Plenary Session 4

Chair: Tom Claes (Ghent University)

Neo-liberals as 'Engineers of the Human Soul'

Bob Brecher
School of Humanities
Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE)
University of Brighton
Brighton, UK

I argue that an examination of the fundamental ideological position of neo-liberalism shows that the “individuals” it seeks to create are necessarily incapable of exercising moral responsibility. First, it requires a non-cognitivist view of morality, and all such views in effect (whether or not by intention) deny morality. Second, it insists that the simulacrum of morality that remains pertains only to the individual lives of “individuals” – that’s to say, to our “private” lives, where non-cognitivist views of morality might have such plausibility as they do. Third, and most important, neo-liberal "individuals" cannot be morally responsible, since they are required to treat each other merely as means to ends. Neo-liberalism, then, is an unavoidably anti-moral ideology.