The anthropology of ethics that I seek to develop has many precedents. Those that are theological, those that are grounded in an aprioristic rather than an empirical and thus unresolved concept of human nature and those that pursue the reduction of ethics to or its dissolution into alleged psychological or biological interests or instincts or needs are of little relevance. Or to be more precise: it does not follow but instead diverges from them. Its central precedent resides in the second and third volumes of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality and in several of the interviews that Foucault saw published while he was engaging in the thinking and the research that resulted in those volumes.

Framing Foucault's work of that period are several versions of the concept of governmentality, a concept ranging over not merely such formal and often directly coercive apparatuses of intervention as state administrations and their police but also the great variety of more informal incitements and incentives that ask or invite human actors to govern themselves. Among such incitements and incentives are those that ask or invite actors to make themselves into subjects of esteemed qualities or kinds. Actors who take up such requests and invitations freely and self-reflexively are ethical actors, and their distinctive domain is the ethical domain, of which Foucault identifies four basic parameters. One of these he calls “ethical substance.”