CFP: MANCEPT, New Work in Population Ethics

In this workshop, we'll bring together experts and young scholars working in the field of population ethics. The event is to take place from September 1-3, 2015 as a part of the MANCEPT Workshops on Political Theory. The conference will aim to cover five distinct, but related themes in population ethics. (However, these may be subject to change given the content, variability, and quality of the abstracts received.) The provisional five themes are as follows:

I) The Ethics of Causing to Exist: How should we act when the outcome of our actions may affect the identities of who exists? Can our actions harm merely possible people? Is there a moral asymmetry between possible people with positive or negative welfare such that there is no reason to bring about the former, but there is a reason to not bring about the latter?

II) How the Numbers Count: How should we take account of numbers in our population theory? Are non-additive approaches to aggregation plausible? Can we avoid the Repugnant Conclusion without incurring even more counter-intuitive conclusions?

III) Egalitarianism, Prioritarianism, and Other Non-Welfarist Goods: Can we account for egalitarian concerns in our population ethics? Are prioritarain views more or less plausible than there egalitarian cousins? Can either family of theories be extended to adequately account for different sized populations? How could we account for other goods such as perfection, or “the best things in life”?

IV) Revising the Good: Do the problems of populations ethics point to a need to revise our understanding of value itself? Could 'better than' be Non-Transitive? Are there 'imprecise' value relations such as parity? Are some populations lexically superior to others? What are the prospect for any such revision helping with the problems of population ethics?

V) Applied Ethics and Future Generations: How are debates in population ethics relevant to environmental ethics or to issues of existential risk? How should these problems be accounted for by policy makers? Can we answer the questions of these domains without first finding answers in population ethics?

Submission Guidelines

Send an abstract of up to 1,000 words to [email protected] no later than May 15, 2015. The abstract should be prepared for blind review. In your email, please state your name and affiliation as well as whether you'd be interested in being a respondent in one of the sessions. Final decisions will be made by June 15, 2015.