the amygdala—providing a “natural” explanation for it and thereby
absolving agents from their behavior.
We have found only one article in which the neurosciences have begun
to address its racial context. In an incisive 2019 article in Frontiers of Human
Neuroscience entitled “‘Seeing Color,’ A Discussion of the Implications and
Applications of Race in the Field of Neuroscience,” Sade J. Abiodun takes her
thought-community to task, asking “whether the Neuroscience community has
successfully been held accountable for its actions, or whether the attempt to remain
‘objective’ has, in essence, resulted in harmful complicity in the perpetuation of
scientific racism.”
55 David Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of
Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 2, 8.
56 For this history, see Jim Yong Kim et al., Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the
Health of the Poor (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2002).
57 See Rogers-Vaughn, Caring for Souls, 116 and 54–5. Rogers-Vaughn is joined in this
insight by French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, in his book, The Age of Disruption:
Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press,
2019).
58 Rogers-Vaughn, Caring for Souls, 36. See also Brown, Undoing the Demos.
59 Brown, Undoing the Demos, Kindle location 59, 172–9.
60 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), 23.
61 Brown, Undoing the Demos, Kindle location 332–40.
62 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 41.
63 Rogers-Vaughn, Caring for Souls, 19–20.
64 Brown provides a complex and nuanced critique of the gender of Homo economicus,
making clear that it remains not only normatively male but that under neoliberalism,
“gender subordination is both intensified and fundamentally altered” (Brown,
Undoing the Demos, Kindle location 1520). We will therefore in this book refer to
Homo economicus and his offspring using the male pronoun. We also find Homo
capitalus to be so completely objectified that personal pronouns no longer apply; we
will therefore refer to Homo capitalus as “It.”
65 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 1–2.
220 Notes

66 Rogers-Vaughn, Caring for Souls, 42. See also Brown as noting that neoliberalism
“structure[es] markets it claims to liberate from structure, intensely governing
subjects it claims to free from government, strengthening and retasking states it
claims to abjure” (48–9).
67 Paul J. Zak, The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity (New York: Dutton,
2012).
68 Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, et al., “Neural Mechanisms of Genetic Risk for
Impulsivity and Violence in Humans,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
USA 103, no. 6 (April 18, 2006): 6269–74; Adrian Raine, “From Genes to Brain to
Antisocial Behavior,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 17, no. 5 (October
1, 2008): 323–8; Adrian Raine, “Schizotypal Personality: Neurodevelopmental and
Psychosocial Trajectories,” Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 2 (2006): 291–326;
Essi Viding and Uta Frith, “Genes for Susceptibility to Violence Lurk in the Brain,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103, no. 16 (April 2006): 6085–6.
69 Suzanne Meeks, Shruti N. Shah and Sarah K. Ramsey, “The Pleasant Events
Schedule—Nursing Home Version: A Useful Tool for Behavioral Interventions in
Long-term Care,” Aging & Mental Health 13, no. 3 (2009): 445–55; Martin Seligman,
Authentic Happiness (New York: Atria Books, 2004).
70 Persson and Savulescu, “The Perils of Cognitive Enhancement,” 162–77; Raine, “From
Genes to Brain to Antisocial Behavior.”
71 Thomas W. Meeks and Dilip V. Jeste, “Neurobiology of Wisdom: A Literature
Overview,” Archives of General Psychiatry 66, no. 4 (2009): 355–65.
72 Douglas, “Moral Enhancement”; Persson and Savulescu, “The Perils of Cognitive
Enhancement”; Persson and Savulescu, “Getting Moral Enhancement Right”; Walker,
“Enhancing Genetic Virtue.”
73 See Richard Joyce and Richard Garner, eds., The End of Morality: Taking Moral
Abolitionism Seriously (New York: Routledge, 2019). In pronouncing the demise of
morality, Joyce and Garner do not seem to recognize the etiology of the malaise that,
in their opinion, has led to the abolition of morality.
74 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 2.
75 Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, ed. T. J. Trenn and R. K.
Merton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 112.
76 Ibid.
77 Ludwik Fleck, “Crisis in Science,” in Cognition and Fact: Materials on Ludwik Fleck,
ed. Robert S. Cohen and Thomas Schnelle (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing, 1986),
156.
78 Meeks and Jeste, “Neurobiology of Wisdom.”
79 Raine, “From Genes to Brain to Antisocial Behavior”; Raine, “Schizotypal Personality.”
80 William Bennett, John DiIulio, and John P. Walters, Body Count: Moral Poverty
. . . and How to Win America’s War against Crime and Drugs (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1996). In this book, DiIulio coined the term “superpredators” to refer to
urban youth as “‘radically impulsive, [and] brutally remorseless youngsters . . .’” and
used it elsewhere to forecast a massive increase in juvenile violence and incarceration
over the coming decade. Now widely understood as racially coded scare tactic, this
term and DiIulio’s work in criminology helped to fuel the shift to mass incarceration
of Black youths and men that we discuss later in the Interlude.
81 Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and
Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012); Meeks and Jeste, “Neurobiology of
Wisdom”; Seligman, Authentic Happiness.
 
Notes 221

82 Avshalom Caspi et al., “Role of Genotype in the Cycle of Violence in Maltreated

Children,” Science 297, no. 5582 (2002): 851–4; Avshalom Caspi et al., “Influence
of Life Stress on Depression: Moderation by a Polymorphism in the 5-HTT Gene,”
Science 301, no. 5631 (2003): 386–9; Naomi Sadeh et al., “Serotonin Transporter Gene
Associations with Psychopathics Traits in Youth Vary as a Function of Socioeconomic
Resources,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 119, no. 3 (2010): 604–9.
83 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 23.
84 Jeremy Bentham, “An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation,” in The
Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838–1843;
reprinted New York, 1962).
85 Jeremy Bentham, Table of the Springs of Action, https://www​.laits​.utexas​.edu​/
poltheory​/bentham​/springs​/index​.html.
86 Jeremy Bentham, “To Jaques Pierre Brissot de Warville, November 25, 1791,” in The
Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 4: October 1788 to December 1793, ed. A. T.
Milne, in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, gen. ed. J. R. Dinwiddy (London:
UCL Press, 2017), letter 821, 341–2.

Prelude to a Neuroscience of Morality

1 Wojciech Sady, “Ludwik Fleck,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter
2021 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. Fleck was a survivor of the concentration camps
at both Auschwitz and Buchenwald, his life spared perhaps because of his ability
to provide medical services, eventually helping to develop an anti-typhus vaccine.
He testified in the Nuremburg Trials against German physicians who conducted
experiments on concentration camp prisoners.
2 Fleck, The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Originally published as
Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache. Einführung in die Lehre
vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv (Schwabe und Co., Verlagsbuchhandlung, Basel,
1935).
3 As Fleck notes, the carnal scourge was an umbrella diagnosis capturing all venereal
diseases that would be “crystallized during the following centuries into various
entities [including] what we now call leprosy; scabies; tuberculosis of the skin,
bone, and glands; small pox (variola); mycoses of the skin; gonorrhea, soft chancre,
probably also lymphogranuloma inguinale, and many skin diseases still regarded as
nonspecific today, as well as general constitutional illnesses such as gout” (Genesis and
Development of a Scientific Fact, 1).
4 As Sady notes, “Traditionally—and today some still think so—facts were considered
to be what is given and accessible through the senses. Modern empiricists claimed
that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses. Fleck reversed this
maxim: there is nothing in the senses that was not first in the mind” (Sady, “Ludwik
Fleck”).
5 Fleck’s project would be helpfully extended by analyzing how the racist exoteric
community in the United States and Europe imagined syphilis differently in Black
and African-American bodies, providing the conceptual apparatus for the infamous
“Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the African American Male” conducted by
the US Public Health Service between 1932 and 1972. For more on this case see James
H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, revised ed. (New York: Free
222 Notes

Press, 1993). For more on the relationship between racism as a social imaginary and
medical science see Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of
Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New
York: Anchor, 2008); and Rebeca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (New
York: Broadway Books, 2011).
6 Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, 42.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., 46.
9 Ibid., 5, quoting Josef Hermann, Es gibt keine constitutionelle Syphilis: Ein Trostwort
für die gesamte Menschheit (Westphalia: Hagen, 1891; 4th ed., Leipzig: Otto, 1903).
10 Ibid., 27.
11 Ibid. If this process sounds like Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
it is because Kuhn was familiar with Fleck’s work. It should be noted that Kuhn read
Fleck’s book well before he wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
12 Sady, “Ludwik Fleck.”
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 See chapter three, “The Nature of Normal Science,” in Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
16 Ibid.
17 Sady, “Ludwik Fleck.” As he further notes: “In contemporary society, almost
everybody belongs to many thought-collectives; e.g., a scientist may also be a member
of a certain church, political party, mountain climbing club. An individual usually
belongs to distant thought-collectives, so that conflicts between thought-styles
coexisting in him/her do not arise. Most people belong only to exoteric circles; only
few become members of any esoteric circle, sporadically belonging to more than one.”
18 Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, 2.
19 As he also notes, astrological interpretations likewise shaped the conceptual space,
with many believing scientifically that “the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter under
the sign of Scorpio and the House of Mars on 25. XI 1484 was the cause of the carnal
scourge [Lustseuche]. Benign Jupiter was vanquished by the evil planets Saturn and
Mars. The sign of Scorpio, which rules the genitals, explains why the genitals were the
first place to be attacked by the new disease” (ibid., 2).
20 Sady, “Ludwik Fleck.”
21 Sady continues: “Fleck also stresses that there is no spontaneous creation of concepts
(1935a, II.1). This is why a new research starts usually—although not always—from
proto-ideas which often are of a religious or philosophical character, which had
existed centuries before they acquired a scientific character. For example, long before
Copernicus there was a proto-idea of a heliocentric system, before Lavoisier—a
proto-idea of chemical elements, before Dalton—a proto-idea of atom, and before
Leeuwenhoek—a proto-idea of microbe (1935a, II.2). Proto-ideas are vague, and
therefore in the scientific understanding they cannot be considered as true or false.
(Even though they were true for the members of corresponding thought-collectives).
But they can become a point of departure for investigation” (ibid.).
22 J. B. Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1984), 6.
23 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2007), 23.
 
Notes 223

24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., 24.
27 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 20.
28 As Larry Squire notes in the Preface to his multivolume The History of Neuroscience in
Autobiography, vol. 1, “Neuroscience is quintessentially interdisciplinary, and careers
in neuroscience come from several different cultures including biology, psychology,
and medicine” (Cambridge: Academic Press, 1998), ix. In light of our claim that
contemporary neuroscience is characterized by multiple thought-communities, we
find it notable that Squire, the president of the Society for Neuroscience from 1993 to
1994, uses the term “cultures” to characterize the different interlocutors captured
under the neuroscience umbrella.
29 See Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 30.

Chapter 1
1 Baron-Cohen, The Science of Evil; Michael H. Stone and Gary Brucato, The New Evil:
Understanding the Emergence of Violent Crime (Amherst, : Prometheus Books, 2019).
2 Viding and Frith, “Genes for Susceptibility to Violence Lurk in the Brain.”
3 Meyer-Lindenberg et al., “Neural Mechanisms of Genetic Risk for Impulsivity and
Violence in Humans.” It should be remembered that a functional polymorphic gene
is a gene that is capable of being transcribed into a functional protein, though the
protein product is functions differently than the “normal” gene, where normal simply
means the gene form that the majority of the population possesses.
4 Viding and Frith, “Genes for Susceptibility to Violence Lurk in the Brain,” 6085.
5 Ibid.
6 We first noticed this use of the word “make” in Laurence Tancredi, Hardwired
Behavior: What Neuroscience Reveals about Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005).
7 Sadler, Values and Psychiatric Diagnosis, International Perspectives in Philosophy and
Psychiatry.
8 By human sciences we mean those social and psychological sciences, including
things like anthropology, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, social work, and public
health, each having its separate theories, models, approaches, and methodologies.
Rather than listing these sciences at each juncture, we will refer to them as the
human sciences. These are the sciences that attempt to understand human behavior
for the purposes of being able to intervene in human behavior. We will use human
sciences and social sciences interchangeably.
9 Joseph J. Schildkraut, “The Catecholamine Hypothesis of Affective Disorders: A
Review of Supporting Evidence,” American Journal of Psychiatry 122, no. 5 (1965):
509–22.
10 David Lester, “The Concentration of Neurotransmitter Metabolites in the
Cerebrospinal Fluid of Suicidal Individuals: A Meta-Analysis,” Pharmacopsychiatry
28, no. 2 (1995): 45–50; Marie Åsberg, “Neurotransmitters and Suicidal Behavior: The
Evidence from Cerebrospinal Fluid Studies,” Annals of New York Academy of Sciences
836 (1997): 158–81. For example, persons with histories of attempted or completed
224 Notes

suicide show low cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) concentrations of 5-hydroxyindoleacetic

acid (5-HIAA), a metabolite of serotonin, when compared to control subjects.
11 Emil F. Coccaro, “Central Neurotransmitter Function in Human Aggression and
Impulsivity,” in Neurobiology and Clinical Views on Aggression and Impulsivity,
ed. Michael Maes and Emil F. Coccaro (New York: Wiley, 1998), 143–68; Åsberg,
“Neurotransmitters and Suicidal Behavior.”
12 Emil F. Coccaro et al., “Diminished Prolactin Responses to Repeated Fenfluramine
Challenge in Man,” Psychiatry Research 22 (1987): 257–9; David Stoff et al., “Test-
retest Reliability of the Prolactin and Cortisol Responses to d,l-Fenfluramine
Challenge in Disruptive Behavior Disorders,” Psychiatry Research 42 (1992): 65–72.
13 Kevin M. Malone et al., “Prolactin Response to Fenfluramine and Suicide Attempt
Lethality in Major Depression,” British Journal of Psychiatry 168 (1996): 324–8.
14 Stephen B. Manuck et al., “Socio-economic Status Covaries with Central Nervous
System Serotonergic Responsivity as a Function of Allelic Variation in the Serotonin
Transporter Gene-linked Polymorphic Region,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 29 (2004):
651–68.
15 See Stephen Manuck et al., “The Socioeconomic Status of Communities Predicts
Variation in Brain Serotonergic Responsivity,” Psychological Medicine 35 (2005): 519–
28; Stephen Manuck et al., “Aggression, Impulsivity, and Central Nervous System
Serotonergic Responsivity in a Nonpatient Sample,” Neuropsychopharmacology
19 (1998): 287–99; Janine Flory, Stephen Manuck, and Matthew Muldoon,
“Retest Reliability of Prolactin Response to dl-Fenfluramine Challenge in Adults,”
Neuropsychopharmacology 26 (2002): 269–72; Janine Flory et al., “A Comparison of d,
l-Fenfluramine and Citalopram Challenges in Healthy Adults,” Psychopharmacology
174 (2004): 376–80; Karen Matthews et al., “Does Socioeconomic Status Relate to
Central Serotonergic Responsivity in Healthy Adults?” Psychosomatic Medicine 62
(2000): 231–7.
16 Manuck et al., “The Socioeconomic Status of Communities.” It should be noted that
a variation is not an abnormality. A variation is a functional difference in anatomy or
physiology.
17 Manuck et al., “Socio-economic Status Covaries,” 652. The length and diversity of this
list of correlate conditions is worth noting.
18 Ibid., 520.
19 Manuck et al., “The Socioeconomic Status of Communities.”
20 These authors see the use of census tract data as an improvement over prior
measures, without mentioning the racial profile of this data. As is widely known,
especially in urban areas, race is correlated with census track, with “four times as
many Blacks and three times as many Hispanics” living in census tracts that have
been designated as “poverty areas” in 1990 (U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical
Brief: Poverty Areas, 1995, https://www​.census​.gov​/prod​/1​/statbrief​/sb95​_13​.pdf.) For
the implications of racialized data, see Sade J. Abiodun, “‘Seeing Color’: A Discussion
of the Implications and Applications of Race in the Field of Neuroscience,” Front
Hum Neurosci 13 (August 13, 2019): 280. Thus, there is an unspoken correlation
between their findings and race. See especially Peter Gianaros and Stephen
Manuck, “Neurobiological Pathways Linking Socioeconomic Position and Health,”
Psychosomatic Medicine 72, no. 5 (2010): 455.
21 Manuck et al., “The Socioeconomic Status of Communities.” Note that although this
is supposed to be a more complex variable, the components remain economic.
22 Ibid., 526.
 
Notes 225

23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Peter Gianaros et al., “Perigenual Anterior Cingulate Morphology Covaries with
Perceived Social Standing,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2 (2007):
161–73.
26 This scale asks subjects to rank their own perception of their social status by marking
a rung on a ladder.
27 Gianaros et al., “Perigenual Anterior Cingulate Morphology.”
28 Ibid., 170. Emphasis added. pACC refers to the perigenual area of the anterior
cingulate cortex, a region of the brain involved in emotional and behavioral
regulation.
29 Gianaros and Manuck, “Neurobiological Pathways Linking Socioeconomic Position
and Health.”
30 As we will see in Part II, Gary Becker likewise adopts the construct of socio-
economic positioning (SEP) in his analyses.
31 Gianaros and Manuck, “Neurobiological Pathways Linking Socioeconomic Position
and Health.”
32 Peter Gianaros et al., “Potential Neural Embedding of Parental Social Standing,”
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 3 (2008): 91–6.
33 Gianaros and Manuck, “Neurobiological Pathways Linking Socioeconomic Position
and Health,” 452. Emphasis added.
34 Ibid., 457.
35 John Ashburner and Karl Friston, “Voxel-Based Morphometry—The Methods,”
Neuroimage 11 (2000): 805–21.
36 Earl Babbie, The Practice of Social Research, 10th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth,
2004), 119.
37 Catherine Marshall and Gretchen B. Rossman, Designing Qualitative Research, 5th
ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2011), 63–4.
38 Babbie, The Practice of Social Research, 128. Note that common sense is also part of
a social construct. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks,
trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971),
321–43.
39 Ibid., 132.
40 Ibid., 131; Fisher, “The Importance of Variable Names,” in Babbie, The Practice of
Social Research, 130–1.
41 Babbie, The Practice of Social Research, 128.
42 Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).
Economist Martin Ravallion in his historical study of references to “poverty” in
literature confirms Himmelfarb’s thesis, naming the period of roughly 1740–90 as
the first of two “Poverty Enlightenments.” See Martin Ravallion, “The Two Poverty
Enlightenments: Historical Insights from Digitized Books Spanning Three Centuries”
(The World Bank Development Research Group, Director’s Office, January 2011). For
a more in-depth study of this thesis, see Martin Ravallion, The Economics of Poverty
(Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2016).
43 Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of
Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
44 See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of
Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001). We discuss this further in Chapter 5.
45 Ravallion, “The Two Poverty Enlightenments,” 3.
226 Notes

46 Bernard Beck, “Bedbugs, Stench, Dampness, and Immorality: A Review Essay on

Recent Literature about Poverty,” Social Problems 15, no. 1 (1967): 101–14.
47 Ravallion, “The Two Poverty Enlightenments,” 3. Ravallion notes that this was
“followed by a resurgence starting in the mid-1980s, with the overall peak just a couple
of years before the turn of the 21st century.” Ravallion’s survey spans 1700–2000;
given the reinvigorated attention to global health since 2000, the shock of the Great
Recession of 2008, and increased consciousness of income and wealth inequalities, we
may well be in what Ravallion would term a third Poverty Enlightenment.
48 Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York:
Scribner’s, 1962; Reprint Edition 1997).
49 Hubert H. Humphrey, War on Poverty (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964); Arthur B.
Shostak and William Gomberg, eds., New Perspectives on Poverty (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965); Louis A. Freeman, Joyce L. Kornbluh, and Alan Haber, eds.,
Poverty in America (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1965); Robert E.
Will and Harold G. Vatter, eds., Poverty in Affluence (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
and World, 1965); Hannah H. Meissener, ed., Poverty in the Affluent Society (New
York: Harper and Row, 1966); Margaret S. Gordon, ed., Poverty in America (San
Francisco, CA: Chandler, 1965); Leo Fishman, ed., Poverty Amid Affluence (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); Florence Heller Graduate School for Advanced
Studies in Social Welfare, Colloquia: 1963–1964, Poverty and Dependency (Waltham,
MA: Brandeis University, 1965); Harold L. Wilensky and Charles N. Lebeaux, Social
Welfare and Industrial Society (New York: Free Press, 1965).
50 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: A Case for National Action
(Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1965). For an annotated edition
of this report with historical commentary, see Daniel Gleary, “The Moynihan
Report: An Annotated Edition,” The Atlantic Monthly, September 14, 2015, https://
www​.theatlantic​.com​/politics​/archive​/2015​/09​/the​-moynihan​-report​-an​-annotated​
-edition​/404632/.
51 The long unpublished paper can now be found at: August B. Hollingshead, “Four
Factor Index of Social Status,” Yale Journal of Sociology 8 (2011): 21–52, https://
sociology​.yale​.edu​/sites​/default​/files​/files​/yjs​_fall​_2011​.pdf. See also Julia Adams and
David L. Weakliem, “August B. Hollingshead’s ‘Four Factor Index of Social Status’:
From Unpublished Paper to Citation Classic,” Yale Journal of Sociology 8 (Fall 2011): 11.
52 August B. Hollingshead and Frederick C. Redlich, Social Class and Mental Illness: A
Community Study (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1958). This study is, like that of
Gianaros and Manuck, notable for the way it elides the issue of race. To contextualize
their study, the authors narrate the social history of New Haven and how it
contributed to the class stratifications that define their study; in this history, African
Americans are mentioned a handful of times, but then they essentially disappear from
the remaining analysis, but for one mention (see chapter 7 on “Class and Prevalence
of Disorders”). Glossing over the statistical anomalies in the racial composition of
their patient population, they draw important class-based conclusions. For example,
they find that mental disorders of the higher classes (1–II) tend to be of the “neurotic”
variety, whereas the disorders of Classes IV–V tended to be of the psychotic variety.
They also find that “the lower the class, the greater proportion of patients in the
population” (216). Finally, people from Classes IV and V were less likely to categorize
their own behavior or that of others as “psychopathological,” whereas there was a
much great readiness to do so in Classes I–II (see, e.g., 173).
 
Notes 227

53 August B. Hollingshead, “Commentary on ‘The Indiscriminate State of Social Class

Measurement,’” Social Forces 49 (1971): 565.
54 According to Adams and Weakliem, Hollingshead’s “Two Factor Index of Social
Position” was also not published—he had it “privately printed [as a pamphlet] and
sold for 1 dollar per copy. The Two Factor Index offered a procedure which combined
the occupation and education of the head of the household to generate a single
measure of social status” (12). This too was received enthusiastically by the social
scientific community.
55 Adams and Weakliem, “August B. Hollingshead’s ‘Four Factor Index of Social Status,’”
12–13.
56 Ibid., 11.
57 Cirino and his colleagues specifically examine six instruments developed between
1971 and 1994 to test how well they correlate in terms of their findings (see Paul T.
Cirino et al., “Measuring Socioeconomic Status: Reliability and Preliminary Validity
for Different Approaches,” Assessment 9 (2002): 145–55). The instruments they cite
and/or assess include: the Hollingshead Four Factor Index of Social Status (1975);
Blishen, Carroll, and Moore (1987); Entwisel and Astone (1994); Nakao and Treas
(1992); the Revised Duncan Socioeconomic Index (1981); and the Siegel Prestige
Scale (1971).
58 Babbie, The Practice of Social Research, 128.
59 See David Hilfiker, Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen (New York: Seven Stories
Press, 2003).
60 Gianaros and Manuck, “Neurobiological Pathways Linking Socioeconomic Position
and Health,” 2.
61 Ibid., 5.
62 Maurice M. Rapport, Arda Alden Green, and Irvie H. Page, “Serum Vasoconstrictor,
Serotonin; Isolation and Characterization,” Journal of Biological Chemistry 176, no. 3
(1948): 961–9.
63 Irving J. Selikoff and Edward H. Robitzek, “Tuberculosis Chemotherapy with
Hydrazine Derivatives of Isonicotinic Acid,” Dis Chest 21, no. 4 (1952): 385–38.
64 Ibid., 401.
65 David Healy, The Creation of Psychopharmacology (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2002).
66 Michael Rosenbloom, “Chlorpromazine and the Psychopharmacologic Revolution,”
JAMA 287, no. 14 (2002): 1860–1.
67 Schildkraut, “The Catecholamine Hypothesis of Affective Disorders.”
68 Bruce Rogers-Vaughn, “Blessed are Those Who Mourn: Depression as Political
Resistance,” Pastoral Psychol 63 (2014): 506.
69 Dan German Blazer, The Age of Melancholy: “Major Depression” and Its Social Origin
(New York: Routledge, 2005).
70 Rogers-Vaughn, “Blessed are Those Who Mourn,” 506.
71 Rogers-Vaughn, Caring for Souls. See also M. Therese Lysaught, “That Jagged Little
Pill and the Counter-Politics of the Community of the Expelled Sacramentality and
Psychiatric Medications,” Christian Bioethics 24, no. 3 (2018): 246–64.
72 Rogers-Vaughn, “Blessed are Those Who Mourn,” 507.
73 Ibid., 507.
74 In the words of Peter Kramer, “Depression is the Opposite of Freedom” (Against
Depression [New York: Viking, 2004], 14).
228 Notes

75 See A. V. Horwitz, “How an Age of Anxiety Became an Age of Depression,” The

Milbank Quarterly 88, no. 1 (2010): 112–38. The World Health Organization
recently declared that “By 2020, depression will be the second leading cause of world
disability” (Rogers-Vaughn, “Blessed are Those Who Mourn,” 509; World Federation
for Mental Health, “Depression: A Global Crisis,” October 10, 2012, https://www​.who​
.int​/mental​_health​/management​/depression​/wfmh​_paper​_depression​_wmhd​_2012​
.pdf). Rogers-Vaughn also argues convincingly that the neoliberal cultural paradigm
produces mental illness by the ways that the changes it has wrought in material,
social, and political conditions “dismember the soul” (510, passim).
76 Randy A. Sansone and Lori A. Sansone, “Personality Disorders: A Nation-Based
Perspective on Prevalence,” Innov Clin Neurosci 8, no. 4 (April 2011): 13–18. As
noted, ASPD was only defined as a disorder in 1980 with the DSM-III. The literature
notes that the prevalence of ASPD “can reach 80% in correctional settings” (Donald
W. Black, “The Natural History of Antisocial Personality Disorder,” Canadian Journal
of Psychiatry 60, no. 7 (July 2015): 309–14). Black and others fail to elaborate on
further facts behind this statistic, namely that in the United States, 34 percent of the
population in correctional settings are African-American, that African Americans
and Hispanics who make up approximately 32 percent of the US population
comprised 56 percent of all incarcerated people in 2015; and that African Americans
are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of whites (NAACP, “Criminal Fact
Sheet,” https://www​.naacp​.org​/criminal​-justice​-fact​-sheet/ [Accessed October 15,
2021]).
77 Hervey M. Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Re-Interpret Some Issues
About the So-Called Psychopathic Personality, 5th ed. (St. Louis, MO: Mosby, 1976).
78 American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders.
79 John M. Oldham, “The Alternative DSM-5 Model for Personality Disorders,” World
Psychiatry 14, no. 2 (June 2015): 234–6.
80 American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders.
81 National Institute of Mental Health, “RDoC Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ),”
https://www​.nimh​.nih​.gov​/research​/research​-funded​-by​-nimh​/rdoc​/resources​/rdoc​
-frequently​-asked​-questions​-faq.
82 Note Adrian Raine’s article of the same title, “From Genes to Brains to Antisocial
Behavior,” 323–8.
83 Viding and Frith, “Genes for Susceptibility to Violence Lurk in the Brain”; Meyer-
Lindenberg et al., “Neural Mechanisms of Genetic Risk for Impulsivity and Violence
in Humans.”
84 It should be noted again that a polymorphism is a functional gene, though its function
is different—either more or less efficient—than the gene possessed by the majority
of a population. J. W. Buckholtz et al., “Genetic Variation in MAOA Modulates
Ventromedial Prefrontal Circuitry Mediating Individual Differences in Human
Personality,” Molecular Psychiatry 13, no. 3 (2008): 313–24; Luca Passamonti et al.,
“Monoamine Oxidase-A Genetic Variations Influence Brain Activity Associated with
Inhibitory Control: New Insight into the Neural Correlates of Impulsivity,” Biological
Psychiatry 59, no. 4 (2006): 334–40; Leanne M. Williams et al., “Polymorphism of the
MAOA Gene is Associated with Emotional Brain Markers and Personality Traits on
an Antisocial Index,” Neuropsychopharmacology 34 (2009): 1797–809.
85 Viding and Frith, “Genes for Susceptibility to Violence Lurk in the Brain,” 6085–6.
 
Notes 229

86 Meyer-Lindenberg et al., “Neural Mechanisms of Genetic Risk for Impulsivity and

Violence in Humans,” 6269–74.
87 Low-efficiency means less MAOA-I, which means less degradation of major
neurotransmitters; high efficiency means more MAOA-I, which means more
degradation of major neurotransmitters.
88 It should be noted that Meyer-Lidenberg et al. were not interested in behavior, just
neural structure and function.
89 Meyer-Lindenberg et al., “Neural Mechanisms of Genetic Risk for Impulsivity and
Violence in Humans,” 6269 (emphasis added). Note that they are correlating here
genetic variation, neurobiological activity, and neurobiological structure.
90 Caspi et al., “Role of Genotype in the Cycle of Violence in Maltreated Children,”
851–4, cited in Meyer-Lindenberg et al., “Neural Mechanisms of Genetic Risk for
Impulsivity and Violence in Humans,” 6269. Note that this study did not explore the
connection between this genetic polymorphism and behavior; researchers instead
extrapolate from other studies to associate these changes with presumed behavioral
outcomes.
91 Lester, “The Concentration of Neurotransmitter Metabolites in the Cerebrospinal
Fluid of Suicidal Individuals: a Meta-Analysis”; Asberg, “Neurotransmitters and
Suicidal Behavior.”
92 Viding and Frith, “Genes for Susceptibility to Violence Lurk in the Brain,” 6085.
93 Ibid., emphasis added.
94 Caspi et al., “Role of Genotype in the Cycle of Violence in Maltreated Children.”
95 Supplementary material for Caspi et al., “Role of Genotype in the Cycle of Violence
in Maltreated Children,” 3.
96 Ibid.
97 Ibid., 853, emphasis added.
98 Sadeh et al., “Serotonin Transporter Gene Associations.”
99 Ibid., 606.
100 Lukas Pezawas et al., “5-HTTLPR Polymorphism Impacts Human Cingulate-
Amygdala Interactions: A Genetic Susceptibility Mechanism for Depression,” Nature
Neuroscience 8 (2005): 828–34.
101 Meyer-Lindenberg et al., “Neural Mechanisms of Genetic Risk for Impulsivity and
Violence in Humans,” 6269.
102 Viding and Frith, “Genes for Susceptibility to Violence Lurk in the Brain,” 6085.
103 Meyer-Lindenberg et al., “Neural Mechanisms of Genetic Risk for Impulsivity and
Violence in Humans,” 6269.
104 Baron-Cohen, The Science of Evil; Raine, “From Genes to Brains to Antisocial
Behavior.”
105 Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, “Evidence from Behavioral Genetics for
Environmental Contributions to Antisocial Conduct,” in The Explanation of Crime:
Context, Mechanisms, and Development, ed. Per-Olof H. Wikström and Robert J.
Sampson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 108.
106 Adrian Raine, The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime (New York:
Vintage, 2013).
107 For an interesting take on the importance of a moral anthropology of another
social science—namely the science of economics—see Christina McRorie, “The
Emptiness of Modern Economics: Why the Dismal Science Needs a Richer Moral
Anthropology,” The Hedgehog Review 16, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 120–9.
108 Raine, The Anatomy of Violence.
230 Notes

109 Gianaros and Manuck, “Neurobiological Pathways Linking Socioeconomic Position

and Health,” 450.

Chapter 2
1 “Milestones in Neuroscience Research,” https://faculty​.washington​.edu​/chudler​/hist​
.html. This page is curated by Eric Chudler, UW’s Executive Director of the Center for
Neurotechnology.
2 Lorenzo Livianos-Aldana, Luis Rojo-Moreno, and Pilar Sierra-SanMiguel, “Gall and the
Phrenological Movement,” The American Journal of Psychiatry 164, no. 3 (2007): 414.
3 Donald Simpson, “Phrenology and the Neurosciences: Contributions of F. J. Gall and
J. G. Spurzheim,” ANZ Journal of Surgery 75 (2005): 475.
4 Ibid., 475–6.
5 John van Wyhe, “The History of Phrenology,” The Victorian Web, http://www​
.victorianweb​.org​/science​/phrenology​/intro​.html. See also John van Wyhe, “The
Authority of Human Nature: The Schädellehre of Franz Joseph Gall,” BJHS 35 (2002):
17–42, http://www​.historyofphrenology​.org​.uk​/texts​/2002van​_wyhe​.htm.
6 Livianos-Aldana et al., “Gall and the Phrenological Movement,” 414; Martin S. Staum,
Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race and Empire, 1815–1848 (Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003). Per van Wyhe, the British Phrenological
Society was only disbanded in 1967, right around the time of the founding of the
Society of Neuroscience.
7 John van Wyhe, “Reading Phrenology,” The History of Phrenology on the Web, http://
www​.historyofphrenology​.org​.uk​/literature​.html.
8 Ibid.
9 Staum, Labeling People; see also George Combe, “On the Coincidence Between the
Natural Talents and Dispositions of Nations, and the Development of Their Brains,” in A
System of Phrenology, 5th ed. (Edinburgh: MacLachlan and Stewart, 1853), 327–61, http://
www​.historyofphrenology​.org​.uk​/system​/national​_character​.htm; and Dan van Ness,
“Applying Restorative Justice to the Genocide in Rwanda,” Restorative Justice International,
March 30, 2012, http://www​.res​tora​tive​just​icei​nter​national​.com​/2012​/applying​-restorative​
-justice​-to​-the​-genocide​-in​-rwanda/. See also Abiodun, “‘Seeing Color’.”
10 Staum, Labeling People; and Sherrie L. Lyons, Species, Serpents, Spirits, and Skulls:
Science at the Margins in the Victorian Age (Albany, NY: New York Press, 2009), 141–3.
11 Simpson, “Phrenology and the Neurosciences,” 476.
12 Ibid.
13 Meeks and Jeste, “Neurobiology of Wisdom,” 357.
14 Though Meeks and Jeste associate conditions such as dementia with a corollary
lack or absence of wisdom, it is unclear how this direct link is actually made in
their reasoning. They seem to suggest that if wisdom could somehow be ingrained,
strengthened, or rehabilitated, then those who suffer with neurocognitive disorders
might remain or become wise, though this association is never fully spelled out.
15 Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson, Character, Strengths, and Virtues: A
Handbook in Classification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
16 Meeks and Jeste, “Neurobiology of Wisdom,” 356.
17 Van Wyhe opines: “Rather than portraying phrenology as having succumbed to an
inexorable progress of ‘science’ or representing the Victorians as having become less
 
Notes 231

‘gullible,’ phrenology can be understood to have been diffused and absorbed into a
host of other practices and traditions—as such many of its components live on” (van
Wyhe, “The History of Phrenology”). That phrenology is not entirely a thing of the
past, see Harriet Dempsey-Jones’s account of University of Oxford research group
that tested Gall’s theory using modified MRI techniques in “Neuroscientists Put the
Dubious Theory of ‘Phrenology’ Through Rigorous Testing for the First Time,” The
Conversation, January 22, 2018, http://theconversation​.com​/neuroscientists​-put​-the​
-dubious​-theory​-of​-phrenology​-through​-rigorous​-testing​-for​-the​-first​-time​-88291.
18 Meeks and Jeste, “Neurobiology of Wisdom,” 355.
19 Meeks and Jeste state that they chose ten definitions. However, full citations of only
six studies can be found in their article. These include: Richard J. Sternberg, Wisdom,
Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
Paul B. Baltes, Jacqui Smith, and Ursula M. Staudinger, “Wisdom and Successful Aging,”
Nebraska Symposium on Motivation 39 (1991): 123–67; Scott C. Brown and Jeffrey A.
Greene, “The Wisdom Development Scale: Translating the Conceptual to the Concrete,”
Journal of College Student Development 47, no. 1 (2008): 1–19; Monika Ardelt, “Wisdom
as Expert Knowledge System: A Critical Review of a Contemporary Operationalization
of an Ancient Concept,” Human Development 47, no. 5 (2004): 275; Leonard A. Jason,
Arne Reichler, Caroline King, Derryk Madsen, Jennifer Camacho, Wendy Marchese,
“The Measurement of Wisdom: A Preliminary Report,” Journal of Community Psychology
29, no. 5 (2001): 585–98; Gerard M. Brugman, “Wisdom and Aging,” in Handbook of
the Psychology of Aging, ed. J. E. Birren and K. Warner Schaie, 6th ed. (Burlington, MA:
Elsevier Academic Press, 2005), 445–69. Three other “articles” are cited in a table by
Kitchener, Meacham, Wink, and Helson; however, full bibliographic information is not
supplied in the references. This, however, would only bring the total to nine definitions.
20 Meeks and Jeste, “Neurobiology of Wisdom,” 356.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 357. On altruism, see John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon
(London: Routledge, 2003), 139.
23 Sternberg, Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized, 152.
24 Meeks and Jeste, “Neurobiology of Wisdom,” 356.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 Sternberg, Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized, 152.
29 Paul B. Baltes, “The Aging Mind: Potential and Limits,” The Gerontologist 33 (1993):
580–94. Paul B. Baltes and Ursula M. Staudinger, “The Search for a Psychology of
Wisdom,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 2, no. 3 (1993): 75–81.
30 Paul B. Baltes and Ursula M. Staudinger, “Wisdom: A Metaheuristic (Pragmatic) to
Orchestrate Mind and Virtue Toward Excellence,” American Psychologist 55, no. 1
(2000): 123.
31 Ibid., 124.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Ardelt, “Wisdom as Expert Knowledge System,” 275–6.
35 Ibid., 263.
36 Scott C. Brown, “Learning Across the Campus: How College Facilitates the
Development of Wisdom,” Journal of College Student Development 45, no. 2 (2004):
134–48.
232 Notes

37 Brown and Greene, “The Wisdom Development Scale.”

38 Jason et al., “The Measurement of Wisdom,” 590.
39 Ibid., 591.
40 Ibid., 591–2.
41 Ibid., 591.
42 Equally, as Viding and Frith point to impulsivity that tends toward aggression as a
central antisocial trait, Meeks and Jeste consider its opposite, namely, “emotional
homeostasis,” to be a subcomponent of wisdom. They draw on three studies
(Brugman, “Wisdom and Aging”; Ardelt, “Wisdom as Expert Knowledge System”; and
Brown and Green, “The Wisdom Development Scale”) but again, their umbrella term
elides and ignores important nuances and differences in these studies.
43 As already noted, one article cited by Meeks and Jeste is a review article by Monika
Ardelt, which challenges other definitions they use. Yet we could critique both
Ardelt’s work and Meeks and Jeste’s appropriation of it a la our analysis of prosocial
attitudes and behaviors above. Ardelt’s article cites two of her own articles (Monika
Ardelt, “Wisdom and Life Satisfaction in Old Age,” The Journals of Gerontology Series
B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 52, no. 1 (1997): P15–P27; and Monika
Ardelt, “Empirical Assessment of a Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale,” Research on
Aging 25, no. 3 (2003): 275–324) in which she attempts to operationalize a definition
of wisdom. The more important of these two papers is the development of what Ardelt
calls a three-dimensional wisdom scale (3D-WS). Wisdom here is operationalized
as a latent variable of cognitive, reflective, and affective indicators. That is, wisdom
is not directly measured but is a construct of three other psychological constructs,
each of which already has established measures. Ardelt complied 114 items from
several existing scales and 18 additional items to assess the cognitive, reflective,
and affective dimensions of wisdom. By the cognitive dimension of wisdom, Ardelt
means the ability of a person to understand and comprehend the deeper meaning
and significance of “phenomena and events, particularly with regard to intrapersonal
and interpersonal matters” (Ardelt, “Empirical Assessment,” 278). The reflective
dimension, Ardelt notes, is “a prerequisite to the development of the cognitive
dimension of wisdom” (Ibid.). The affective dimension refers to the emotional state
one has when engaging the world, reflecting on oneself, or engaging with others. By
affective, Ardelt means both “feelings and acts of sympathy and compassion, and
the absence of indifferent or negative emotions and behavior toward others” (ibid.,
278–9).
From Ardelt’s description, it is easy to see the relationship between emotional
homeostasis and prosocial attitudes and behaviors. In Ardelt’s version, emotional
stability seems necessary to see clearly into the deep reality of the world, and
emotional attunement to the other also is required, not just in terms of feelings for
others or attitudes, but in action, behavior toward others. But again, much is lost in
reducing her account to these two concepts. Lastly, as noted by Ardelt herself, the
conceptual definition and the operationalized 3D-WS is being designed for large,
standardized surveys, but she does not indicate to what end and purposes such
surveys will be used.
44 Udo Dannlowski et al., “Reduced Amygdala–Prefrontal Coupling in Major
Depression: Association with MAOA Genotype and Illness Severity,” International
Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology 12, no. 1 (2009): 11–22; Andreas Heinz
et al., “Amygdala-Prefrontal Coupling Depends on a Genetic Variation of the
Serotonin Transporter,” Nature Neuroscience 8, no. 1 (2005): 20–1; Pezawas et al.,
 
Notes 233

“5-HTTLPR Polymorphism Impacts Human Cingulate-Amygdala Interactions,”

828–34.
45 Meeks and Jeste, “Neurobiology of Wisdom,” 360.
46 Ibid., 359.
47 Heinz et al., “Amygdala-Prefrontal Coupling Depends on a Genetic Variation of the
Serotonin Transporter.”
48 Meeks and Jeste, “Neurobiology of Wisdom,” 360.
49 Ibid., 359.
50 Ibid., 357.
51 Ibid. Meeks and Jeste here refer to Jean Decety and Philip Jackson, “The Functional
Architecture of Human Empathy,” Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews 3,
no. 2 (2004): 71–100.
52 Rüdiger Seitz, Janpeter Nickel, and Nina Azari, “Functional Modularity of the
Medial Prefrontal Cortex: Involvement in Human Empathy,” Neuropsychology 20,
no. 6 (2006): 743–51. This work draws on the work of Josef Perner and Birgit Lang,
“Development of Theory of Mind and Executive Control,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences
3, no. 9 (1999): 337–44. The theory behind the “theory of mind” is that the average
person carries with them a theory of mind that allows them to “theorize” about
what the person is thinking. It is a shorthand for being able to intuit the thoughts of
another person. Some thinkers at times refer it as “mind-reading.”
53 Jean Decety et al., “The Neural Bases of Cooperation and Competition: An fMRI
Investigation,” Neuroimage 23, no. 2 (2004): 744–51.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid., 749.
56 Ibid., 750.
57 James K. Rilling et al., “Neural Correlates of Social Cooperation and Non-
Cooperation as a Function of Psychopathy,” Biological Psychiatry 61, no. 11 (2007):
1260–71, quoted by Meeks and Jeste, “Neurobiology of Wisdom,” 358.
58 Jorge Moll et al., “Human Fronto-Mesolimbic Networks Guide Decisions About
Charitable Donation,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United
States of America 103, no. 42 (2006): 15623–8.
59 Rachel Bachner-Melman et al., “Dopaminergic Polymorphisms Associated with
Self-Report Measures of Human Altruism: A Fresh Phenotype for the Dopamine D4
Receptor,” Molecular Psychiatry 10, no. 4 (2005): 333.
60 Bachner-Melman et al. here cite Stephen V. Faraone et al., “Meta-Analysis of the
Association between the 7-Repeat Allele of the Dopamine D(4) Receptor Gene
and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder,” American Journal of Psychiatry 158,
no. 7 (2001): 1052–7; and Naomi Lowe et al., “Joint Analysis of the Drd5 Marker
Concludes Association with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Confined to
the Predominantly Inattentive and Combined Subtypes,” American Journal of Human
Genetics 74, no. 2 (2004): 348–56.
61 Bachner-Melman et al., “Dopaminergic Polymorphisms,” 333–5.
62 Bachner-Melman et al., cite Eric Wang et al., “The Genetic Architecture of Selection at
the Human Dopamine Receptor D4 (Drd4) Gene Locus,” American Journal of Human
Genetics 74, no. 5 (2004): 931–44.
63 Bachner-Melman, “Dopaminergic Polymorphisms,” 335.
64 One further point that Meeks and Jeste seem to miss that is in Bachner-Melman both
the prosocial genetic signature and the antisocial genetic signature seem important for
herd survival. In terms of inclusive fitness, the terms “antisocial” and “prosocial” seem
234 Notes

inappropriate. As we will see in Chapter 3, these ideas align conveniently with the
work of Paul Zak.
65 As we will see in Chapter 3, Jonathan Haidt reinforces our claim.
66 An entire issue of the Journal of Applied Philosophy (25, no. 3 [2008]) was devoted
to the question of human enhancement, including moral enhancement, as was
the October 2018 issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy (43, no. 5). One
indication that this is not a marginal conversation, a search on “moral enhancement”
in just AJOB Neuroscience yielded (in 2019) 178 citations. For a more developed
argument, see Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu, Unfit for the Future (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012).
67 Douglas, “Moral Enhancement.”
68 Persson and Savulescu, “Getting Moral Enhancement Right”; Persson and Savulescu,
“The Perils of Cognitive Enhancement,” 162–77.
69 Persson and Savulescu, Unfit for the Future.
70 Walker, “Enhancing Genetic Virtue.”
71 Walker cites several authorities for his claim: Robert Plomin et al., Behavioural
Genetics, 4th ed. (New York: Freeman, 2001); Raymond Cattell, The Inheritance
of Personality and Ability (New York: Academic Press, 1982); Lindon Eaves, Hans
Eysenck, and Nicholas Martin, Genes, Culture, and Personality: An Empirical Approach
(London: Academic Press, 1989); Kerry Jang et al., “Heritability of the Big Five
Dimensions and Their Facets: A Twin Study,” Journal of Personality 64, no. 3 (1996):
577–91; Kerry Jang et al., “Heritability of Facet-Level Traits in a Cross-Cultural
Twin Sample: Support for the Hierarchy Model of Personality,” Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology 74 (1998): 1556–65; John Loehlin, Genes and Environment in
Personality Development (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992); and John Loehlin, Lee
Willerman, and Joseph Horn, “Personality Resemblances in Adoptive Families: A
10-Year Follow-Up,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 42 (1987): 1089–99.
72 Walker, “Enhancing Genetic Virtue,” 33.
73 Walker’s selection of evidence notwithstanding, there may well be genes that
contribute to some degree to various personality traits, though it seems doubtful that
these traits will be so narrowly defined as truthfulness, justice, or caring. That is, there
will not be one gene for truthfulness, but a constellation of genes working together,
likely in response to and alongside certain environmental features, such as class,
socioeconomic status, nutritional, educational, and political features. Walker’s theory
minimizes the social/environmental factors that might contribute to personality traits,
including virtue.
74 Walker, “Enhancing Genetic Virtue,” 3. Clearly a “third” route of enhancement not
mentioned here is the disposal or “non-implantation” of those embryos with the
problematic genetic profiles.
75 Oddly enough, Walker at points refers to the state’s neutrality on the good, but in the
entire section called “Making the World Better,” he uses better as a noun, as in the
idea that we can arrive at some “univocal conception of better,” and “what if better is
different for every individual.” Walker, “Enhancing Genetic Virtue,” 36. It seems he does
this in order to avoid any claim that he wants to deploy a particular conception of the
good.
76 Walker, “Enhancing Genetic Virtue,” 41.
77 Sam Harris, as we shall see in Chapter 3, is not far behind.
 
Notes 235

78 Gerald McKenny, To Relieve the Human Condition: Bioethics, Technology, and the Body
(New York: SUNY Press, 1997).
79 David Simpson, “Francis Bacon (1561–1626),” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
https://www​.iep​.utm​.edu​/bacon/. See also Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa
Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
80 As we noted in Chapter 1. See also Jorge Moll, Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, and P. J.
Eslinger, “Morals and the Human Brain: A Working Model,” Neuroreport 14, no. 3
(2003): 299–305.
81 Insofar as our account makes clear the ways that the development of antisocial
personality disorder has been shaped by a deeply racialized and socioeconomic
history, this use of Hare’s test is a case in point of the biopolitical impact of
neuroscience. See Alix Spiegel, “Creator of Psychopathy Test Worries About Its
Use,” NPR, May 27, 2011, https://www​.npr​.org​/2011​/05​/27​/136723357​/creator​-of​
-psychopathy​-test​-worries​-about​-its​-use; and Christa McLeod, “Why California Got
it Right: Assessing Psychopaths Before Release,” Rutgers Law Record 45 (2017–2018):
145–69, https://lawrecord​.com​/files​/45​_Rutgers​_L​_Rec​_145​.pdf.
82 Warren Kinghorn, “Combat Trauma and Moral Fragmentation: A Theological
Account of Moral Injury,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 32, no. 2 (2012):
57–74; William P. Mahedy, Out of the Night: The Spiritual Journey of Vietnam Vets
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1988).
83 Maureen Dowd, “Virtuous Bankers? Really?” New York Times, November 11, 2009,
https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2009​/11​/11​/opinion​/11dowd​.html.
84 Ibid.
85 David Linden, “Addictive Personality? You Might Be a Leader,” New York Times, July
23, 2011, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2011​/07​/24​/opinion​/sunday​/24addicts​.html.
86 David Segal, “Just Manic Enough: Seeking Perfect Entrepreneurs,” New York Times,
September 18, 2010, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2010​/09​/19​/business​/19entre​.html.
87 Ibid.
88 Alexander Eichler, “Stockbrokers More Competitive, Willing To Take Risks
Than Psychopaths: Study,” The Huffington Post, September 26, 2011, https://www​
.huffingtonpost​.com​/2011​/09​/26​/stockbroker​-psychopath​_n​_981950​.html.
89 Daisy Grewal, “Rich People Have Less Compassion, Psychology Research Suggests,”
The Huffington Post, April 11, 2012, https://www​.huffpost​.com​/entry​/rich​-people​
-compassion​-mean​-money​_n​_1416091.
90 Ibid.
91 Daniel M. Bartels and David A. Pizzaro, “The Mismeasure of Morals: Antisocial
Personality Traits Predict Utilitarian Responses to Moral Dilemmas,” Cognition 121,
no. 1 (2011): 154–61.
92 Jeffrey Sachs, “The Global Economy’s Corporate Crime Wave,” Project Syndicate,
May 8, 2011, https://www​.project​-syndicate​.org​/commentary​/the​-global​-economy​-s​
-corporate​-crime​-wave.
93 Quotation from Decety et al., “The Neural Bases of Cooperation and Competition: An
fMRI Investigation,” 745. Emphasis added. See also S. J. Blakemore and C. Frith, “Self-
Awareness and Action,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 13, no. 2 (2003): 219–24;
Decety and Jackson, “The Functional Architecture of Human Empathy.” This way of
understanding agency is also the way that agency is imagined by Sam Harris as we
shall see in Chapter 3.
236 Notes

Chapter 3
1 See SJR, Scimago Journal and Country Rank, https://www​.scimagojr​.com​/journalrank​
.php​?category​=2801​&year​=2018.
2 “Jonathan Haidt’s Home Page,” NYU Stern, http://people​.stern​.nyu​.edu​/jhaidt/.
3 “Jonathan Haidt,” NYU Leonard N. Stern School of Business, https://www​.stern​.nyu​
.edu​/faculty​/bio​/jonathan​-haidt.
4 Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Find Modern True in Ancient Wisdom
(New York: Basic Books, 2006); Haidt, The Righteous Mind. Other titles include
Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good
Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting up a Generation for Failure (New York: Penguin,
2018); Jonathan Haidt, All Minus One: John Stuart Mill’s Ideas on Free Speech (New
York: Heterodox Academy, 2018); and Corey L. M. Keyes and Jonathan Haidt, eds.,
Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-Lived (Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association, 2002).
5 “Jonathan Haidt,” TED​.com​, https://www​.ted​.com​/speakers​/jonathan​_haidt. See also:
Jonathan Haidt, “Of Freedom and Fairness,” Democracy Journal 28 (Spring 2013),
https://democracyjournal​.org​/magazine​/28​/of​-freedom​-and​-fairness; Jonathan
Haidt, “We Need a Little Fear,” The New York Times, November 7, 2012, https://
www​.nytimes​.com​/2012​/11​/07​/opinion​/after​-the​-election​-fear​-is​-our​-only​-chance​
-at​-unity​.html; Jonathan Haidt and Marc Hetherington, “Look How Far We’ve
Come Apart,” The New York Times, September 17, 2012, https://campaignstops​
.blogs​.nytimes​.com​/2012​/09​/17​/look​-how​-far​-weve​-come​-apart/; Jonathan Haidt,
“Forget the Money, Follow the Sacredness,” The New York Times, March 17, 2012,
https://campaignstops​.blogs​.nytimes​.com​/2012​/03​/17​/forget​-the​-money​-follow​-the​
-sacredness/; Jonathan Haidt, “How to Get the Rich to Share the Marbles,” The New
York Times, February 20, 2012, https://campaignstops​.blogs​.nytimes​.com​/2012​/02​/20​
/how​-to​-get​-the​-rich​-to​-share​-the​-marbles/. For a complete list, see: Jonathan Haidt,
“Essays: Featured Essays/Talks by Jonathan Haidt,” The Righteous Mind, https://
righteousmind​.com​/about​-the​-author​/essays/.
6 Haidt has helpfully posted a PDF of his bibliography to his website: https://www​
.righteousmind​.com​/wp​-content​/uploads​/2012​/08​/RighteousMind​.References​.pdf.
7 Haidt, The Righteous Mind, xiv–xv.
8 Ibid., xv.
9 Western thought has been caught between two approaches to knowledge:
Rationalism and Empiricism. Kant certainly was steeped in the more rationalist
camp; however, it was Hume—the empiricist—that awoke him from his dogmatic
slumber. Yet, Haidt seems to misunderstand Jeremy Bentham. Bentham was not a
rationalist; he comes out of the tradition of empiricism—directly from Hume, as we
show in Chapter 5. Although Haidt is correct that Bentham created a moral calculus,
like other British empiricists, he grounded morality in the moral sentiments.
10 Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 26.
11 For some of his articles on disgust see: Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidt, and Clark
McCauley, “Disgust,” in Handbook of Emotions, ed. Michael Lewis, Jeannette
Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Barrett, 3rd ed. (New York: The Guilford Press, 2008);
Thalia Wheatley and Jonathan Haidt, “Hypnotic Disgust Makes Moral Judgments
More Severe,” Psychological Science 16, no. 10 (October 2005): 780–4; Simone
Schnall, Jonathan Haidt, Gerald L. Clore, and Alexander H. Jordan, “Disgust as
 
Notes 237

Embodied Moral Judgment,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34, no. 8
(2008): 1096–109; Jonathan Haidt, Clark McCauley, and Paul Rozin, “Individual
Differences in Sensitivity to Disgust: A Scale Sampling Seven Domains of Disgust
Elicitors,” Personality and Individual Differences 16, no. 5 (1994): 701–13; Yoel
Inbar, David Pizarro, Ravi Iyer, and Jonathan Haidt, “Disgust Sensitivity, Political
Conservatism, and Voting,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 3, no. 5
(2012): 537–44; Paul Rozin, Laura Lowery, Sumio Imada, and Jonathan Haidt, “The
CAD Triad Hypothesis: A Mapping Between Three Moral Emotions (Contempt,
Anger, Disgust) and Three Moral Codes (Community, Autonomy, Divinity),” Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology 76, no. 4 (1999): 574–86.
12 See Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 3–31.
13 Ibid., 3–4.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., xiv. Italics in original.
16 Ibid., 70.
17 Haidt cites here studies similar to those we analyzed in chapter one: Kevin M. Beaver,
Meghan W. Rowland, Joseph A. Schwartz, and Joseph L. Nedelec, “The Genetic
Origins of Psychopathic Personality Traits in Adult Males and Females: Results from
an Adoption-Based Study,” Journal of Criminal Justice 39 (2011): 426–32; Daniel M.
Blonigen, Brian M. Hicks, Robert F. Krueger, William G. Iacono, and Christopher
J. Patrick, “Psychopathic Personality Traits: Heritability and Genetic Overlap with
Internalizing and Externalizing Psychopathology,” Psychological Medicine 35 (2005):
637–48; and Essi Viding, James R. Blair, Terrie E. Moffitt, and Robert Plomin,
“Evidence for Substantial Genetic Risk for Psychopathy in 7-Year-Olds,” Journal of
Child Psychology and Psychiatry 46 (2005): 592–7.
18 Again, Haidt cites neurobiological studies: “Brain scanning studies confirm that
many emotional areas, including the amygdala and the vmPFC, are much less
reactive in psychopaths than in normal people,” referencing James R. Blair, “The
Amygdala and Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex in Morality and Psychopathy,” Trends
in Cognitive Sciences 22 (2007): 387–92; Kent A. Kiehl, “A Cognitive Neuroscience
Perspective on Psychopathy: Evidence for Paralimbic System Dysfunction,”
Psychiatry Research 147 (2006): 107–28; and James R. Blair, “Responsiveness to
Distress Cues in the Child with Psychopathic Tendencies,” Personality and Individual
Differences 27 (1999): 135–45. He closes by citing Hervey M. Cleckley’s The Mask of
Sanity: “For the best clinical portraits of psychopaths and their indifference to others,
including their parents, see Cleckley.”
19 Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 62–3.
20 Ibid., xiv and 114.
21 He adopts this now meme-like acronym from Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine,
and Ara Norenzayan’s 2010 article “The Weirdest People in the World?” Behavioral
and Brain Sciences 33, nos. 2–3 (2010): 61–83. Abiodun calls out the racial profile
of the cohort that Haidt engages: “Discrepancies in inclusivity can be examined
in the everyday practices of research labs, as exemplified by the ‘representative
sample’ conundrum: Oftentimes, participant samples recruited for studies fall
into the category of being W.E.I.R.D (White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and
Democratic),” in Abiodun, “Seeing Color.” The same critique applies to Harris and
Zak.
22 Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 125.
238 Notes

23 For two critiques of Lawrence Kohlberg’s six-stage theory of moral development see
John R. Snarey, “Cross-Cultural Universality of Social-Moral Development: A Critical
Review of Kohlbergian Research,” Psychological Bulletin 97, no. 2 (1985): 202–32;
and Joan G. Miller, David M. Bersoff, and Robin L. Harwood, “Perceptions of Social
Responsibilities in India and in the United States: Moral Imperatives or Personal
Decisions?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 58, no. 1 (1990): 33–47.
24 Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 131–4.
25 Ibid., 159.
26 Ibid., 134–8.
27 Ibid., 138–41.
28 Ibid., 142–6.
29 Ibid., 170, recounts the story of Bernd Brandes, who agreed to allow Armin
Meiwes to eat him in a psychosexual murder fantasy. Meiwes was convicted only of
manslaughter since the murder was consensual.
30 Ibid., 185.
31 Ibid., 218.
32 Ibid., 219–20, 314, 350. That morality and virtue are equated with prosociality
is captured when Haidt finally defines the term “morality” in his last chapter:
“Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities,
institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together
to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible” (314).
See also 335.
33 Ibid., 283.
34 Ibid., 272.
35 Ibid., 317.
36 Ibid., 270.
37 Ibid., 285.
38 Ibid., 273.
39 Ibid., 313.
40 Ibid., 214.
41 Ibid., 212.
42 Ibid., 322, 324, and 328.
43 Disclaimers notwithstanding, in his visual display of the alignment between various
political positions and the six “moral foundations” (Figures 12.2, 12.3, and 12.3), only
social conservatism is displayed as balanced. He also avers that due its “blindspot”
regarding moral capital, “liberalism . . . is not sufficient as a governing philosophy”
(Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 342) and that he believes “that libertarians are right on
many points” (Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 353). Since Haidt has made these figures
publicly available through The Righteous Mind website, we have not reproduced them
here, but we encourage readers to consult them: https://www​.righteousmind​.com​/wp​
-content​/uploads​/2012​/08​/Figures​-for​-The​-Righteous​-Mind​.pdf.
44 Throughout his book, Haidt criticizes Homo economicus as a strictly rationalist
model. We will see, however, in Chapter 4, how closely Haidt’s theory aligns with
recent developments in economic theory.
45 Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 274–9. It is hard to miss here the resonance between his
final metaphor of the hive and Bernard Mandeville’s classic 1705 poem The Fable of
the Bees, or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, which is regarded as a classic prototype of
many of the economic ideas developed by Adam Smith. See Chapter 6.
46 Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 335.
 
Notes 239

47 Ibid., 353–6.
48 See “The Righteous Mind” website: https://righteousmind​.com​/capitalism​-and​
-morality/.
49 See Jonathan Haidt and Melvin Konner, “Capitalism and Moral Evolution: A Civil
Provocation,” On Being with Krista Tippett, June 2, 2016, https://onbeing​.org​/
programs​/jonathan​-haidt​-melvin​-konner​-capitalism​-and​-moral​-evolution​-a​-civil​
-provocation/; and Jonathan Haidt, “How Capitalism Changes Conscience,” Center
for Humans and Nature, September 28, 2015, https://www​.humansandnature​.org​/
culture​-how​-capitalism​-changes​-conscience.
50 Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 135, emphasis added.
51 Ibid., 29.
52 Ibid., 33, italics in original; see also 103.
53 Ibid., 58.
54 In a section excised from The Righteous Mind before publication, Haidt notes: “If
any ethical theory can claim to be the natural, normal, default way in which human
beings think about morality, it is virtue ethics . . . [I]t fits so well with what we now
know about moral psychology. First, if the mind is like a rider (conscious controlled
processes) on an elephant (unconscious automatic processes), then only virtue ethics
addresses the whole mind.” (https://www​.righteousmind​.com​/wp​-content​/uploads​
/2012​/08​/Righteous​-Mind​-outtake​.virtue​-ethics​.pdf). In other words, virtue theory
is the one approach to ethics that could challenge Haidt’s position—but he does not
engage it.
55 The archived website for Project Reason can be found at: https://web​.archive​.org​/web​
/20100306140031​/http:/​/www​.project​-reason​.org/.
56 Sam Harris, “Science Can Answer Moral Questions,” TED​.com​, https://www​.ted​.com​
/talks​/sam​_harris​_science​_can​_answer​_moral​_questions; and Sam Harris, “Can We
Build AI Without Losing Control Over It?” TED​.com​, https://www​.ted​.com​/talks​/
sam​_harris​_can​_we​_build​_ai​_without​_losing​_control​_over​_it.
57 Some examples include: Sam Harris and Mark S. Cohen, “The Functional
Neuroanatomy of the Belief,” Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting, San Diego,
CA, October 25, 2004; Sam Harris, Sameer A. Sheth, and Mark S. Cohen, “Functional
Neuroimaging of Belief, Disbelief, and Uncertainty,” Annals of Neurology 63, no.
2 (2008): 141–7; and Sam Harris et al., “The Neural Correlates of Religious and
Nonreligious Belief,” PLoS ONE 4, no. 10 (2009): e7272.
58 Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2004); Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without
Religion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014). His most recent book The Four
Horsemen: Conversations that Sparked an Atheist Revolution (New York: Random
House, 2019), is co-authored with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and
Daniel Dennett.
59 Glenn Greenwald, “Sam Harris, the New Atheists, and Anti-Muslim Animus,” The
Guardian, April 3, 2013, https://www​.theguardian​.com​/commentisfree​/2013​/apr​/03​/
sam​-harris​-muslim​-animus. See Harris’s Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue,
co-authored with Maajid Nawaz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
60 Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New
York: Free Press, 2010). See also Sam Harris, Free Will (New York: Free Press, 2012).
61 While his work is mostly work of public philosophy, it is rather thin on
argumentation and highly simplistic its dismissal of criticisms. Space here precludes
a comprehensive critique of his philosophical positions. Instead, our aim in this
240 Notes

section is to present his work and illustrate some of the problems with his overall
philosophical stance.
62 Harris, The Moral Landscape, 2.
63 Ibid., 21.
64 Ibid., 28. Emphasis in original.
65 Harris, End of Faith, 61–2.
66 Ibid., 63.
67 Ibid., 30.
68 Ibid., 170–1.
69 Ibid., 190.
70 Harris, Moral Landscape, 62.
71 Ibid., 104.
72 Ibid., 65.
73 Harris, End of Faith, 104.
74 Ibid., 107–8.
75 Ibid., 108.
76 Ibid., 108–9.
77 Harris, Moral Landscape, 109.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid., 2–3.
81 Ibid., 191.
82 Zak, The Moral Molecule.
83 See Zak’s website: https://pauljzak​.com/; Paul Zak, “Trust, Morality – And
Oxytocin?” TED​.co​m, https://www​.ted​.com​/talks​/paul​_zak​_trust​_morality​_and​
_oxytocin.
84 Zak, The Moral Molecule.
85 Zak’s first book, Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) brought together an array of natural
and social scientists, as well as scholars of law, philosophy, and management;
it draws on evidence from neuroscience and these other domains to argue that
modern economic markets only work because most people act virtuously most of
the time.
86 Zak’s most recent book Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance
Companies (New York: AMACOM, 2017) seeks to operationalize his neuroscience.
His consulting firm, Ofactor, works with companies to do so, see: https://ofactor​.com.
87 “Paul Zak,” Claremont Graduate University, Department of Social Science, Policy,
and Evaluation, https://www​.cgu​.edu​/people​/paul​-zak/.
88 As is noted on his Claremont webpage: “Zak was one of the first scientists to
integrate neuroscience and economics into a new discipline: neuroeconomics. His
research has identified the brain processes that support such virtuous behaviors as
trustworthiness, generosity, and sacrifice, as well as those whose absence leads to
evil, vice, and conflict. He uses these results to increase flourishing by individuals,
organizations, and societies” (ibid.)
89 Zak, The Moral Molecule, 5–9.
90 Ibid., 8.
91 Paul J. Zak, Angela A. Stanton, and Sheila Ahmadi, “Oxytocin Increases Generosity
in Humans,” PloS ONE 2, no. 11 (2007): e1128. In a similar vein, see also Jorge A.
Barraza, Michael E. McCullough, Sheila Ahmadi, and Paul J. Zak, “Oxytocin Infusion
 
Notes 241

Increases Charitable Donations Regardless of Monetary Resources,” Hormones and

Behavior 60, no. 2 (2011): 148–51.
92 These pathways are not strictly biochemical or physiological pathways, but his use of
the term and the way he describes them give them an air of scientific validity.
93 Zak, The Moral Molecule, 63.
94 Ibid.
95 Ibid., 64.
96 Ibid.
97 Ibid., 75.
98 Ibid., 140–5.
99 Ibid., 138–40.
100 Ibid., 140–5, 49–51.
101 Ibid., 159. Italics in the original.
102 Ibid., 160.
103 Ibid.
104 Ibid., 164.
105 Ibid.
106 Ibid., 169.
107 Ibid.
108 Thomas B. Edsall, “How Could Human Nature Have Become This Politicized?”
New York Times, July 8, 2020, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2020​/07​/08​/opinion​/trump​
-politics​-psychology​.html.
109 Zak, The Moral Molecule, 75.

Interlude between Neuroscience and the Economic Imaginary

1 Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the
Hidden Side of Everything (New York: William Morrow and Company, 2005, revised
2007); Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic
Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance (New York: William
Morrow, 2011); Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Think Like a Freak: The Authors
of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain (New York: William Morrow, 2014); and
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, When to Rob a Bank:. . . and 131 More Warped
Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants (New York: William Morrow, 2015).
2 See “Steven D. Leavitt,” http://pricetheory​.uchicago​.edu​/levitt/.
3 See the Center for Radical Innovation for Social Change, https://centerforrisc​.org/.
4 The TGG Group, http://www​.tgggroup​.com​/index​.html.
5 Stephen J. Dubner, “The Probability that a Real-Estate Agent is Cheating You (and
Other Riddles of Modern Life),” The New York Times Magazine, August 3, 2003,
https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2003​/08​/03​/magazine​/probability​-that​-real​-estate​-agent​
-cheating​-you​-other​-riddles​-modern​-life​.html.
6 http://freakonomics​.com​/about/.
7 Rogers-Vaughn, Caring for Souls, 36.
8 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 111, 116, on Nazism and state power.
9 Ibid., 116.
10 Paul Krugman, “Who Was Milton Friedman?” The New York Review of Books,
February 15, 2007. In 1976 Friedman was quoted in Newsweek magazine saying
242 Notes

that “the elementary truth is that Great Depression was produced by government
mismanagement.” The irony, Krugman notes, is that here Friedman was faulting the
government for not intervening more directly.
11 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 116.
12 Ibid.
13 Brown, Undoing the Demos, Kindle location 1121. See also Timothy Mitchell, Rule of
Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (London: University of California Press,
2002).
14 Brown, Undoing the Demos, 1121, 1136.
15 Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2015), 119.
16 Jones, Masters of the Universe, 98.
17 Ibid., 31.
18 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 160.
19 Ibid., 218–19, citing F. A. Hayek, “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” The University of
Chicago Law Review (Spring 1949): 417–20, 421–3, 425–33.
20 Hayek, “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” 417–18. See also Lawrence J. McQuillan,
“The Courage to be Utopian,” Mises Institute, https://mises​.org​/library​/courage​-be​
-utopian.
21 Rogers-Vaughn, Caring for Souls, 171, citing Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal
Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
22 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 244.
23 Orlando Letelier, “The ‘Chicago Boys’ in Chile: Economic Freedom’s Awful Toll,” The
Nation, September 21, 2016, originally published August 1976, available at: https://
www​.thenation​.com​/article​/archive​/the​-chicago​-boys​-in​-chile​-economic​-freedoms​
-awful​-toll/. See also Naomi Klein, Shock Doctrine: The Arise of Disaster Capitalism
(New York: Picador, 2008); and Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public
Action (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
24 For detailed analyses of the effects on most Chileans, see: Peter Winn, ed., Victims
of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973–2002
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); and Warwick Murray, Lida Kousary,
and Jonathan Barton, “Land of Miracles? A Critical Analysis of Poverty Reduction
Strategies in Chile, 1975–2005,” International Development Planning Review 31, no. 2
(June 2009): 127–63.
25 Rogers-Vaughn, Caring for Souls, 110–12.
26 Ibid., 111. See also Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of
Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).
27 Rogers-Vaughn, Caring for Souls, 112, citing Sakia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and
Complexity in the Global Economy (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); and
Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge, UK: Polity
Press, 2004).
28 Rogers-Vaughn, Caring for Souls, 113.
29 Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason, 26.
30 Rogers-Vaughn, Caring for Souls, 113.
31 Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason, 26. See also Rogers-Vaughn, Caring for
Souls, 116, citing Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador,
2008), 12–13; and https://thedisorderofthings​.com​/2015​/06​/18​/capitalism​-a​-history​
-of​-violence/.
 
Notes 243

32 See: ACLU, “Mass Incarceration,” https://www​.aclu​.org​/issues​/smart​-justice​/mass​

-incarceration.
33 See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010); Kara Gotsch and Vinay Basti,
“Capitalizing on Mass Incarceration: U.S. Growth in Private Prisons,” August 2, 2018,
https://www​.sentencingproject​.org​/publications​/capitalizing​-on​-mass​-incarceration​-u​
-s​-growth​-in​-private​-prisons; The Federal Bureau of Prisons, “Inmate Race,” updated
October 16, 2021, https://www​.bop​.gov​/about​/statistics​/statistics​_inmate​_race​.jsp. See
also Ava DuVernay’s 2016 film, 13th.
34 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 88, 89. [First edition 1944].
35 See Ravallion, “The Two Poverty Enlightenments,” 2011.
36 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 91.
37 Robert Bucholz and Newton Key, Early Modern England, 1485–1714: A Narrative
History (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 176. As Ava DuVernay makes clear
in her film 13th, the first way that southern Whites moved to police freed Blacks after
the Civil War was to charge them with crimes of movement (loitering) and idleness
(vagrancy). Parallel to our account in Chapter 6, this removed them from a state of
freedom and returned them to a state of confinement by the state.
38 Intriguingly, Francis Bacon was a major drafter of the 1601 Poor Laws. See Gladys
Boone, The Poor Law of 1601, with Some Consideration of Modern Developments of
the Poor Law Problem, unpublished MA Thesis, University of Birmingham, United
Kingdom, 1917, 81, https://etheses​.bham​.ac​.uk​/id​/eprint​/6134/.
39 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 90.
40 Ibid., 82. Polanyi notes that Speenhamland set the rates based on an assumption
that “bread” cost one-third of a family’s income—the same metric that was used to
establish the poverty thresholds in the 1960s (where “bread” had been replaced with
“food”). That metric is still in place today.
41 Polanyi opines that if the poor/workers had not been prevented from organizing, it
might have worked.
42 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 100–4; and Richard H. Tawney, Religion and the
Rise of Capitalism: An Historical Study (London: John Murray, 1922), 263.
43 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 109.
44 R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century. Introduction by
Lawrence Stone (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967), 260.
45 Ibid., 268.
46 Ibid., 269.
47 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); see also Kelly Johnson, Fear of Beggars:
Stewardship and Poverty in Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans
Publishers, 2007), 79. According to the National Archives of the United Kingdom,
£136,00 in 1540 has the purchasing power of £57,304,579.20 in 2017.
48 Without a note of irony, sixteenth-century Anglican cleric Joseph Townsend—who
we will meet further in Chapter 5—notes the role of the dispossession of the Catholic
Church in the creation of the problem of the poor, but in the same breath, due to his
clear anti-Catholic sentiments, seems to blame the church for the poor for sustaining
lazy, indigent people in the first place (Townsend, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, By
a Well-Wisher to Mankind (1786), Section III, https://socialsciences​.mcmaster​.ca​/econ​
/ugcm​/3ll3​/townsend​/poorlaw​.html).
244 Notes

49 Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the
Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2000).
50 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 81.
51 Ibid., 72.
52 Ibid., 74.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid., 75.
55 Ibid., 75–6.
56 Ibid., 79.
57 This is concurrent, of course, with the commodification of Africans in the
development of chattel slavery. Although these two streams emerge around the same
time point (late 1400s), the reconfiguration of English citizens as commodities takes
almost three centuries. Notably, the same moral configurations are applied to both
Africans and the English “undeserving” poor, although the violent consequences for
Africans were generally more severe. Similar parallels could be traced with regard to
the commodification of land in Africa and other colonial locations and the enclosure
of the commons.
58 Ibid., 79, 81, 82.
59 Ibid., 76.
60 Ted Bergstrom and Robert F. Schoeni, “Income Prospects and Age-at-Marriage,”
Journal of Population Economics 9, no. 2 (1996): 115–30.
61 Tawney, The Agrarian Problem, 105–6.

Chapter 4
1 Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 150.
2 Brown, Undoing the Demos, Kindle location 52–65.
3 Ibid.
4 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 161.
5 Kathryn Blanchard, The Protestant Ethic or the Spirit of Capitalism: Christians,
Freedom, and Free Markets (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010), 162. Blanchard
notes, “neoliberal economics is a particular school of ethics.” David Harvey notes: “In
so far as neoliberalism values market exchange as ‘an ethic in itself, capable of acting
as a guide to all human action, and substituting for all previously held ethical beliefs,’
it emphasizes the significance of contractual relations in the marketplace” (Harvey, A
Brief History of Neoliberalism, 3).
6 Brown, drawing on the work of Ronen Shamir (“The Age of Responsibilization:
On Market-Embedded Morality,” Economy and Society 37, no. 1 (February 2008):
1), defines “responsibilization” as the deployment of sole responsibility for one’s
condition upon the worker, the indigent person, or the “entity at the end of the
pipeline.” See Brown, Undoing the Demos, Kindle location 1903.
7 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 270–1.
8 Press release, NobelPrize​.or​g, Nobel Media AB 2019, October 13, 1992, https://www​
.nobelprize​.org​/prizes​/economic​-sciences​/1992​/press​-release/.
9 The Becker-Posner Blog is now archived at the University of Chicago. See: https://
www​.becker​-posner​-blog​.com/.
 
Notes 245

10 See “George J. Stigler, 1911–1991,” The Library of Economics and Liberty, https://
www​.econlib​.org​/library​/Enc​/bios​/Stigler​.html.
11 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 222.
12 Brown, Undoing the Demos, Kindle location 326–32. See also Foucault, Birth of
Biopolitics, 219; Ross Emmett, “Did the Chicago School Reject Frank Knight?
Assessing Frank Knight’s Place in the Chicago School of Economics Tradition,” in
Frank Knight and the Chicago School in American Economics (London: Routledge,
2009). As Emmett notes: “Chicago’s training of students is designed to inculcate a
price-theoretic way of seeing the world” (ibid., 147).
13 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 270.
14 Ibid., 268–9.
15 Gary Becker, The Economics of Discrimination, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1957).
16 Gary Becker, “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach,” The Journal of
Political Economy 76 (1968): 169–217.
17 Gary Becker, A Treatise on the Family (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1998); Gary Becker and H. Gregg Lewis, “On the Interaction between the Quantity
and Quality of Children,” The Journal of Political Economy 81 (1973): S279–S288;
Gary S. Becker, Elizabeth Landes, and Robert T. Michael, “An Economic Analysis of
Marital Instability,” Journal of Political Economy 85 (1977): 1141–88.
18 Gary Becker and Kevin M. Murphy, “A Theory of Rational Addiction,” Journal of
Political Economy 96, no. 4 (August 1988): 657–700.
19 Gary S. Becker, “The Economic Way of Looking at Life,” Nobel Prize Lecture, 1992.
See also: Gary S. Becker and Guity Nashat Becker, The Economics of Life: From
Baseball to Affirmative Action to Immigration, How Real-World Issues Affect Our
Everyday Life (London: McGraw-Hill, 1998).
20 Blanchard, The Protestant Ethic, 146–7.
21 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 240.
22 Rogers-Vaughn, Caring for Souls, 43, quoting William Davies, The Limits of
Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition (London: SAGE
Publications, 2014), 20.
23 Theodore W. Schultz, “Investment in Human Capital,” The American Economic
Review 51, no. 1 (1961): 1–17.
24 Ibid., 3.
25 Ibid., 2.
26 Per Foucault, prior to American neoliberalism, labor was only analyzed as a factor
of time or in terms of numbers, that is, “the possibility of employing more hours of
labor thus made available to capital. Consequently, there is a neutralization of the
nature itself of labor, to the advantage of this single quantitative variable of hours of
work and time” (Birth of Biopolitics, 220).
27 Schultz, “Investment in Human Capital,” 13.
28 Gary S. Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special
Reference to Education, 2nd ed. (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research,
1975).
29 Becker opens Part I of the book with an epigraph from Alfred Marshall: “The most
valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings.” Notice, however, how Becker
elides the terms—Marshall is referring to external capital invested in human beings; for
Becker, persons are only referred to as human capital. In his second footnote, he also
246 Notes

credits Adam Smith and J. S. Mill as pioneers of this concept as well as “the brilliant
work which greatly influenced” his own thinking by Milton Friedman (ibid., 15).
30 Ibid., 245.
31 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 224.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 225.
34 Brown, Undoing the Demos, Kindle location 418. See also Rogers-Vaughn, Caring
for Souls, 44 and 2; and Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1987).
35 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 225.
36 Luis Rayo and Gary Becker, “Habits, Peers, and Happiness: An Evolutionary
Perspective,” American Economic Review 97, no. 2 (2008): 487–91. Becker does this
throughout his corpus. For example, describing the desires that underlie preferences
he again employs traditional language of virtues and vices, such as “health, prestige,
sensual pleasure, benevolence, or envy” (Don Browning, “Egos without Selves:
A Theological-Ethical Critique of the Family Theory of the Chicago School of
Economics,” Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 14 [Autumn 1994]: 130, citing
Gary Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior [Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2008], 5).
37 Rayo and Becker, “Habits, Peers, and Happiness,” 487.
38 Ibid., emphasis added. As a mathematical equation, the “happiness function”
continues, as we will see, “Knight’s belief that economists study the form of human
behavior, not its content” (Blanchard, The Protestant Ethic, 145).
39 Rayo and Becker, “Habits, Peers, and Happiness,” 487.
40 Ibid., 487–8.
41 Ibid., 488.
42 Ibid., 490.
43 Ibid., 489–90.
44 Translation: “There’s No Disputing or Accounting for Taste.” Becker and Stigler, “De
Gustibus non est Disputandum,” The American Economic Review 67, no. 2 (March
1977), 76–90. This essay was later expanded into Becker’s book, Accounting for Tastes
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). See Ross B. Emmett, “Frank
Knight and the Chicago School,” paper presented at the Becker Friedman Institute for
Economic Research, The University of Chicago “The Legacy of Chicago Economics”
(October 5, 2015), 4, footnote 8; the other key statement is Milton Friedman’s “The
Methodology of Positive Economics,” discussed below.
45 Ibid., 76.
46 Ross Emmett holds that Frank Knight would have strongly opposed Becker
and Stigler’s position. He has penned a riposte, in the voice of Knight, in “De
Gustibus Est Disputandum: Frank H. Knight’s Reply to George Stigler and Gary
Becker’s ‘De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum’ With an Introductory Essay,” Journal of
Economic Methodology 13, no. 1 (2006): 97–111.
47 Becker and Stigler, “De Gustibus,” 76.
48 Ibid., 77–8.
49 Ibid., 81. Or, as he states clearly: “We should state explicitly, to avoid any
misunderstanding, that ‘harmful’ means only that the derivatives in [equation 9]
are negative, and not that the addiction harms others, nor, as we have just indicated,
that it is unwise for addicts to consume such commodities” (81, footnote 9). In
economics, elasticity refers to the degree to which patterns in consumption change
 
Notes 247

according to a change in price. For elastic demands, consumption changes greatly

according to price. For inelastic demands, on the other hand, consumption does not
vary as much according to price.
50 Ibid., 83.
51 Ibid., 76, emphasis added.
52 See Gary S. Becker, “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach,” in Essays in
the Economics of Crime and Punishment, ed. Gary S. Becker and William M. Landes
(Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1974).
53 Ibid., 2.
54 Ibid., 3, 6. As should come as no surprise, his calculus suggests that fines—or
economic penalties—are the most optimal form of punishment or deterrent.
55 See also Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 253.
56 Becker, “Crime and Punishment,” 6.
57 Ibid., 11, 12, 17, et passim.
58 See Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 252–9.
59 Ibid., 41.
60 Becker, “Crime and Punishment,” 2.
61 Ibid.
62 Rayo and Becker, “Habits, Peers, and Happiness,” 487.
63 Ibid., Becker and Rayo appear to be drawing on the following articles for their
biological information: Shane Frederick and George Loewenstein, “Hedonic
Adaptation,” in Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, ed. Daniel
Kahneman, Ed Diener, and Norbert Schwarz (New York: Russell Sage Foundation),
351–401; Eric R. Kandel, James H. Schwartz, and Thomas M. Jessell, Principles of
Neural Science (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000); and Arthur J. Robson, “The Biological
Basis of Economic Behavior,” Journal of Economic Literature 39, no. 1 (2001): 11–33.
64 Rayo and Becker, “Habits, Peers, and Happiness,” 487.
65 Ibid., 488. Relative to our account of the neurobiological narrative of virtue in
Chapter 2, they state importantly, “The theoretical work on happiness is far less
abundant, but has been expanding in recent years. A central goal of this literature is
to provide a biological foundation for the observed empirical patterns” (488, emphasis
added).
66 Ibid., 488.
67 Luis Rayo and Gary S. Becker, “Evolutionary Efficiency and Happiness,” Journal of
Political Economy 115, no. 2 (2007): 302–37.
68 Ibid., 303.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid., 304.
71 Rogers-Vaughn highlights the Darwinian character of neoliberalism, pointing
to the violence inherit in a construct of “survival of the fittest” (Caring for Souls,
45). As we will see in Chapter 5, Darwin inherits this metaphor from Townsend.
Rogers-Vaughn cites Susan Searls Giroux on the Sadean (a la Marquis de Sade)
character of neoliberalism: “The essential plot ingredients of Sade’s malevolent,
imaginary universe are uncannily recapitulated in the hard realities of a racially
driven neoliberalized society that I have already sketched above: ruthless, efficient
instrumentalization; the severing of all social bonds; compulsory amoralism;
violence transvalued as pleasure, luxury, indulgence, spectacle; icy, emotionless
judgement duly capable of producing endless corpses; erotic excess that hardens
into indifference and apathy; relentless social fragmentation and violent isolation;
248 Notes

the dissolution of thought; the exercise of force and domination that quickly betrays
itself as masochistic self-destruction. A tale of two sovereignties—the sadistic and the
neoliberalized—both predicated on absolute negation” (Caring for Souls, 45, citing
Giroux, “Sade’s Revenge: Racial Neoliberalism and the Sovereignty of Negation,”
Patterns of Prejudice 44, no. 1 (2010): 1–26 at 17).
72 Rayo and Becker, “Evolutionary Efficiency and Happiness,” 304.
73 The single reference to freedom found in the essays cited in this chapter comes on
the final page of “De Gustibus”: “Addiction, advertising, etc., affect not tastes with
the endless degrees of freedom they provide, but prices and incomes, and are subject
therefore to the constraints imposed by the theorem on negatively inclined demand
curves, and other results” (89). Similarly, Stigler notes that “Things like justice and
freedom require ethical evaluation and judgement, whereas economic principles
should be straightforward and unencumbered by morality” (Blanchard, The
Protestant Ethic, 153). It thus seems no small irony that in 2007, Becker was awarded
the National Medal of Freedom.
74 Blanchard, The Protestant Ethic, 154.
75 Ibid., 161.
76 Brown, Undoing the Demos, 1086; As we will see, Friedman posits economic freedom
as the necessary precondition for political freedom.
77 Blanchard, The Protestant Ethic, 146–7.
78 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 270.
79 Ibid., 259–60.
80 Foucault sees Becker’s focus on crime as an instance of the intersection of the
“economization of everything” and the restructuring of political reason in market
terms. He first connects it to the longer history of capitalism, noting that prima
facie, the neoliberal analysis of crime “at first appears to be the simplest possible
return to the eighteenth-century reformers like Beccaria and especially Bentham”
(ibid., 248). Yet he marks important intertwinings of Homo penalis, Homo
criminalis, and Homo economicus (ibid., 250–3). It seems the coincidence of the
neoliberal reconfiguration of crime and policing is less than coincidental with the
extraordinary rise in incarceration and shift to private, for-profit prisons in the
United States beginning in the 1980s, a shift also connected with the neuroscientific
narrative of vice.
81 Daniel B. Klein and Ryan Daza, “Gary Becker,” Econ Journal Watch 10, no. 3
(September 2013): 286. Becker cites Milton Friedman as one of the most significant
influences on his work: “He was by far the greatest living teacher I have ever had.”
82 Krugman, “Who Was Milton Friedman?”; “Milton Friedman, a Giant Among
Economists,” The Economist, November 23, 2006; and William L. Davis, Bob Figgins,
David Hedengren, and Daniel B. Klein, “Economic Professors’ Favorite Economic
Thinkers, Journals, and Blogs,” Econ Journal Watch 8, no. 2 (2011): 126–46.
83 “Milton Friedman—Facts,” Nobelprize​.or​g, Nobel Media AB 2019, https://www​
.nobelprize​.org​/prizes​/economic​-sciences​/1976​/friedman​/facts/.
84 Krugman, “Who was Milton Friedman,” 7. Krugman notes that the pamphlet was
originally a publication of the Foundation for Economic Education, an organization
with the founder of the John Birch Society on its board and which “spread a
libertarian gospel so uncompromising it bordered on anarchism.”
85 J. Daniel Hammond, “Milton Friedman [Ideological Profiles of the Economics
Laureates],” Econ Journal Watch 10, no. 4 (September 2013): 330.
86 Ibid., 327.
 
Notes 249

87 Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2002, Kindle edition), Kindle location 14.
88 Ibid., 33.
89 Ibid., 51.
90 Milton Friedman, “Neoliberalism and Its Prospects,” originally published in Farmand
2 (1951): 89–93. It is interesting to note, however, that in Capitalism and Freedom, he
uses the example of exchange between the islands of Robinson Crusoe households—
model of cooperation and peaceableness (Kindle location 172). Not only is this echoed
later in the work of Zak and Haidt; it echoes Daniel Defoe, as we will see in Chapter 6.
91 Julian Reiss, “Review of The Methodology of Positive Economics: Reflections on the
Milton Friedman Legacy, ed. Uskali Mäki,” Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and
Economics 3, no. 2 (Autumn 2010): 103–10.
92 Milton Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” in Essays in Positive
Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 3–16, 30–43.
93 Ibid., 4. See also Reiss, “Review of The Methodology of Positive Economics,” 104.
94 Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” 3.
95 Ibid., 5.
96 Krugman, “Who Was Milton Friedman?” As outlined in the Interlude, Friedman
is (in)famous for advising Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. See: Andre Gunder
Frank, “Economic Genocide in Chile: Open Letter to Milton Friedman and Arnold
Harberger,” Economic and Political Weekly 11, no. 24 (1976): 880–8.
97 Friedman, “Neoliberalism and Its Prospects,” 2.
98 Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, Kindle location 63–70.
99 Ibid.
100 Friedman, “Neoliberalism and Its Prospects,” 8.
101 Friedman, Capitalism as Freedom, Kindle location 95–6, 100. See also Milton
Friedman and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (New York:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1980), ix–x; and Hammond, “Milton Friedman,” 330.
102 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 246–7.
103 Ibid.
104 Friedman, “Neoliberalism and Its Prospects,” 2.
105 Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, Kindle location 140–9.
106 Blanchard, The Protestant Ethic, 125. See also Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 8.
107 Defending this thin and often counterfactual anthropology is the gist of “The
Methodology of Positive Economics.”
108 Blanchard, The Protestant Ethic, 128.
109 Ibid., 131.
110 Friedman, “Neoliberalism and Its Prospects,” 4. See also Blanchard, The Protestant
Ethic, 128.
111 See especially Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 270–1.
112 Ibid., 173, 176.
113 Don Ross, “Game Theory,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021
Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta.
114 “Game Theorists Who Have Received the Nobel Prize,” http://lcm​.csa​.iisc​.ernet​.in​/
gametheory​/nobel​.html.
115 Krugman, “Who Was Milton Friedman.”
116 Frank Knight, “The Ethics of Competition,” in Selected Essays by Frank H. Knight, ed.
R. B. Emmett, 61–93 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1923] 1999); see also
Emmett, “Did the Chicago School Reject Frank Knight,” 5.
250 Notes

117 Foucault names Henry Calvert Simons as “the father of the Chicago School” citing
his 1934 article “A Positive Program for Laissez-Faire” as “the first, fundamental
text of this American neoliberalism” (Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 216). Others
name Knight. Some analysts trace more discontinuity within the Chicago School
than continuity. Dierdre McCloskey, for example, differentiates what she calls “the
Good Old Chicago School” of Frank Knight, Jacob Viner and Ronald Coase from
the “new” Chicago School of Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Gary Becker
(Steven G. Medema, “Adam Smith and the Chicago School,” in The Elgar Companion
to Adam Smith, ed. Jeffery Young [Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishers, 2010]). As
we will see in Chapter 6, these two camps interpret Adam Smith very differently. For
a critical assessment of both sides of this claim, see Ross Emmett, “Did the Chicago
School Reject Frank Knight?”
118 Chris Leitner, “Frank Knight’s Economic and Social Theology,” Le Québécois Libre
326 (November 15, 2014), http://www.quebecoislibre.org/14/141115-8.html.
119 Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (Boston and New York: Houghton
Mifflin Co., The Riverside Press, 1921).
120 Emmett, “Did the Chicago School Reject Frank Knight,” 4. Interestingly, like
Hollingshood’s original study, The Economic Organization was not formally
published until 1951 by August Kelley, Inc., but rather was circulated in “typed and
mimeographed editions” for two decades (Ross Emmett, “Frank H. Knight and The
Economic Organization,” James Madison College, Michigan State University Working
Papers Series, Working Paper No.: 0405-01, [April 2005]: 1). Unlike Hollingswood,
by the time The Economic Organization was published, Knight no longer held some
of the views expressed in the book (ibid., 3). It was Knight’s opinion some years later
that he had not authorized Kelley to publish it and that any copyright it held “was a
pure invention” (ibid., 4).
121 Frank Knight, The Economic Organization (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1951).
Emmett notes that “Knight’s role as creator of the Chicago price theory tradition
is symbolized today by the fact that the first chapter of The Economic Organization
(‘Social Economic Organization’) remains on the reading list for Gary Becker’s and
Kevin Murphy’s Econ 301 class at Chicago today” (“Did Frank Knight,” 4). Precursor
chapters and materials that eventually ended up in the 1933 volume trace back to
at least 1921, and perhaps earlier (Emmett, “Frank H. Knight and the Economic
Organization,” 6).
122 Emmett, “Did the Chicago School Reject Frank Knight?” 4.
123 Ross Emmett, “The Passage from Classical to Neo-Liberalism: Frank H. Knight’s Role
Re-Considered,” March 6, 2011, https://papers​.ssrn​.com​/sol3​/papers​.cfm​?abstract​_id​
=1779102.
124 Emmett, “Did the Chicago School Reject Frank Knight?” 10.
125 Emmett, “The Passage from Classical to Neo-Liberalism,” 6.
126 Blanchard, The Protestant Ethic, 91.
127 Lionel Robbins, Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (London:
Macmillan, 1932), 21. Here Robbins is rejecting a definition of “economics as the
study of the causes of material welfare,” 9.
128 While certain economists in the 1930s–1960s might have thought they were
restricting analyses to traditionally “economic” choices, with Becker, this “economic
science of human behavior” is then extended to everything.
129 Frank Knight, “Ethics and the Economic Interpretation,” The Quarterly Journal of
Economics 36, no. 3 (1922): 454–81. Although a prolific scholar, after the mid-1930s,
 
Notes 251

Knight only published a handful of articles on economic theory (Emmett, “Frank

Knight and the Chicago School,” 3).
130 Knight, “Ethics and the Economic Interpretation,” 474.
131 Ibid.
132 Ibid., 473.
133 Ibid., 455.
134 Ibid., 475.
135 Ibid., 473, fn. 1.
136 Interestingly, Knight’s distinction here between “conduct” and general human action
mirrors Thomas Aquinas’s fundamental distinction between “human acts” and “acts
of man.” See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I-I, q. 1. Oddly, while Knight holds
to such vestiges of classical understandings of moral theory, he rejects others, in
particular the fundamental premise of both Aristotelian and later utilitarian or, in his
phrase, “hedonistic” moralities, that the goal of human behavior and the moral life is
happiness (see Knight, “Ethics and the Economic Interpretation,” 469). What is more,
“in regard to ‘real ends,’ we should note the futile quest of a Summum Bonum by
ethical thinkers” (ibid., 472, footnote 8).
137 Ibid., 455. Presaging Robbins by a decade, Knight notes that the fundamental debate
in economics is “whether the science is properly concerned with facts and cause-
and-effect relations, or with ‘welfare.’ In other provinces of science such controversies
would seem absurd” (ibid., 456).
138 Ibid., 454.
139 Ibid., 456. Clearly, Knight presumes the givenness of the “fact-value” distinction, the
genesis of which (as we will see in Chapter 6) lies over a century before him.
140 Ibid., 467. Throughout the essay, he takes issue with various forms of biological
warrants.
141 Ibid., 472–3, emphasis added. Here we see the beginnings of Becker’s “economization
of everything.”
142 Blanchard, The Protestant Ethic, 95.
143 Ibid., 92.
144 Knight, “Ethics and the Economic Interpretation,” 474.
145 Ibid., 475.
146 Robert Nelson, “Frank Knight and Original Sin,” The Independent Review 6, no. 1
(Summer 2001): 7.
147 Knight, “Ethics and the Economic Interpretation,” 475.
148 Ibid., 459.
149 Ibid.
150 Ibid.
151 Ibid., 472, 473.
152 Ibid., 473.
153 Ibid., 470.
154 Frank Knight, Selected Essays by Frank H. Knight, vol. 1, ed. Ross Emmett (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999), 28–9. See also Knight, “Ethics and the Economic
Interpretation,” 474.
155 Knight, “Ethics and the Economic Interpretation,” 457.
156 Blanchard, The Protestant Ethic, 112.
157 Emmett, “Frank Knight and the Economic Organization,” 5, 11–12.
158 Frank Knight, The Ethics of Competition (New York: Routledge, 2017), 5.
159 Knight, “Ethics and the Economic Interpretation,” 459.
252 Notes

160 Ibid.
161 Emmett, “Frank Knight and the Chicago School,” 3.
162 George J. Stigler, “Frank Hyneman Knight,” Working Paper 37. Working Papers
Chicago, IL: Center for the Study of the Economy and the State, The University of
Chicago, 1985; cited in Emmett, “Frank Knight and the Chicago School,” 3.
163 Blanchard, The Protestant Ethic, 92.
164 Nelson, “Frank Knight and Original Sin,” 7. Nelson notes that Knight labeled such
thinking as mere rationalist and “scientistic propaganda”: “The plain fact is that
a fully rational ‘science’ of human behavior, in the literal sense, is impossible.” Or
again, a “natural or positive science of human conduct” is “an absurdity” (Knight, The
Economic Organization, 258, 260, 261).
165 Emmett, “Did the Chicago School Reject Frank Knight?” 5.
166 Nelson, “Frank Knight and Original Sin,” 20.
167 Ibid., 20–1. See also Knight, The Economic Organization, 265, 258.
168 Ibid., 7.
169 Ibid.
170 As he tellingly states:
Economics has always treated desires or motives as facts, of a character susceptible
to statement in propositions, and sufficiently stable during the period of the activity
which they prompt to be treated as causes of that activity in a scientific sense. It has
thus viewed life as a process of satisfying desires. If this is true then life is a matter
of economics; only if it is untrue, or a very inadequate view of the truth, only if the
“creation of value” is distinctly more than the satisfaction of desire, is there room for
ethics in a sense logically separable from economics. (Knight, “Ethics and the Economic
Interpretation,” 456–7)

171 Knight, “Ethics and the Economic Interpretation,” 456.

172 Emmett, “Frank Knight and the Chicago School,” 6.
173 Ibid.
174 Tim Robertson, “We Are All Neoliberals Now,” Eureka Street, April 20, 2017, https://
www​.eurekastreet​.com​.au​/article​/we​-are​-all​-neoliberals​-now.
175 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 242.
176 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 65–6.

Chapter 5
1 Irene C. L. Ng and Lu-Ming Tseng, “Learning to be Sociable: The Evolution of
Homo Economicus,” The American Journal of Economics and Society 67, no. 2 (2008):
265–86.
2 Lysander Spooner, Vices are Not Crimes, 1875, https://static1​.squarespace​.com​/static​
/55a​3c83​3e4b​07c3​1913e6eae​/t​/55a​5236​8e4b​0994​cd9068873​/1436885864688​/Vices​
+Are​+Not​+Crimes​.pdf.
3 Brown, Undoing the Demos, Kindle location 721, 735–43.
4 Ibid.
5 Christopher Macleod, “John Stuart Mill,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Summer 2020 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/
sum2020​/entries​/mill/. Oddly, in this essay, Macleod does not discuss Mill’s work on
political economy.
 
Notes 253

6 See Nicholas Capaldi, John Stuart Mill: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2004). See also Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand
(London: Atlantic Books, 2008).
7 Macleod, “John Stuart Mill.”
8 See John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being
a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific
Investigation, 8th ed. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1882), 592.
9 Terence Ball, “James Mill,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter
2018 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/win2018​/
entries​/james​-mill.
10 As Ball notes, from 1802 to 1819, Mill authored “some 1,400 editorials [as well as]
hundreds of substantial articles and reviews.”
11 For the transition of natural theology and natural philosophy into science, see
especially Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion. Chapter three, “Signs and
Causes,” is of particular note as it details the transition as it begins to take form in the
early modern period. Also relevant is Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical
and Contemporary Issues (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1997), 49–75.
12 Mill, A System of Logic, 592.
13 Charles Douglas, John Stuart Mill: A Study of His Philosophy (Edinburgh: William
Blackwood and Sons, 1895), 119.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 122–30.
16 Ibid., 114.
17 Ibid., 152.
18 John Stuart Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy and of
the Principal Philosophical Questions Discussed in His Writings, ed. J. M. Robson
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 208. It is interesting that Mill mentions
permanence, which suggests that the self perceives itself as enduring through time.
However, the permanence seems not to be a “positive attribute,” but rather seems to
be more akin to what Kant means in the schematism as a kind of a priori of “interior”
experience.
19 Mill, A System of Logic, 598–9.
20 Ibid., 599.
21 Ibid., 582–3.
22 Ibid., 582.
23 See John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed.
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 75.
24 John Stuart Mill, The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (Rockville, MD: Arc Manor,
2008), 168–9.
25 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, 2nd ed., ed. George Sher (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett
Publishing, 2001), end of ch. 4.
26 Douglas, John Stuart Mill, 134; Mill, A System of Logic, 550.
27 Douglas, John Stuart Mill, 136.
28 Ibid.
29 Mill, A System of Logic, 584.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid., 602.
32 Ibid., 543.
33 Ibid., 604.
254 Notes

34 Ibid., 607.
35 Ibid., 653–4.
36 Ibid., 653.
37 Ibid., ch. 7, section 7, 658. As with Becker, Mill employs the language of the virtue
tradition, locating happiness as the goal of even the science of ethology. Though Mill
similarly changes the content of the terms in deploying the language, he is much
closer to the virtue tradition than Becker.
38 Ibid., 656–7.
39 Jeremy Bentham referred to his panopticon as “a mill for grinding rogues honest, and
idle men industrious,” in a letter to a French correspondent. See Bentham, “To Jaques
Pierre Brissot.” 342.
40 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 11–35. Recently, MacIntyre has shifted his language from
emotivism to expressivism. See MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflict of Modernity.
41 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 63–5.
42 Mill, A System of Logic, 658.
43 Joseph Persky, “Retrospectives: The Ethology of Homo Economicus,” The Journal of
Economic Perspectives 9, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 221–31.
44 Mill, A System of Logic, 657. For Hume, “a proposition of which the predicate is
expressed by the words ought or should be, is generically different from one which is
expressed by is or will be.”
45 John Stuart Mill, “On the Definition of Political Economy, and on the Method of
Investigation Proper to It,” London and Westminster Review October 1836. Essays on
Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green,
Reader & Dyer, 1874), 312–13.
46 Mill, “On the Definition of Political Economy,” 310–11.
47 Ibid., 325–6.
48 Ibid., 326.
49 Persky, “Retrospectives: The Ethology of Homo Economicus,” 21.
50 Mill, “On the Definition of Political Economy,” 321.
51 Mill, A System of Logic, 624.
52 Mill, “On the Definition of Political Economy,” 322. See Brown, Undoing the Demos,
Kindle location 1388–95.
53 Brown, Undoing the Demos, Kindle location 1367.
54 Ibid., 1367–82.
55 Michael Quinn, “Mill on Poverty, Population, and Poor Relief: Out of Bentham and
Malthus?” Revue d’études benthamiennes (2008): 4. As we noted earlier, Mill’s person
is Locke’s person, and here again they align. See, e.g., Christian Sonk, “John Locke
Publishes His Plan to Reform the Poor Laws,” Bringing the Past to Virtual Life blog,
https://hist235​.hist​.sites​.carleton​.edu​/timeline​/john​-locke​-publishes​-his​-plan​-to​
-reform​-the​-poor​-laws//.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.
58 Brown, Undoing the Demos, Kindle location 1367–82.
59 James E. Crimmins, “Jeremy Bentham,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Summer 2019 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/
archives​/sum2019​/entries​/bentham.
60 Ibid.
61 Deirdre McCloskey, “Adam Smith, the Last of the Former Virtue Ethicists,” History of
Political Economy 40, no. 1 (2008): 43–4.
 
Notes 255

62 Douglas, John Stuart Mill, 178.

63 Mary Poovey notes that even toward the end of the eighteenth century, Bentham had
already wanted to move away from the more theological utilitarianism of Hutcheson
and Malthus and to a more secular utilitarianism by giving numerical value to
the various pleasures to stand in as markers of utility. See Poovey, A History of the
Modern Fact, 279, 282–4.
64 Douglas, John Stuart Mill, 179.
65 This is a quote that Bentham may have used, but it comes from a very lengthy title
from Hutcheson, “An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in
Two Treatises, in which the Principles of the late Earl of Shaftesbury are Explained
and Defended against the Fable of the Bee: And the Ideas of Moral Good and Evil are
Established, according to the Sentiments of the Ancient Moralists, with an Attempt to
Introduce a Mathematical Calculation on Subjects of Morality,” in Leslie Stephen, The
English Utilitarians, vol. 1 (London: Duckworth and Co., 1902), 178.
66 Quoted in Stephen, The English Utilitarians, 178. Emphasis added.
67 Ibid., 240.
68 Ibid., 241–2.
69 Ibid., 243.
70 Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact.
71 Stephen, The English Utilitarians, 241–2.
72 See “Table of the Springs of Action,” Explanation no. 14, https://www​.laits​.utexas​.edu​/
poltheory​/bentham​/springs​/index​.html.
73 Stephen, The English Utilitarians, 250.
74 Ibid., 247.
75 Ibid., 252. The Table of the Springs of Action is complicated to understand, even with
Bentham’s elaborate explication of the table. It appears the Table was mostly just a way
for Bentham to imagine leverage points for his principles of legislation and morals.
76 Ibid., 247.
77 Ibid., 247–8.
78 Ibid., 249. See “Table of the Springs of Action” Explanation no. 14.
79 We will explicate Hume on this point in the next chapter.
80 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009).
81 James E. Crimmins, “Bentham’s Metaphysics and the Science of Divinity,” Harvard
Theological Review 79, no. 4 (1986): 387–411, 388.
82 Stephen, The English Utilitarians, 247–24.
83 Bentham believed his approach was superior insofar as it avoided both Cartesian
innate ideas of a moral sense and the Kantian a priori. He did remain somewhat
Kantian insofar as he saw pleasure as a kind of measure of the good (pleasure
immediately coinciding with the good for the human being). Thus, where for Kant
goodness is a noumenal reality that cannot be known in itself, Bentham avoids
anything metaphysical by focusing on its phenomenal instantiation in human
sensory experience.
84 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 11–35; MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflict of Modernity,
17–19.
85 Stephen, The English Utilitarians, 249.
86 See Ibid., 196–7.
87 Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838–
1843), 227, quoted in Stephen, The English Utilitarians, 178.
256 Notes

88 Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 122, quoted in Stephen, The English
Utilitarians, 184.
89 It is with zero irony that a current e-learning tool, widely used in universities and
other settings, has named itself Panopto.
90 Simon Werrett, “Potemkin and the Panopticon: Samuel Bentham and the
Architecture of Absolutism in Eighteenth Century Russia,” Journal of Bentham
Studies 2 (1999): 1–25.
91 Ibid., 13.
92 Bentham, “To Jaques Pierre Brissot.”
93 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 111–12.
94 Ibid., 112.
95 According to Michael Quinn, Bentham proposed indenturing all minors to the
Industry Houses until the age of twenty-one as a way of reducing and eventually
eliminating the need to collect taxes for poor relief. “Explicitly, the basis of Bentham’s
plan lay in the transformation of the economic value of a child, from negative to
positive. Crudely, children ate less and, especially as they approached the age of
liberation, produced more than adults” (Michael Quinn, “Mill on Poverty,” 31,
available at: https://journals​.openedition​.org​/etudes​-benthamiennes​/185​#tocto2n8).
In order to increase the number of indentured children, Bentham advocated early
marriage between poor children and apparently took great steps to “facilitate marital
sex in the pauper panopticons” (Quinn, “Mill on Poverty,” 33).
96 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 123, quoting Bentham in Principles of Civil Code,
ch. 14, section 1. See the digitized version of the Browning edition of Bentham’s
works, vol. 1 at https://www​.laits​.utexas​.edu​/poltheory​/bentham​/pcc/.
97 Bentham, Principles of Legislation and Morals, ch. 1.
98 See especially Janet Simple’s critique of Foucault’s reading of the Panopticon. Janet
Semple, Bentham’s Prison: A Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary (Oxford: Oxford,
1993), 322.
99 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 67.
100 Stephen, The English Utilitarians, 213.
101 David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (London: John
Murray, 1821), http://www​.econlib​.org​/library​/Ricardo​/ricP2​.html. Unless otherwise
specified, all references to Ricardo’s Principles are cited by chapter.paragraph.
102 Thomas Robert Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population. The 1826 edition is the
expanded edition. The first edition was published anonymously in 1798, http://www​
.econlib​.org​/library​/Malthus​/malPlongCover​.html. All citations to Malthus’s Essay are
cited by book.chapter.paragraph in this electronic version unless otherwise noted.
103 “David Ricardo,” The History of Economic Thought, Institute for New Economic
Thinking, https://www​.hetwebsite​.net​/het​/profiles​/ricardo​.htm.
104 Daniel B. Klein et al., “Characteristics of the Members of Twelve Economic
Associations: Voting, Policy Views, and Favorite Economists,” Econ Journal Watch 9,
no. 2 (May 2012): 149–62.
105 Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 5.1.
106 Ibid., 5.2. It is significant that Ricardo’s theory of price focuses on reproduction and
hunger.
107 Ibid., 5.3.
108 Ibid., 5.5.
109 Ibid., 5.6.
110 Ibid., 5.5. This is clearly just an assertion.
 
Notes 257

111 Ibid., 5.7.

112 Ibid., 5.13.
113 Ibid., 5.22.
114 See Tawney’s discussion of the enclosures and the age of marriage in the Interlude.
115 Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 5.23.
116 Ibid., 5.36 and 5.37.
117 Ibid.
118 Ibid., 5.37.
119 Ibid., 5.38.
120 For an explication of the perversity thesis—that aid to the poor is actually harmful—
see Stephen Monroe Tomczak, “From Townsend to Malthus to the Poor Law
Report: An Examination of the Ideas Concerning the Relationship of Public Aid and
Reproduction on Policy Development, 1786–1834,” Journal of Sociology and Social
Work 3, no. 2 (December 2015): 27.
121 Lauren F. Landsburg, “Thomas Robert Malthus,” The Library of Economics and
Liberty, https://www​.econlib​.org​/library​/Enc​/bios​/Malthus​.html.
122 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 127.
123 “The Political Economy Club,” The History of Economic Thought, Institute for New
Economic Thinking, https://www​.hetwebsite​.net​/het​/schools​/peclub​.htm.
124 Malthus adds this statement in the Preface to the second edition. See An Essay on the
Principle of Population: Or a View of Its Past and Present on Human Happiness, 7th
ed. (London: Reeves and Turner, 1872).
125 Townsend, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws. For the influence of Townsend on
Malthus and Darwin, see Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 119; and Tomczak,
“From Townsend to Malthus to the Poor Law Report”. All citations to Townsend’s
Dissertation are cited by section.paragraph in this electronic unless otherwise noted.
126 Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population, I.I.9. Notably, no attention was paid to
reigning in the lusts or increasing the industry of the wealthy.
127 Ibid., I.I.16.
128 Ibid., I.I.17.
129 Ibid., I.II.1–2.
130 Ibid., I.II.22.
131 As Himmelfarb has noted, Malthus thought he was describing the problem in
the first edition, but many people seemed to think that because he took pains to
enumerate the various “natural” checks on population growth, he was promoting the
checks (Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty, 122–6).
132 Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population, I.II.9.
133 Ibid., I.II.9.
134 Ibid., I.II.13.
135 Ibid., I.II.12.
136 Ibid., I.II.4.
137 Ibid., I.II.11.
138 Ibid., I.II.5. Jenise DePinto cites Patrick Brantlinger’s observation that “although
Malthus does not emphasize race . . . [he] has, for good reason, been called ‘the
founding father of scientific racism’” (Jenise Ruth DePinto, “Re-Imagining Empire
and Nation in Early Victorian Britain: Race, Class, and Gender in the Condition
of England Question” [Dissertation, Stony Brook University, 2005], 32, citing
Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–
1930 [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003], 17).
258 Notes

139 Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population, I.II.6.

140 Biographers describe Townsend as one who cared deeply for the poor; see, e.g.,
A. D. Morris, “The Reverend Joseph Townsend MA MGS (1739–1816) Physician and
Geologist—‘Colossus of Roads,’” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 62, no. 5
(May 1969): 471–7. However, his language about toward the poor in his Dissertation
is deeply disdainful and tinged with anti-Catholic rhetoric.
141 Townsend, Dissertation on the Poor Laws, V:2.
142 Ibid., VII:1.
143 Ibid., VIII:2.
144 Philipp H. Lepenies argues that the originality of Townsend’s Dissertation “lies in the
fact that the notion of competitive markets was defined as a ‘natural law” (Philipp H.
Lepenies, “Of Goats and Dogs: Joseph Townsend and the Idealisation of Markets—A
Decisive Episode in the History of Economics,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 38,
no. 2 [March 2014]: 447). He further argues that Townsend and Malthus “share a
revolutionary methodology that removed the market mechanism from any cultural
and social context in the name of science.”
145 Townsend, Dissertation on the Poor Laws, III:1, continuing to IV:1. See also Polanyi,
The Great Transformation, 119.
146 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 119–20.
147 Porter, Rise of Statistical Thinking, 47–8.
148 Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty, 118. Here Himmelfarb is quoting from Malthus’s
sixth edition, IV.III.6, and I.II.6 (moral agent).
149 Ibid., 119.
150 For an interesting thesis on the shifting understanding of motion, see Simon Oliver,
Philosophy, God, and Motion (New York: Routledge, 2005).
151 An important point made by Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty, 126.
152 Ibid., 126, citing William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (New York: Dolphin, 1825),
44.
153 Ibid.
154 Ibid. Thomas Carlyle refers to utilitarianism as “pig philosophy” (ibid., 12).
155 Ibid., 126.
156 Himmelfarb notes that primary victims of the Poor Law of 1601 were not the poor.
While the poor were victims of the lack of education put upon them by upper classes,
and while the Poor Laws were aimed at alleviating the pains of the poor, it was the
class right above the poor that suffered the most under these dictates (ibid., 120).

Chapter 6
1 Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring (London, 1838–
1843; Reprinted New York, 1962); “An Introduction to the Principles of Legislation
and Morals,” ch. 1, part 1.
2 See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1896), https://oll​.libertyfund​.org​/titles​/hume​-a​-treatise​-of​-human​
-nature. All citations will be to this volume and will be referenced as Book.
Part.Section.Paragraph. See David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding, 2nd ed., ed. Eric Steinberg (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing
Company, 1977).
 
Notes 259

3 Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, 4th ed.
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1998), 7.
4 Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: The Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 58.
5 Matthew Jones, The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz
and the Cultivation of Virtue (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006). See
also David Rapport Lachterman, The Ethics of Geometry: A Genealogy of Modernity
(New York: Routledge, 1989), and Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific
Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1986).
6 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 89.
7 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Kenneth P. Winkler
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing), 95.
8 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 350. (Second Treatise, no. 123).
9 Ibid., 323. (Second Treatise, no. 87).
10 Bacon, The New Organon. For an excellent review of medicine as a Baconian project,
see Gerald P. McKenny, To Relieve the Human Estate: Bioethics, Technology, and the
Body (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997).
11 William Edward Morris and Charlotte R. Brown, “David Hume,” The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato​
.stanford​.edu​/archives​/sum2020​/entries​/hume/.
12 Ibid., section 1.
13 Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 281–8.
14 Frederick Rosen, Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill (New York: Routledge,
2003), 20.
15 Pierre Gassendi, Three Discourses on Happiness, Virtue, and Liberty: Collected from
the works of the Learn’d Gassendi, ed. Mosieur Bernier (London: Awnsham and John
Churchill, 1699), 315.
16 For Aristotle, justice is a mean that adjudicates disputes between citizens. It is
grounded in the facts of human nature and attempts to remediate the harmed party.
17 Rosen, Classical Utilitarianism, 21.
18 Ibid., 29. It should be noted that several scholars suggest that sympathy plays a
different role in the earlier Treatise than it does in the Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding. See Rico Vitz, “Sympathy and Benevolence in Hume’s Moral
Psychology,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 42, no. 3 (2004): 261–75.
19 David Hume, The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols., ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1932), quote from vol. 1, p. 33.
20 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. J. B. Schneewind
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1983), section 3: part 1.
21 Ibid.
22 Rosen, Classical Utilitarianism, 34.
23 See Vitz, “Sympathy and Benevolence.”
24 Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 43, fn. 19.
25 Rosen, Classical Utilitarianism, 41.
26 Ibid., 44.
27 Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 24.
260 Notes

28 Ibid., 28.
29 For an excellent discussion of Hume’s theory of property see George E. Panichas,
“Hume’s Theory of Property,” in ARSP: Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie /
Archives for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy 69, no. 3 (1983): 391–405.
30 Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 21.
31 Panichas, “Hume’s Theory of Property,” 392. See also Hume, An Enquiry Concerning
the Principles of Morals, 22.
32 Ibid., 393.
33 MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 91–3. It should be noted that
MacIntyre also critiques Adam Smith for his individualism in his economics.
However, as we shall shortly see, if one reads the Theory of Moral Sentiments as a
necessary propaedeutic for Wealth of Nations, we find that whatever individualism
there is in Smith, the centrality of community, the natural origin of the human
faculties for community (i.e., sympathy), and the rational ordering of the virtues
render Smith less guilty than MacIntyre makes him out to be.
34 Ibid., 79–85.
35 Ibid., 82.
36 Hume, Treatise, ii.2.5.1
37 Ibid., ii.2.5.2.
38 MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 82–3. Citing Hume, Treatise, ii.2.5.
39 Ibid., 83.
40 MacIntyre, Whose Justice?, 313.
41 MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflict of Modernity, 92.
42 See, for example, McCloskey, “Adam Smith,” 43–71; and Christopher Bertram, “Jean
Jacques Rousseau,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition),
ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/sum2020​/entries​/rousseau/.
43 MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflict of Modernity, 84, 85. See also MacIntyre, Whose
Justice? 282, 300–7.
44 Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, vol 1.
(1732) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), https://oll​.libertyfund​.org​/titles​/mandeville​
-the​-fable​-of​-the​-bees​-or​-private​-vices​-publick​-benefits​-vol​-1. As Polanyi notes in
The Great Transformation, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, wealth was
considered a moral issue, but poverty was not (114).
45 Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Two Enlightenments: A Contrast in Social Ethics,”
Proceedings of the British Academy 117 (2001): 297–324 at 299.
46 Ibid. Mandeville’s claim here echoes that of Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson
Crusoe, who in his 1704 address to Parliament entitled Giving Alms No Charity and
Employing the Poor a Grievance to the Nation was one of the earliest figures to argue
“that if the poor were relieved, they would not work for wages; and that if they were
put to manufacturing goods in private institutions, they would merely create more
unemployment in private manufactures” (Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 114).
Defoe’s address is available at: https://socialsciences​.mcmaster​.ca​/econ​/ugcm​/3ll3​
/defoe​/alms. It is notable that these same images appear in our earlier narrative—
Robinson Crusoe is invoked by Milton Friedman and the bees by Jonathan Haidt.
Tellingly, Hayek lauded Mandeville’s ideas about society and politics in Law,
Legislation, and Liberty, vols. 1–4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973–1979)
and Dr. Bernard Mandeville: Lecture on a Master Mind (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1966).
 
Notes 261

47 Jürgen Klein and Guido Giglioni, “Francis Bacon,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/
archives​/win2016​/entries​/francis​-bacon/.
48 Tawney, The Agrarian Problem, 387.
49 For discussion of Bacon’s role in the creation of the 1601 Act for the Relief of the
Poor, see the Interlude.
50 The original title is, in fact, Novum Organum, sive indicia vera de Interpretatione
Naturae, or the New Work, or true directions concerning the interpretation of
nature.
51 See especially E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (New
York: Dover, 2003). Originally published in 1924.
52 Bacon, The New Organon, 12–13.
53 Ibid., 13.
54 Ibid., 16.
55 Ibid., 17.
56 Ibid., 21. The word translated here as “harassed” is taken from the Latin vexare, to
vex or to afflict, or to harass. Vexatus is the perfect passive participle of vexo, which
translates as “to injure, damage, molest, annoy, distress, plague, trouble, maltreat,
abuse, vex, harass, disquiet, disturb, torment, etc” (Charleton Lewis and Charles
Short, A Latin Dictionary, http://www​.perseus​.tufts​.edu​/hopper​/text​?doc​=Perseus​
%3Atext​%3A1999​.04​.0059​%3Aentry​%3Dvexo). The gendered language used here,
in the context of such violent imagery, should not be overlooked. See Iddo Landau,
“Feminist Criticism of Metaphors in Bacon’s Philosophy of Science,” Philosophy 73,
no. 283 (January 1998): 47–61.
57 For the importance of experiment over experience in medicine, see Claude Bernard,
An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, trans. Henry Copley
Greene (New York: Dover Publications, 1957), 103. See also Jeffrey P. Bishop, The
Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Norte Dame Press, 2011). See also Heidegger’s “Modern Science,
Metaphysics, and Mathematics,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York:
HarperCollins, 2008).
58 Bacon, The New Organon, 102.
59 Ibid., 106–8.
60 Ibid., 109.
61 Ibid., 103.
62 Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London:
Routledge, 1968), 17. Originally published in Italian, Francesco Bacone: Dalla Magia
Alla Scienza by Editori Laterza (Bari, 1957).
63 Sophie Weeks, Francis Bacon’s Science of Magic (PhD dissertation, University of
Leeds, 2007), 22.
64 See Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations.
65 Bacon, The New Organon, 20, 221 (Book I Aphorism LXXIII, Book II Aphorism LII).
66 In the United States, the statute concerning patents explicitly mentions that
patentable information must in some way be useful: one may obtain a patent if and
only if one “invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture,
or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof ” (United
States Patent and Trademark Office, “General Information Concerning Patents,”
October 2015, https://www​.uspto​.gov​/patents​-getting​-started​/general​-information​
-concerning​-patents).
262 Notes

67 Bacon, The New Organon, 20, 221 (Book I, LXXIII, Book II, LII).
68 See Martin Heidegger, “Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, ed.
David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).
69 See Jacqueline L. Cowan “Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis and the Alterity of the New
World,” Literature and Theology 25, no. 4 (2011): 407–21.
70 Peter Lucas, “Bacon’s New Atlantis and the Fictional Origins of Organized Science,”
Open Cultural Studies 2 (2018): 114–21.
71 See McRorie, “The Emptiness of Modern Economics,” no. 3, 120–9.
72 See Ryan Patrick Hanley, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009) on the centrality of the addition of Part VI in the
last edition of TMS. See also Samuel Fleischacker, “Sympathy in Hume and Smith:
A Contrast, Critique, and Reconstruction,” in Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in
Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl: A Collection of Essays, ed. Christel Fricke and
Dagfinn Føllesdal (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 272–311; and Paul Sagar, “Beyond
Sympathy: Smith’s Rejection of Hume’s Moral Theory,” British Journal for the History
of Philosophy 25, no. 4 (2017): 681–705.
73 See Christina McRorie, “Adam Smith, Ethicist: A Case for Reading Political
Economy as Moral Anthropology,” Journal of Religious Ethics 43, no. 4 (December
2015): 677.
74 McRorie, “Adam Smith, Ethicist,” 678.
75 McCloskey, “Adam Smith,” 51.
76 See Dennis C. Rasmussen, The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith,
and the Friendship that Shaped Modern Thought (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2019), discussed in Taylor McNeil, “An Enlightened Friendship,” TuftsNow,
January 16, 2018, https://now​.tufts​.edu​/articles​/enlightened​-friendship.
77 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 116.
78 Ibid., 92.
79 Ibid., 129. See Ravallion, “The Two Poverty Enlightenments” 10, fn. 14. See also
Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty.
80 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 116–17.
81 Ibid., 117.
82 See Sagar, “Beyond Sympathy.”
83 Blanchard, The Protestant Ethic, 67.
84 Sagar, “Beyond Sympathy.”
85 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Joseph Black and James Hutton
(London: Alex. Murray & Sons, 1869), at Part II, Section I, Introduction, Paragraph
2, https://oll​.libertyfund​.org​/titles​/theory​-of​-moral​-sentiments​-and​-essays​-on​
-philosophical​-subjects. All references for Theory of Moral Sentiments will be to this
edition and were accessed at the aforementioned website unless otherwise specified.
Citations will be to Part.Section.Chapter.Paragraph.
86 McRorie, “Adam Smith, Ethicist,” 684. See also Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, pt.
I. sec. I. ch. III. para. 4.
87 McRorie, “Adam Smith, Ethicist,” 683. McRorie also makes an interesting point
about the shift from the language of “moral anthropology” to “moral psychology.”
See also Sagar, “Beyond Sympathy”; and Fleischacker, “Sympathy in Hume and
Smith.”
88 Stephen Darwall, “Sympathetic Liberalism: Recent Work on Adam Smith,” Philosophy
and Public Affairs 28, no. 2 (1999): 139–64.
89 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, pt. I. sec. I. ch. I. para. 10.
 
Notes 263

90 Ibid., pt. I. sec. I. ch. II. para. 1.

91 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 2,
ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, Glasgow Edition (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty
Fund, 1981/1776), 26–7.
92 Robert A. Black, “What Did Adam Smith Say About Self-Love?” Journal of Markets &
Morality 9, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 7.
93 Samuel Fleischacker, “Adam Smith’s Moral and Political Philosophy,” The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato​
.stanford​.edu​/archives​/spr2017​/entries​/smith​-moral​-political/.
94 Sagar, “Beyond Sympathy,” 687.
95 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, pt. III. sec. I. ch. I. para. 2.
96 Sagar, “Beyond Sympathy,” 693.
97 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, pt. II. sec. II. ch. III. para. 4.
98 Ibid., Theory of Moral Sentiments, pt. III. sec. I. ch. I. para. 2.
99 Ibid., pt. III. sec. I. ch. III. para. 5.
100 Ibid., pt. III. sec. I. ch. III. para. 5.
101 McRorie, “Adam Smith, Ethicist,” 685–6.
102 Blanchard, The Protestant Ethic, 71.
103 McCloskey, “Adam Smith,” 50.
104 Adam Smith, Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 320. Quoted in McCloskey, “Adam Smith,” 51.
105 Fleischacker, “Adam Smith’s Moral and Political Philosophy.”
106 Ibid.
107 Brown offers a mixed assessment of Smith’s alignment with Aristotle, claiming
that in Smith, “homo oeconomicus has displaced Homo politicus. Aristotle has
been inverted, if not buried” (Undoing the Demos, Kindle location 1298–313).
Yet she moderates this critique by noting the role of interdependence in Smith’s
work.
108 Blanchard, The Protestant Ethic, 73. See also Paul D. Mueller, “Adam Smith’s Views on
Consumption and Happiness,” in The Adam Smith Review, ed. Fonna Forman, vol. 8
(New York: Routledge, 2014), 2.
109 Mueller, “Adam Smith’s Views,” 2.
110 Ibid.
111 Ibid., 4.
112 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, pt. II. sec. I. ch. 2. Para. 1.
113 Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 340.
114 Mueller, “Adam Smith’s Views,” 13–14.
115 Amartya Sen, “Introduction,” in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Ryan Patrick
Hanley, 250th Anniversary ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), xiii–iv.
116 Ibid., xxi.
117 Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 120.
118 Ibid., 371.
119 Sen, “Introduction,” xix, xxiii.
120 Ibid., xxiii. As Sen remarks on p. xxvi, fn. 29: “For Smith’s remarks cited here, and
to many other remarks on similar lines, see Emma Rothschild and Amartya Sen,
‘Adam Smith’s Economics,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, ed. Knud
Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).”
121 McCloskey’s thesis: “I am merely arguing that Smith, in sharp contrast to his great
contemporaries in ethical theorizing, was a virtues man, a half-conscious follower
264 Notes

of Plato and Aristotle and therefore of Aquinas, and also of the stoics (though
they, I repeat, can be accused of a monism of temperance only), in emphasizing a
system of multiple virtues—and indeed precisely five of the seven Aquinian virtues”
(McCloskey, “Adam Smith,” 58.)
122 Fleischacker, “Adam Smith’s Moral and Political Philosophy.”
123 Marie A. Martin, “Utility and Morality: Adam Smith’s Critique of Hume,” Hume
Studies 16, no. 2 (November 1990): 107–20, 111.
124 Fleischacker, “Adam Smith’s Moral and Political Philosophy.”
125 Ibid.
126 Fleischacker, in “Adam Smith’s Moral and Political Philosophy,” notes nearly two-
thirds of TMS is devoted to the ways humans cultivate the sentiments.
127 Fleischacker, in “Adam Smith’s Moral and Political Philosophy,” notes, “[Smith]
indeed says explicitly, against the proto-utilitarianism of Hutcheson and Hume, that
philosophers in his day have paid too much attention to the consequences of actions,
and he wants to focus instead on their propriety: the relation they bear to the motive
that inspires them.” See also McCloskey, Adam Smith,” 45.
128 Martin, “Utility and Morality,” 107, 115.
129 Ibid., 111.
130 Ibid., 113.
131 See Lisa Hill, “The Hidden Theology of Adam Smith,” European Journal of the History
of Economic Thought 8, no. 1 (2001): 1–29.
132 Blanchard, The Protestant Ethic, 57.
133 See especially Patrick Hanley, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue.

Concluding Un(neuro)scientific Postlude

1 Fleck, “Crisis in Science.”
2 Ibid., 154.
3 Ibid., 156.
4 See Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3 vols. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1998, 2009, 2011). See also Stiegler, The Age of Disruption; originally published
in French as Dans la disruption. Comment ne pas devenir fou? By Les Liens qui
Libèrent, 2016.
5 Emily Underwood, “U.S. BRAIN Initiative Gets Ethical Advice,” Science Magazine,
May 14, 2014, https://www​.sciencemag​.org​/news​/2014​/05​/us​-brain​-initiative​-gets​
-ethical​-advice.
6 Pierre Gassendi, Opera omnia, vol. 1 (Lugduni, Anisson et Devenet, 1658), 92. The
Latin reads: “Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu.”
7 Sady, “Ludwik Fleck,” https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/win2021​/entries​/fleck/.
8 Robert Spaemann, “Ars Longa, Vita Brevis,” in Ethics of Biomedical Research in a
Christian Vision: Proceedings of the Ninth Assembly of the Pontifical Academy for
Life, ed. Juan de Dios Vial Correa and Elio Sgreccia (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice
Vaticana, 2004), 103.
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 Index

5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid 34 Bentham, Jeremy 80, 105–6, 109–10,

1601 Poor Law 105, 159–60, 199 143–58, 164–6, 168, 170, 178–9,
1662 Act of Settlement 105 195, 200–4
Bentham, Samuel 156
Abiodun, Sade J. 219, 224, 230, 237 bifurcated anthropology 105, 136, 170,
acedia 210, 211 200–2
adaptation 61–2, 84, 98, 133–4 biopolitics 4, 12, 17, 26, 71, 140, 143,
addiction 114, 120, 121, 124, 139, 202 151, 152, 160, 204, 206
adrenaline 33 bios 17, 71, 93, 166, 184, 197, 204–6
African-Americans 7, 43–4, 104, 221, Blanchard, Kathryn 124, 129, 136, 186,
226, 228, 244 189, 190, 194
agency 6, 59, 76, 80, 87, 92, 94, 95, 98, bottom-up 55, 76, 78, 81, 147, 203
103, 109, 110, 114, 139, 156, BRAIN Initiative 3, 56, 77
164–7, 178, 180, 195, 202 Brown, Scott 61–4
altruism 12, 61, 66–8, 83, 94–6 Brown, Wendy 10–11, 101, 117, 143,
American Physiological Society 4 150, 220, 263
American Psychiatric Association Browning, Don 246
(APA) 47–9
amygdala 27, 31, 33, 37, 38, 51–2, 55, 65, capitalism 86, 125–9, 185, 219, 239,
67, 72 242–4, 249
anterocingulate gyrus 37–8 care/harm 82, 83, 85
antisocial behavior 5, 6, 8–9, 11–13, carnal scourge 20–5
16–18, 31–9, 45, 51–5, 59–68, Caspi, Avshalom 52, 53, 55, 81, 203
71–5, 143, 198, 203–6 Cassirer, Ernst 207
antisocial personality disorder catecholamine 46
(ASPD) 46–50, 70, 122, 198 Catholic 106–7, 145, 210
Aquinas, Thomas 176, 212–13 central nervous system (CNS) 34–6
Ardelt, Monika 61–4 charity 160, 174, 177, 180, 194, 199, 200,
Aristotle 118, 135, 171, 176, 181–2, 218, 260
190–2 Chicago School of Economics 18, 101,
artifactual being 125, 194–5, 197–206 113, 115, 125
authority/subversion 82, 83 Cleckley, Hervey 48, 237
cognitive 1, 3, 20–3, 33, 54, 56, 62–6, 80,
Babbie, Earl 40–2, 44 187, 196
Bachner-Melman, Rachel 67–8 competition 66, 125, 128
Bacon, Francis 71, 110, 144, 147, 168–73, Comte, August 145, 205
175–87, 189–95, 198–203, 209 conceptual
Baltes, P.B. 61–4 apparatus 20, 40, 47, 129
Baron-Cohen, Simon 15 definition 40, 41, 45, 58–64
Becker, Gary 103, 110, 113–26, 128–40, formation 21
150, 190, 194–8, 202–4 funneling 32, 40–4, 49–50, 56, 59,
benevolence 57, 172–4 63, 69, 75, 86
284 Index

cortex 27, 31, 37, 51–2, 67, 76, 78 Fable of the Bees 177, 184, 202, 204, 261.
medial prefrontal (MPC) 66, 68 See also hive
prefrontal (PFC) 27, 55, 65, 66, 72, fairness/cheating 79, 82, 83, 85, 236
91 fellow-feeling 190
corticolimbic area 33, 37 fenfluramine 34–6
system 34–5, 37–8, 51, 54–5, 65 fictitious entities 18, 108, 116, 143,
crime 1, 31, 46, 57–8, 74–5, 108–9, 116, 149–51, 153–4, 175–7
121–2, 142, 202 Fleck, Ludwik 14–17, 20–8, 42, 44, 75,
Cunningham, Bill 7, 9, 43 77, 85, 196, 207, 209, 210
Fleischacker, Simon 190–3
Darwin, Charles 84, 105, 145, 161, 170 fMRI 1–3, 36–9, 44, 60, 66, 69, 71, 77, 93
Decety, Jean 66 Foucault, Michel 12, 26, 27, 102, 103,
De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum 119– 114–16, 124, 126, 128, 130, 140,
22, 136 143, 157, 217
demand curve 120, 202 Freakonomics 100, 115, 122, 138
dementia 58 freedom 122, 125, 127–30, 189, 190,
Denkkollectiv 23 202, 210
desire 6, 13, 48, 81, 83, 90–6, 120, 130, free will 6, 11–12, 17, 87–92, 98, 114,
133–6, 146–50, 166–7, 175–6, 124, 129, 148, 177–8, 204
208–14 Friedman, Milton 101–3, 125–40, 202
Diagnostic and Statistics Manual Friedman, Rose D. 126
(DSM) 8, 11, 16, 40, 47–50, Frith, Uta 15, 31, 51–4, 58, 70, 72, 182,
55, 58, 72 204
disgust 80–3, 204 Fuga finis 210–11
dopamine 33, 34, 46, 65, 67–8, 95
GABA 46
Eagleman, David 15 Gall, Franz Joseph 57, 58, 60
East India Company 144, 160, 191 game theory 130
economic imaginary 7, 100–9 Gassendi, Pierre 171–2
economics 7–11, 15–18, 41, 55–6, 93, Genetic Virtue Project 70, 204
100–4, 113–19, 122–40, 142–4, Gianaros, Peter 32–41, 44–6, 50–2, 55,
157–71, 184–206 56, 119, 203, 204
Elizabeth I 105, 179, 199 governmentality 12, 124, 157
Emmett, Ross 119, 132, 137–8 Greene, Jeffrey 61–4
emotional homeostasis 60, 64–5, 69,
72, 232 habits 55, 76, 118–23, 134, 158, 190–2
enclosure of the commons 106–7, 179 Haidt, Jonathan 78–88, 93–5, 98, 113,
English Reformation 107 140, 152, 204–5
environment 8, 11, 16, 17, 25, 31–3, happiness 79, 89–92, 118–23, 148–9,
35, 37–9, 52, 53, 55, 56, 59, 62, 151–5, 172, 191
74–6, 93, 140, 146, 198, 204 happiness function 118–23, 177, 202
epinephrine 95 Hare, Robert 48, 72
esoteric community 23–8, 42–4, 75, 97, Harrington, Michael 43
138, 203 Harris, Sam 78, 87–95, 98, 139, 204, 205
estate 12, 71, 92, 156, 159, 169, 179, Harvey, David 10–11, 140
182–4, 195, 197, 203 Hayek, Frederick 86, 102, 126, 132
ethology 147, 148 Henry VIII 106–7
evolution 7, 111 Himmelfarb, Gertrude 162, 164–5, 167,
exoteric community 16, 24–8, 39, 78 177, 225, 257, 258
 
Index 285

hive 84, 86, 177, 204 Knight, Frank 114, 119, 124–7, 130–40,
Hobbes, Thomas 151, 163, 169, 207 143, 149–51, 201–2
Hollingshead, August B. 43, 44, 47, 53, Krugman, Paul 127, 131
58, 104, 203, 204 Kuhn, Thomas 20, 24
Hollingshead Four Factor Index of Social
Status 43, 44 liberty/oppression 82, 84, 85, 150, 169
Homo capitalus 12, 17–19, 100, 110, life 64, 86, 136, 169, 172
113, 114, 116, 118, 124, 125, limbic structures 51
130–3, 139, 142, 144, 195–6, limbic system 65, 68
203–6 loyalty/betrayal 82, 83
Homo economicus 16–19, 109, 110, lust 25, 157, 158, 160, 165, 200
113–16, 124–5, 129–33, 135–6,
138–44, 149–50, 167–8, 170, MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social
192, 201–3 Status 37
human capital 103, 113, 115–17, 124, McCloskey, Dierdre 151, 185, 190, 194
130, 132, 140, 150 MacIntyre, Alasdair 9, 18, 87, 134, 148,
Human Genome Project 2 154, 171, 175, 176, 185, 195
Human oxytocin mediated empathy McRorie, Christina 184, 187
(HOME) circuit 95 Malthus, Thomas 150, 156–68, 200, 201,
human science(s) 32–3, 39–45, 104–5, 203, 204
197, 206–10 Mandeville, Bernard 177, 184, 195,
Hume, David 9, 18–19, 86–7, 110, 199–202
149–54, 161, 167–95, 198–204, Manuck, Stephen 32–46, 50–2, 55–6,
211–12 119, 203–4
hunger 156, 163–6, 184 market price of labor 159, 160
Hutcheson, Frances 86, 151–2, 155, 172, marriage 109, 116, 139, 159, 161–5, 200,
177, 190, 193 256, 257
hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) Marshall, Catherine 40–2
axis 33–5, 37–9, 44, 93 Martin, Marie 9, 42, 58, 192–3
Meeks, Thomas 58–72
idle 19, 150, 155–7, 178, 184, 201 Meyer-Lindenberg, Andreas 15, 31,
idleness 109, 158–60, 162, 177, 203 51–5, 71
impartial spectator 187–9, 192–3 Milbank, John 146
inductive science 180 Mill, James 143, 153, 158, 160
industry house(s) 156–7, 167 Mill, John Stuart 18–19, 143–53, 166–7,
iron law of wages 157, 159, 160, 163, 195, 201–2
166, 201 mirror neurons 66, 84
is-ought distinction 118, 134, 138, 197 monoamine oxidase-a (maoa) 31, 46,
51–4, 65, 228, 229
Jason, L.A. 61, 63, 64 moral
Jeste, Dilip 58–72 anthropology 5, 6, 19, 55, 76, 86,
Jones, David Stedman 9, 169 108, 114, 138, 170, 186, 190,
journal science 14 196–7
joy 210 enhancement 5, 17, 70
justice 153, 171, 172, 175, 188, 200 foundation(s) 82, 86, 98, 113, 204
molecule 12, 28, 93, 96, 203
Kant, Immanuel 9, 80, 90, 151, 154, 170, physics 87–8, 90–3, 152, 155
192 psychology 1, 80–3, 94, 175, 176,
Keynesianism 10, 102–3 200
286 Index

sense(s) 48, 58, 82, 86, 89, 152, 168, Ordoliberal 101–2
172, 176, 178, 195 oxytocin 84, 95–9, 123, 203, 205
sentiment(s) 9, 19, 86–7, 175–6, oxytocin virtuous cycle (OVC) 95
185–8, 190–5, 200, 202, 236,
260, 264 panopticon 110, 151, 155–7, 184, 200,
taste(s) 78, 80, 82–7, 93, 110, 184, 203
189, 193 pauper 105, 108, 156, 177
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick 43 perversity thesis 257
PET 3
natural price of labor 158 Peterson, Christopher 58
neoliberalism 9–12, 47–9, 101–4, phrenology 4, 57–60, 64, 70, 71, 201
109–10, 113–16, 125–6, 128, Pinochet, Augusto 103
138–40, 166–7, 184–5, 202–6, pleasure and pain 78, 87–92, 110,
209–10, 214 124, 152–5, 168, 171–4,
neurobiology 27, 58, 59, 64 178, 184, 187, 192, 195, 200,
neuroeconomics 4, 7, 67, 93, 95, 203, 202, 212
240 Polanyi, Karl 105–8, 116, 156, 160, 163,
neurohormones 33, 93 176, 186, 190, 203
neuroscience polis 13, 17, 71, 91, 93, 166, 169, 170,
and biopolitics 26 174, 175, 180, 184, 195, 197,
definition of 4, 15, 20, 26–7, 44, 143, 200, 201, 204, 212
206 political economy 3–5, 13, 17–19, 71, 75,
history of 4–5 76, 88, 93, 97, 100, 101, 103, 105,
of morality 4, 6, 13–14, 17, 27, 36, 106, 110, 113, 115, 127, 128,
58, 69, 70, 77, 87–8, 98–100, 130, 131, 142–4, 149–51, 157,
109, 125, 131, 143, 166, 171, 158, 160, 165, 166, 170, 176,
184, 194–8, 203–6, 209 184, 185, 195, 200, 202, 204, 205
and naturalization 11, 204 polymorphism 31, 35, 36, 39, 51–3, 67,
and neoliberalism 11–12, 139–40 68, 72
popular 76, 92, 104, 134 Poor Law Reform of 1834 143, 144, 157,
and thought communities 26–7 158, 166
and types of science 14–15 Poor Laws 9, 42, 105, 108, 142, 151, 157,
of wisdom 64, 198 159–63, 165, 186, 191, 202
neurotechnology 1–4, 56, 69–71, 124, Poovey, Mary 42, 152
182–3 popularizers 7, 15, 17, 26, 76–9, 87,
neuroticism 34 98–100, 103, 104, 115, 134, 171,
neurotransmitter(s) 3, 13, 17, 33, 34, 40, 184, 185, 198, 203, 205
46, 51–3, 59, 64–7, 69, 72, 75, 84 popular science 14, 15
New Atlantis 170, 180, 183, 184, 195, population growth 158, 161–3
199 positive science 18, 114, 127, 140, 146,
new work 179–80, 182–3, 199 148–9, 152
Nobel Prize for Economics 115, 116, positivism 128, 145, 152, 171, 201
125, 130 positivist science 18, 110, 167, 168
norepinephrine 34, 46 Posner, richard 115
poverty 7–9, 16–17, 35–6, 38, 42–5, 56,
Obama, Barack 1, 2 73, 97, 103–5, 110, 140, 142–3,
obligation 153 156, 160, 161, 163, 164, 166, 167,
operational definition 41, 55, 63 174, 177–8, 191, 201, 203, 204
operations 41, 64, 78, 86 poverty enlightenment 42, 105, 225–6
 
Index 287

power ontology 179, 184, 185, 194, reproduction 7, 124, 201, 256
195, 203 Ricardo, David 105, 157–60, 166, 178,
Presidential Commission for the Study of 186, 200–1
Bioethical Issues 3 Robinson Crusoe 129, 137, 163, 249, 260
Price theory 100, 132, 137, 138 Rogers-Vaughn, Bruce 10, 47, 104, 218,
Principle of population 150, 162, 164, 228, 247
165 Rossman, Gretchen 41, 42
Principles of legislation 18, 157, 168, 201
Principles of morals 18, 168, 172, 173, Sachs, Jeffrey 73, 75
201 Sadeh, Naomi 38, 53–5, 81, 203
prolactin 33 Sady, Wojciech 23, 25, 210
property 10, 36, 44, 46, 105, 107, 109, sanctity/degradation 82, 83
110, 117, 141, 163, 169, 170, Science of Virtue 8
172, 174–6, 188, 200, 201, self-interest 9, 61, 76, 84, 94, 96–7, 109,
203, 211 124, 135–7, 167, 188–92, 199
prosocial behavior(s) 8, 12, 13, 32, 59, Seligman, Martin 58
62, 63, 66, 67, 69, 72, 73, 84, 96, Sen, Amartya 191
97, 198 serotonin (5-HT) 34–6, 46, 53
prosociality 62, 67, 68, 72, 73, 84, 85, transporter gene (5-HTT) 35–6
139, 205 sex 1, 7, 26, 43, 58, 73, 74, 80, 93, 96, 97,
proxies 5, 8, 32, 77, 198 99, 109, 150, 157, 162, 164, 167,
for vice 12, 16, 32, 55, 59, 110, 115, 199, 203, 238, 256
122, 139 Smith, Adam 8–9, 18–19, 97, 110, 113,
for virtue 12, 16, 59, 61, 115 131–2, 137, 168, 170, 176,
Prozac 47 184–94, 200, 211–12
prudence 69, 149, 159, 185, 190, 194, social
213 apparatus 140, 149, 184
psychiatry 15, 16, 26, 27, 32, 40, 44, engineering 18, 144, 151, 155–7,
46–9, 57, 58, 72, 74 163, 164, 209
psychology 1, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 27, imaginary 3, 5, 9, 14, 17–18,
44, 47, 57–64, 72, 78–83, 85, 25–8, 125, 171, 177, 179, 194–8,
93, 94, 100, 124, 143–7, 205–9, 212
153, 166, 175, 176, 195, sciences 15, 18, 32, 34, 39, 41–2, 60,
200–2 143–5, 149, 152, 206
psychopath(s) 1, 53–4, 74, 81, 91, 92, sociobiology 56, 123
226, 237 socioeconomic 11, 17, 32, 38–9, 54, 56,
psychopathology 8, 17, 49, 68, 71 72, 103, 206, 234, 235
psychopathy 48, 67, 72, 74, 81, 198 position (SEP) 16, 36–41, 44–5, 52,
55–6, 110, 115, 119, 139, 143,
quest 13, 16, 17, 20, 28, 125, 183, 197, 225
203–7 status (SES) 8–9, 16, 32–48, 52–5,
Quetelet, Adolph 164 59, 73, 104, 110, 115, 119, 139,
143, 202–4, 219
race 9, 43, 44, 158, 218, 219, 224, 226, sociology 9, 15, 27, 201–2
243, 244, 257 sociopathy 5, 49, 52–4, 65, 67, 198
racism 116, 219, 222 Spaemann, Robert 210–14
Raine, Adrian 4, 54, 69, 71, 204 Spooner, Lysander 142–3
Ravallion, Martin 42, 225–6 Spring(s) of action 18, 152–67
Reagan, Ronald 10 SSRI 47
288 Index

state of nature 125–8, 169, 176, 207 utility 9, 50, 115–25, 128, 136, 139, 141,
Sternberg, Richard 61–2, 64 150–3, 157, 170–9, 181, 184,
Stigler, George 113, 115, 119–20, 124–5, 186, 188, 191, 193, 195, 200–3
132, 136–9, 150, 190, 204 utility maximizing behavior 115, 116,
summum bonum 213 119, 121–4, 128, 139, 141,
sympathy 173, 186–9 189–91

Tawney, R.H. 106, 109, 243 vademecum science 14–15

Taylor, Charles 3, 14, 17, 25–6, 28, 99 vagrancy 105–6, 243
teleology 12, 55, 62, 122, 148–9, 182, validation 41, 44, 48, 50, 64
192–4, 199, 204, 209, 214 value relativism 60, 88–9
temperance 58–9, 69, 185, 190, 192, 213 values 2, 133
testosterone 95 Viding, Essi 15, 31, 51–4, 58, 70, 72, 182,
textbook science 14 204
Thatcher, Margaret 10 violence 31, 34, 43, 46, 51, 52, 54–5, 58,
thought-collective (collectives) 21, 23, 70–3, 88, 104, 107, 169, 215,
24, 27–8, 102 220–1, 223, 228–9, 242, 247
thought-community (communities) 5, virtue 7–13, 16–18, 57–61, 68–74, 76,
15–16, 23–8, 31–4, 207–10 87, 115, 118–19, 153–4, 171–7,
thought-style 14, 16, 23–4, 27–8, 32, 186–7, 190–4, 198–202, 210–14
39–42, 56, 64, 98–9, 207–10
top-down 76, 147, 148, 193, 212 WEIRD societies 19, 82, 85, 205, 207,
Townsend, Joseph 18, 144, 158, 160–7 211, 237
Treponema pallidum 21, 26, 27 well-being 2, 45, 56, 59, 78, 88, 90, 92,
Trust game 94–6 140, 160, 190, 206, 214
wisdom 58–65, 68–9, 72–3, 79, 139, 198,
ultimatum game 96 213–14, 224
utilitarianism 9, 18, 90, 129, 138, 148,
155, 171, 201 Zak, Paul 78, 93–9, 124, 140, 176, 203–5
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