ASSOCIATION FOR LEGAL AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY (ALSP)

2009 Annual Conference ‘Ethics for the 21^st Century’

July 2-4, 2009

University of Edinburgh – Department of Politics and IR, ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum

http://www.lifelong.ed.ac.uk/alsp2009/

Outline

The last two decades have seen profound social and economic changes in all areas of our lives. To name but a few: borders have become both more open and more closed. We have witnessed unprecedented levels of technological development: from new medical technologies such as genetic engineering and cloning, to communication technologies such as the internet and new modes of warfare. Environmental degradation and climate change are now seen as pressing issues by most.

On the one hand, we have gained considerable freedoms and opportunities (to shape our children, to access information, to use the internet as a tool for democratic governance, to travel, to exchange information, etc.). On the other hand, we are increasingly vulnerable to breaches of privacy and autonomy (such as identify theft), to denials of our freedoms (through, e.g., anti-terrorist legislation), to growing inequalities and distrust within heterogeneous societies, and to extreme forms of violence.

ALSP 2009 aims to examine the ethical implications of those changes. It welcomes panels and papers across the disciplines of philosophy, politics, law and social policy, which explicitly discuss the complex relation between philosophical and practical analysis in relation to those concerns.

It welcomes submissions on the following themes:

- Climate change: justice and climate change, ecological debt, future generations

and climate change

-  Genetic engineering, genetic testing, cloning, abortion and wrongful life,

property rights in genetic material, xenotransplantation

- War: new wars v. old wars, new forms of warfare, wars over natural resources,

mercenarism, terrorism, torture, the ethics of peacekeeping

- Electronic technologies: privacy and the internet, surveillance technologies,

democracy and the internet, data security

- Migration and citizenship: border controls, refugee quotas, religious toleration

in an age of terror

- Concepts and conceptions of rights, freedom and justice in the face of those

changes.

- Business ethics in a globalised world

Confirmed keynote speakers

Professor Jeff McMahan, Rutgers University. Professor McMahan is one of the most innovative and thought-provoking philosophers of his generation. His work in the fields of bioethics (particularly abortion and genetics) and war has yielded seminal books and articles (see esp. his Ethics of Killing – Problems at the Margins of Life, Oxford University Press, 2002, and his numerous articles in Ethics, Utilitas, Law and Philosophy.)

Professor Jonathan Wolff, University College London. Member of the Nuffield Council for Bioethics. Professor Wolff’s work is located at the crossroad of philosophy and public policy. His recent book Disadvantage (co-authored with A. De-Shalit, OUP 2007) is already an influential contribution to the philosophical literature on social justice.

Submission of Paper/Panel Proposals:

Submission of Papers: Please upload a title and abstract (c.300 words), as well as contact details, by February 1^st, 2009, at

http://www.lifelong.ed.ac.uk/alsp2009/

Submission of panels: we encourage submission of panels with up to three papers discussing a related topic. Panel conveners should upload a short outline of the panel theme, a list of participants and titles & short abstracts of the papers by February 1^st, 2009.

http://www.lifelong.ed.ac.uk/alsp2009/

Paper givers will be expected to talk for no more than 20mns, followed by discussion. Selective contributions will be considered for subsequent publication in the conference proceedings.

Important Dates:

· Deadline for proposal submission: 1 February 2009

· Notification of paper/panel acceptance: 1 March 2009

· Registration: to open on 1 March 2009 and to close on 1 May 2009

Conference Organisation:

The academic convenor of the conference is Professor Cécile Fabre, department of Politics and IR, University of Edinburgh.

For more information on registration, venue, etc. see the conference website at

http://www.lifelong.ed.ac.uk/alsp2009/

Email inquiries should be sent to alsp2009@ed.ac.uk

Going to conferences can often be a frustrating experience. Going may be good for refreshing your academic network but there is rarely any deep discussion of the topics on the agenda and many of the presentations are to be blunt rather boring.

I therefore count myself very lucky to have attended 3 interesting conferences within the last month. At all three events the participants actually conferred. There was sustained and constructive discussion and you felt that you had actually learned something by being there.

I won’t bore you with an account of all three conferences so the Workshop arranged by the EUROBESE project in Ghent and the conference on research ethics arranged by COBRA (wonderful acronym for an ethics centre!) at the University of Galway will only get honourable mention.

The reason for focusing on the third conference is that it linked closely with a problem affecting many medical ethics journals including the Journal of Medical Ethics, that is the question of language.

The conference was organised by the German Academy for Ethics in Medicine and its Swiss counterpart and the target population were early career German and Swiss bioethics academics. Its purpose was to enable these young academics to explore issues around publication in bioethics journals especially how you get your first publications in an international journal.

I had been invited to give one of four workshops on publication as a non-native speaker who is the editor of a reasonably prestigious English language bioethics journal and had been sent a list of questions that these young academics wanted answers to. Many of them were standard for such events, e.g. “How does the review process work?”, “Should you contact the editor before submitting?” and so on, but there were also some more specific questions about the importance of language that led me to reflect on the hegemony of English as the language of publication in the international bioethics field.

I looked through the JME’s own publication statistics and was reasonably content that we publish papers from all over the world and from many non-English speaking countries and authors. It was also evident from referee reports and editorial decisions that a paper with a good and interesting argument does not need to be written in perfect English to be accepted. As long as the English is good enough to communicate the argument effectively most referees (and all of the editors of the JME) will not insist on idiomatic and perfectly grammatical writing.

But I became aware of another language related problem that I had never really thought about before, probably because the academic bioethics literature in my own native Danish is fairly limited. In some languages there is a large and theoretically sophisticated bioethics literature and academics working within that language community naturally relate to that literature and reference it in their work. But to most Anglo-American academics and referees these discussions and the literature that is referenced are at best unknown and at worst misinterpreted as bad referencing practice. In any field a set of references become established as the classical references for certain ideas, e.g. in English language bioethics Parfit’s “Reasons and Persons” for the discussion of personal identity or Glover/Lockwood/Harris/Singer (take your pick) for the discussion of personhood as the basis for full moral status. Referees look for these references and when they do not find them they may suspect that the author is either ignorant of the literature of has some hidden agenda. But in many cases these inferences are fallacious because there is only a partial overlap between the literature as seen by the author and the literature as seen by the referee. In many cases it is actually the English language reader and referee who is the one who is ignorant of the literature. The author of the paper may well know the English language literature well in addition to his or her native language literature(s).

Is this a problem we can solve? We can clearly discuss it and thereby raise the awareness that there is a problem. But to really solve it we would have to convince our Anglo-American colleagues that there is a worthwhile non-English language bioethics literature and that it is actually possible to think interesting thoughts in other languages than English. That might be rather difficult. Like all hegemonies the hegemony of the English language serves those with power, in this case linguistic power well and they may not be willing to give it up.

Something that always surprises me at bioethics conferences, especially given the number of vegetarians in the field, is the absence of quality or sometimes even any vegetarian food.

Take the recent International Association of Bioethics (IAB) Congress in Croatia. The lunches were fairly awful especially for vegetarians (although the KFC looking chicken for the carnivores didn’t appear that much more appetizing). The cake was quite literally taken by the lunch on Sunday though where there was no vegetarian option just chicken, shrimps and what looked like innocuous potato slices but if you looked closely or like me failed to look and took some bites you would find bacon pieces… Not a pleasant experience for a vegetarian.

It seems simple enough to ensure that there is decent food for everyone to eat, but it is surprising how often this isn’t the case. The worst example of inappropriate food at a conference I’ve seen though was at a EUROSAFE conference where after an hour long lecture on the ethical issues in pig crating (the practice of raising pigs in small crates to improve the efficiency of meat production) replete with fairly brutal pictures, we were fed slices of ham…

As Iain said at least there was some pretty good stuff to listen to, even if there was little to munch on for us vegetarians.

I wonder what readers’ experiences were of the IAB conference in Croatia at the start of the month.  I know that some delegates had a terrible time with the organisation - what were your impressions?  Additionally, what was your impression of the standard of papers?

For myself, I was happy to see that those whom I thought would be worth hearing were worth hearing; and there was a good number of papers that were a genuine pleasure to attend.  On the other hand, there was also a number of papers that I thought were (ahem) somewhat less than inspiring.  One or two made me wish that I’d stayed in bed spent a bit more time in the sea gone to other sessions.  And a couple was just hilariously bad.  Here’s a clue: any paper that starts with the phrase “I would like to invite you to come on a journey with me…” should have alarm bells ringing.  And when people are wearing costumes…  Just: no.

Other thoughts?  Who impressed you?  What impressed you?  And what made you want to run away and hide?