The Rejection of Consequentializing

Consequentialists say we may always promote the good. Deontologists object: not if that means killing one to save five. “Consequentializers” reply: this act is wrong, but it is not for the best, since killing is worse than letting die. I argue that this reply undercuts the “compellingness” of consequentialism, which comes from an outcome-based view of action that collapses the distinction between killing and letting die.

COVID-19 and the Sacrificial International Order

This essay uses COVID-19 to illuminate the sacrificial practices of the liberal international order as woven through the concepts of humanitarian governance, moral economy, triage, and sacrifice. The concept of a sacrificial international order calls attention to how all international orders have their share of sacrifices—and this includes liberal international orders. International orders can be distinguished by the selection mechanisms used to identify the sacrifices and the meanings attached to them. I call attention to how liberal international orders often rely on markets as a selection mechanism and interpret these deaths as part of progress. Following critical contributions to the study of neoliberalism that show how markets shape the ethics of “giving life” and “letting die,” I illuminate these processes through four concepts: humanitarian governance and the claim that the highest moral principle is saving lives and relieving suffering; moral economy that regulates who has access to basic subsistence goods during periods of crisis; triage, which considers how to prioritize whose lives are valued; and whether all deaths count as sacrifices or whether they are better understood as “those who can be killed.” I conclude by discussing how COVID-19 conjures hierarchies of humanity ignored by the liberal international order and challenges the discipline to consider the sacrifices in world order.

Colonial management of death: To be or not to be dead in Palestine

During the late 1960s, Israel had a policy of withholding Palestinian corpses in secret cemeteries, in which each corpse was designated by a number, called the ‘secret cemeteries of numbers’. During the last Palestinian ‘al-Quds [Jerusalem] uprising’ in October 2015, Israel again began withholding killed Palestinians’ bodies, this time storing them in refrigerators. Tens of families experienced the detention and release of the frozen dead body of their relative. Drawing on 19 semi-structured interviews with families from al-Khalil (Hebron), this article traces Israel’s political use of Palestinian bodies to dismantle Palestinian collectivity, and the Palestinians’ use of the same bodies to rebuild their national collectivism. This article also describes Israel’s use of its necropolitical and biopolitical powers to manage the Palestinian death, and the resistance strategies used by Palestinian families to oppose these powers. This study argues that necropolitics includes the coloniser’s management of the colonised grief and bereavement, and the decisions about how, when, where and with whom the colonised should die. That is, it is the power to manage the structure and process of ‘letting die’ and being dead.

The Letting Die of the South Asian Body: a Foucauldian Analysis of White Hegemony in Western Cardiovascular Medicine

Cardiovascular disease is the second leading cause of death in Canada and disproportionately affects those of South Asian ancestry. Anecdotally, stories of missed signs and emergency bypass surgeries are abound; empirically, medical research has identified a series of distinct risk factors for South Asian individuals. However, these factors are typically unrecognized by healthcare workers who are typically trained to use recommendations that are founded research done using Caucasian participants. The consequence of this omission is the normalization of the Caucasian body as 'the body' in medicine through disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms, and the 'letting die' of the South Asian body as a result. In taking a Foucauldian approach to this issue, this essay first maps the empirical evidence for the heightened CVD risk in South Asians, namely their predisposition to developing type 2 diabetes mellitus, metabolic syndrome, and dyslipidemia, among other factors. Disciplinary mechanisms to enforce social cohesion discount these differences as exceptions, and attempt to rehabilitate the South Asian body towards the Caucasian norm. These actions are often subconscious, but result in real actions like spending less time with South Asian patients, misuse of assessment metrics, and lower cardiac rehabilitation referral rates. On a population level, research funding is rarely given to studies investigating disease in particular ethnic groups. Hence, clinical practice guidelines must rely on incomplete data to create population-level recommendations. These guidelines act as if they apply to all individuals, but are in fact partisan; thus, the biopolitical control of populations is made apparent through the racist undertones that thrum beneath the veneer of an equal society. Ultimately, this essay serves a counterhistorical function, and demands recognition of the South Asian body in the medical literature. The current medical regime routinely discounts populations who exist outside the norm. Future research and acknowledgement of these groups is necessary to ensure equitable treatment of all patients, regardless of their background.

Making Live and Letting Die in COVID-19: A Biopolitical Review

This article applies discussions of biopolitics and rationalities by governments to <i>make live and let die</i> as a heuristic for the speculative sorting of bodies and their antibodies as state governments lurch toward reopening. It considers how governments rationalize the elimination of certain populations in the name of improving the vitality of the dominant group. This article is based on the theory by sociologist Michel Foucault, who called biopolitics the application of “life-producing techniques” by the state.