Health-based ethics replace prohibition with harm-diagnosis

Evidence

In Tarrying with the Negative, Žižek famously argues that a certain Spinozism is the ideology of late capitalism. Žižek believes that Spinoza’s rejection of deontology for an ethics based around the concept of health is allegedly flat with capitalism’s amoral affective engineering. The famous example here is Spinoza’s reading of the myth of the Fall and the foundation of Law. On Spinoza’s account, God does not condemn Adam for eating the apple because the action is wrong; he tells him that he should not consume the apple because it will poison him. For Žižek, this dramatizes the termination of the Father function. An act is wrong not because Daddy says so; Daddy only says it is ‘wrong’ because performing the act will be harmful to us. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 149

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Žižek’s ‘termination of the Father function’ through the Spinoza reading of the Fall.
• BMF: Your existing library is all contemporary realist fiction that doesn’t map here; a genuinely cross-domain match might be We (Zamyatin) — its rationalized table-of-hours society is precisely a ‘paternalism without the father,’ regulation justified by health/efficiency rather than authority. Worth checking against Zamyatin.
• XREF: connects to: Health-based ethics replaces paternal law with amoral affective engineering — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 149; Reframing health harms as social discomfort is a linguistic strategy of moral disengagement. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1679; An ethics grounded in health rather than prohibition terminates the Father function. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 149

Related

• Health-based ethics replaces paternal law with amoral affective engineering (similarity 0.95)
• An ethics grounded in health rather than prohibition terminates the Father function. (similarity 0.94)

Broader Connections

• An ethics grounded in health rather than prohibition terminates the Father function. #responds-to (0.80) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 149
• Reframing health harms as social discomfort is a linguistic strategy of moral disengagement. #complicates (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1679