Over the past 40 years, mindfulness‐based therapies (MBTs) have gained a reputation among the biomedical community for their ability to contribute to health, mental capital, and human flourishing. Recently, however, critical mindfulness scholars have questioned the moral import of MBTs, claiming that, in modernizing meditation, they strip Buddhist practices of their ethical and soteriological content. Inspired by Harrington and Dunne's (2015, p. 630) recent call to historicize this present discontent, I offer an account for this perceived “de‐ethicization” of mindfulness, locating it in a long history of changes in the ontological infrastructures supporting moral reasoning from the eighteenth century onwards. Through the example of equanimity—a virtue that has been a part of Western and Eastern character ethics and theories of flourishing from the ancient period to the modern age—I show how, from the eighteenth century, research in the natural sciences on nervous diseases, stress, and relaxation, provided a frame for rethinking moral equanimity as a somatic experience of physiological calm. This transformation reaches its peak in the late twentieth century in research on mindfulness, which builds upon that tradition by folding into its ambit Eastern conceptions of equanimity as well. Insofar as modern MBTs continue to somatize moral virtues, I argue that they raise questions about the degree to which they are conducive to human flourishing and well‐being, as opposed to the related but narrower notions of health and mental capital.

中文翻译：

---

宁静：从18世纪到20世纪末，道德情感的躯体化。

在过去的40年中，基于正念疗法（MBT）在生物医学界赢得了声誉，因为它们能够为健康，精神资本和人类繁荣做出贡献。但是最近，批判性正念学者对MBT的道德含义提出了质疑，声称在使冥想现代化的过程中，他们剥夺了佛教徒具有道德和社会学意义的做法。受哈灵顿和邓恩（Harrington and Dunne）（2015，p。630）最近呼吁将目前的不满历史化的鼓舞，我对正念的这种“去道德化”进行了说明，将其定位于支持道德推理的本体基础设施的悠久变化历史中从十八世纪开始。以举止为例-一种自古以来一直是西方和东方性格伦理学和繁荣理论的一部分的美德-我展示了从18世纪开始如何研究神经疾病的自然科学，压力和放松，为重新思考道德的平静提供了一个框架，将其作为生理上的平静的躯体体验。这种转变在二十世纪后期的正念研究中达到顶峰，正念的研究也建立在该传统的基础上，也纳入了其雄心勃勃的东方宁静概念。就现代MBT继续在道德美化方面而言，我认为它们提出了有关它们在多大程度上有利于人类繁荣和幸福的问题，这与相关但狭义的健康和精神资本概念相反。