Commentary
A funny thing happened on the way to the journal: a commentary on Foucault's ethics and Stuart Murray's "Care of the self"
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Correspondence: Madeleine J Murtagh m.j.murtagh@newcastle.ac.uk
Institute of Health and Society, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 2008, 3:2 doi:10.1186/1747-5341-3-2
Published: 14 January 2008Abstract
Stuart Murray's 'Care and the self: biotechnology, reproduction, and the good life' utilizes Foucault's "care of the self" to examine health domains in its title. The present author discusses three important articulations of concern with the Foucauldian concepts of care of the self that are absent in the work of Murray and others: first, the voluntarism and individualism inherent in ideas about care of the self; second, the absence of the interactional and relational; and, third, the perpetuation of the interpretation of Foucault's concept of governmentality, 'the conduct of conduct', as primarily coercive.