The Morals of Life

A theory of biopolitical power that updates Foucault, illustrating the moral implications of modern evolutionary theory.

In our day, the individual has become “a life,” the singular of the plural noun “population.” From this new understanding of what it means to be human comes a new form of biopolitical power with a new set of moral rules. In The Morals of Life, moral philosopher Davide Tarizzo presents a theoretical framework for understanding this transformation of the old-fashioned “government of living beings,” as Michel Foucault characterized biopolitics, into a new government of modular living beings, as well as a template for making sense of biopolitical power that operates on the scale of populations rather than individuals.

Tarizzo traces population thinking, the notion of modular optimization, and other conceptual keystones of the current biopolitical regime (an “ethopolitical regime,” in the author’s terms) to their origins in twentieth-century biological thought—more precisely, and critically, evolutionary theory. Neo-Darwinism, Tarizzo argues, should be seen not only as a scientific paradigm but also as a philosophy per se, because it is evolutionary theory that today provides an answer to the old philosophical question: What is man? This new kind of philosophy, his book suggests, largely determines the way in which people look at themselves and society. Not only does it contribute to designing new technologies of power, but it also fosters subjection to the new ethopolitical regime.Preface
Introduction. The Morals of Life: On Metaphysics
Part I. The Morals of Selection: On Biology
Chapter 1. How Darwin Changed Philosophy
Chapter 2. How Darwinism Changed Science
Chapter 3. Dogmatism, Scientism and Critical Naturalism
Part II. The Morals of Behavior: On Biopolitics
Chapter 4. Towards a New Biopolitical Regime
Chapter 5. From Normalization to Optimization
Chapter 6. The Government of Modular Living Beings
Conclusion. The Moral of Morals: On Bioethics“Tarizzo’s wide-ranging and important critique of contemporary biopower provocatively challenges conventional thinking around what the pandemic wrought and what biopolitical futures may await us.”
—Timothy Campbell, Professor, Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University; coauthor of The Comic Self
 
“Tarizzo poses the question of our times: What construes a value of life? With a lucent exposition of the tension between ‘natural’ and ‘ethical’ life as it forms in a post-pandemic world, he offers a powerful argument that must be heeded.”
—Yasmeen Arif, Professor and Head, Sociology, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar UniversityDavide Tarizzo is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Salerno, Italy.