Workshop on Friendship, and Friendship with the Morally Bad

We invite submissions for a two-day workshop on friendship to be held online, hosted by The University of Salzburg, Austria on the 5th and 6th of March, 2026.

In recent years, philosophers have increasingly turned their attention to the question of whether, and in what way, one goes wrong by maintaining friendships with morally bad people. While the intuition that “something has gone wrong” is widespread, the nature of this alleged wrongness remains underexplored.

Beyond this specific problem, the workshop also aims to showcase work on friendship more generally. We welcome papers that develop, defend, or criticise accounts of the nature and value of friendship; that explore the norms governing friendship (recognition, loyalty, trust, truthfulness, partiality); or that examine how friendship interacts with wider moral, social, and political commitments.

This workshop aims to provide a collegial forum for discussion of these questions, bringing together scholars working on friendship, partiality ethics, and the broader philosophy of personal relationships.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

·      Is there anything inherently wrong with being friends with a morally bad person?

·      Varieties of moral taint: complicity, endorsement, enabling, and standing.

·      Friendship, admiration, and respect: must we find our friends morally good?

·      What, if anything, does friendship reveal about our character and commitments?

·      Norms internal to friendship: loyalty, honesty, discretion, constancy.

·      Friendship, partiality, and competing moral demands.

·      The moral, social, or political consequences of maintaining or terminating friendships.

·      Historical and non-Western accounts of friendship (Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, Confucian traditions) and their relevance today.

·      Friendship across deep moral or political disagreement; polarisation and de-platforming of friends.

·      Terminating or “cooling” friendships: when, how, and on what grounds?

Submission details:

• Abstracts of up to 400 words (prepared for blind review)
• Deadline: 14th of January
• Please send abstracts and a separate cover sheet (with name, affiliation, and contact details) to: [email protected]

We especially welcome submissions from graduate students, early career researchers and members of underrepresented groups.

For further details, please contact Aloysius Ventham at [email protected]