Democracy, Legality and Policy – May 31 through June 1, Tilburg University

Programme

Day 1: Thursday, 31 May

Room AZ 211, Academia Building

09:00 – 09:45
Registration (Foyer)

09:45 – 10:00
Welcome

Chair: Stephan Hartmann
10:00 – 11:15
Helen Longino

Science, Epistemology, and Politics 

11:15 – 12:00
Anna Leuschner

Pluralism, Objectivity, and Democracy

12:00 – 13:15
Lunch

 Chair: Hans Lindahl

13:15 – 14:00
Klemens Kappel

Factual Disagreement and Political Legitimacy

14:00 – 14:45
Maura Priest

The Binding Political Power of Collective Belief

14:45 – 15:15
Coffee break

15:15 – 16:00
Silke Schicktanz

Being Affected, Representation and Experts: How to Deal with Moral Pluralism and Democratic Ideals in Science Policy?
16:00 – 17:15
Alexander Somek

Accidental Cosmopolitanism: Citizenship at the End of History
20:00
Conference Dinner
(Café Anvers)

Day 2: Friday, 1 June

Room AZ 211, Academia Building


Chair: Alan Thomas
10:00 – 11:15
Annabelle Lever

Democracy, Ethics and Method
11:15 – 12:00
Marieke Borren

Illegal Subjectivity and The Politics of In/Visibility: Re-thinking the Ontological Condition of the ‘Illegal’ Alien

12:00 – 13:15
Lunch

 Chair: Helen Longino

13:15 – 14:00
Stephan Hartmann & Soroush Rafiee Rad

Voting, Deliberation and Truth
14:15 – 14:45
Conrad Heilmann & Philip Cook

The Structure of Censorship

14:45 – 15:15
Coffee break

15:15 – 16:00
Desire Louis Nizigiyimana

Social Justice and Capability Building: The Normative Grounds of Social Criticism

16:00 – 16:45
Alan Thomas

Politics Without Principles? – The Political Realist Critique of Rawls

Iwao Hirose – May 14th 2012, 16:30 – 18:00

Iwao Hirose

Department of Philosophy

McGill University

Room Academia Zaal 008

16:30 – 18:00

‘Responsibility for Health’

Recently, many epidemiologists and health policy makers are concerned with the social gradient in health. They claim that it is just to reduce health inequality through redistribution of socially controllable determinants of health such as income, wealth, education, employment, and housing. They take (a) social equality of health to be the goal of health policy and (b) socio-economic inequality is the cause of health inequality. I shall reject both (a) and (b). I will argue that what we should aim at is not health equality per se, but equality of overall well-being. This paper is a chapter of my forthcoming book “Ethics and Health Care Rationing” (Routledge, 2013).

Re-scheduled Event – Bart Streumer, April 16th

‘Can We Believe the Error Theory’
16:30 – 18:00
Location tbc.

According to the error theory, normative judgements are beliefs that ascribe normative properties, even though such properties do not exist. In this paper, I argue that we cannot believe the error theory, and that this means that there is no reason for us to believe this theory. It may be thought that this is a problem for the error theory, but I argue that it is not. Instead, I argue, our inability to believe the error theory undermines many objections that have been made to this theory.

POSTPONED Ethics Research Group June 4 Bastiaan Hoorneman POSTPONED

Bas Hoorneman
University of Amsterdam
Title tbc

This paper has been postponed until September 10 2012

Upcoming Event Bart Streumer POSTPONED

‘Can We Believe the Error Theory?’
Academia Building AZ 008
16:30 – 18:00

Waheed Hussain March 19th 2012, 16:30 – 18:00

Waheed Hussain
The Wharton School of Business
University of Pennsylvania

Room DZ006 (Dante Building Room 006)

16:30 – 18:00

‘Freedom Under Capitalism: the Moral Case for Codetermination’

Freedom figures prominently in the defense of free-market arrangements—especially in the United States. But libertarian-styled arguments greatly oversimplify the relationship between freedom and economic life. My aim in this presentation is to defend a more compelling account of the relationship between freedom and economic life. According to what I call the “social democratic conception,” respect for freedom is not just a matter of ensuring that people can exercise choice-based control over their property and labor. What matters fundamentally is how well an economic arrangement contributes to the broader aim of ensuring that that people reflectively pursue a pattern of conduct that is (objectively) reasonable. I argue that freedom, properly understood, would be best served by a market arrangement, such as the codetermination system in Germany, where capital and labor essentially share control of the corporation.

Upcoming Event 9th November

Alan Thomas
Tilburg University
‘Laws and Generalisations in Ethics’
Stockholm University

Cancelled – THESP 26th March 2012 16:30 – 18:30 – Cancelled

Elizabeth Ashford
St. Andrews

‘The Nature of the Duties imposed by Basic Systemic Injustice’

Room Dante Building 006
NOTE ROOM CHANGE FROM PREVIOUS POSTING OF THIS EVENT

THESP 6th February 2012 16:30 – 18:30

Catherine Wilson
Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Aberdeen

‘Animality and Equality: Civilisations critique before (and in) Marx and Engels’
NOTE ROOM CHANGE FROM PREVIOUS POSTING OF THIS EVENT
Dante Building Room 006

Abstract
Marx and Engels insisted that there was a “necessary connection” between the philosophical materialism of the 17th and 18th century and socialism and communism. But what exactly was the connection? Materialists like Hobbes and (arguably) Locke were assuredly not socialists or communists. The paper will discuss 18th century ideas about anthropology, the domestication of animals, and animal industriousness that enabled Marx and Engels to think in a new way about alienation and exploitation and to build this conceptual bridge.