CFP: Rightness, Ignorance, Uncertainty, and Praise Workshop

The University of Southern California will host a workshop June 28th-29th on topics at the intersection of ethics, epistemology, and/or metaethics. We are particularly interested in (a) projects in moral psychology and (b) projects relating to agency and responsibility. Here are some of the kinds of questions in which we are especially interested:

• What moral requirements govern the ways we form and revise our doxastic states, and/or the ways we influence others' formation and revision of their doxastic states?
• Which kinds of moral ignorance are exculpating, which are not, and why?
• How should we act, and how should we decide what to believe, when we are morally uncertain?
• What does it take to be praiseworthy for something we do? For what we believe? For the way we are?
• Under what conditions can somebody do the right thing and yet not be praiseworthy for doing it?
• Under what conditions can it be inappropriate to praise somebody who is genuinely praiseworthy?

That having been said, we will happily consider any project falling within the workshop's three broader subfields.   There will be eight thirty-minute talks, each followed by Q&A. There will be no pre-reading. 

Funding is available to fully cover participants' travel and accommodations, and possibly to provide catered lunches and dinners (TBD). In light of these funding arrangements, we particularly welcome submissions from graduate students, post-docs, and other precariously employed philosophers who do not have ample research budgets of their own, as well as from philosophers who are members of historically underrepresented groups.  

If you are interested in participating, please submit abstracts of around 750 words to [email protected] by June 20th. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by June 22nd at the latest, at which point we will book travel for workshop participants. Please indicate in your submission email whether you are securely employed (i.e. tenure-track job) or precariously employed (i.e. any other job/status). If you are a member of a historically underrepresented group and would like to indicate that too, please feel free to do so, but no pressure.