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Conference Announcement Theme: Speaking Ethically Across Borders Subtitle: Interdisciplinary Approaches Type: International Conference Institution: Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH) and Division of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge Location: Cambridge (United Kingdom) Date: 8.–10.1.2014 __________________________________________________ Summary Recent years have seen a dramatic growth in the study of ethics among social anthropologists. Much of this growth has been due to the assimilation into anthropological thinking of virtue ethics building on two streams of theoretical work: that of Foucault, and that of virtue ethicists working in the Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition. Proponents of the virtue-ethics approach in anthropology argue that a focus on self- cultivation as a process allows for sufficient attention to be paid to self-conscious reflection. Reflection and the freedom it entails, they argue, are essential aspects of ethical life that traditional social scientific approaches to ethics--Durkheimian approaches--simply ignore. There appears to remain an area of ethical experience, however, that neither approach can easily accommodate. Since virtue ethics sees ethical judgment as the result of cultivation within a self-conscious ethical tradition, it can no more account for ethical judgment outside of or between traditions than the Durkheimian approach can. Yet history is full of situations in which multiple, self-conscious ethical traditions meet, and in which people try to judge each other, persuade each other, or draw lessons from each other across the borders that separate those traditions. These situations are what we call ‘speaking ethically across borders’, and this is the phenomenon that the conference, and the publication we hope to produce from it, will aim to explore. Contexts in which we might expect to find people ‘speaking ethically across borders’ include: - religious missions - international law - colonialism and anti-colonialism - vernacularization of cosmopolitan cultures - universalization of vernacular cultures - the adaptation of ancient models to contemporary situations in renaissances In these situations, are people limited to using values with which they are already familiar to interpret and judge other values? Or can they genuinely learn from alternative ethical systems? If so, on what conditions does this process depend? Is the capacity for or disposition towards a cosmopolitan attitude to ethics itself a culturally specific norm or a virtue to be perfected, or is it a necessary aspect of ethical thought? Ethnographically speaking, how have people in fact used the intellectual resources provided by one ethical tradition to judge others? How have they sought to borrow from other traditions, or to persuade followers of other traditions to adopt novel values and practices? What meta-ethics have specific traditions proposed to govern the relationship of members of the tradition to the mores of other traditions? Programme Wednesday, 8 January 13.15-13.45 Registrations 13.45-14.00 Welcome and introduction 14.00-16.30 Panel: Difference and similarity in ethical conversations - Jonathan Mair (Cambridge): How to speak ethically across borders - Perveez Mody (Cambridge): Ethical Discussions in the Debate on the Criminalisation of Forced Marriage in the UK - Hallvard Lillehammer (Birkbeck): Uses and Abuses of Self Evidence in Ethics 16.30-17.00 Coffee break 17.00-18.30 Lecture: - Michael Lambek (Toronto): The hermeneutics of ethical encounters Thursday, 9 January 9.00-10.40 Panel: Conversations between local, national and global regimes of ethics - John Marenbon (Cambridge): Medieval Christianity and paganism, ancient and contemporary: moral and non-moral relativism - Carlo Severi (EHESS): The Universalism of Diego Valades 10.40-11.00 Coffee break 11.00-13.15 Panel: Conversations between local, national and global regimes of ethics (continued) - Dinah Rajak (Sussex): Global Extraction and the Ethical Frontier of Development - Harri Englund (Cambridge): Poetic Justice and the Proletariat that Never Was - Jan Lorenz (Manchester): Moral obligations, moral upheavals and questions of belonging in a contemporary Polish Jewish Community 13.15-14.15 Lunch 14.15-16.30 Panel: Disputes, persuasion, and compromise in religious discourse - Michael Lempert (Michigan): Hexis, Nexus: Illiberal Buddhist Virtue in the Tibetan Diaspora Nicholas Evans (Cambridge) - Naor Ben-Yehoyada (Cambridge/Harvard): Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men 16.30-17.15 Walk to St John's College 17.15-18.45 Public Lecture in St John’s College: - Simon Coleman (Toronto): Borderlands: Ethics, Ethnography and ‘Repugnant’ Christianity 18.45 - 19.15 Drinks reception 19.30 Conference Dinner Friday, 10 January 9.00-10.20 Panel: Distinct traditions, common standards - Joanna Cook (UCL): Furtive loving-kindness and the problem of Buddhism in Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy 10.20-10.40 Coffee break 10.40-12.30 Panel: Distinct traditions, common standards (continued) - Soumhya Venkatesan (Manchester): Finding causes and solution across religious divides - Paolo Heywood (Cambridge): Are We Church? Moral dialogues between Catholic and LGBTQ activists in Italy 12.30-13.00 Concluding remarks Registration Register online via the following link: https://webservices.admin.cam.ac.uk/cbk/vmyf/index.cgi Conference fee: £60 (full), £30 (students) - includes lunch and tea/coffee Conference Dinner at St John's College: £42 (optional, places are limited) Deadline: Sunday 5 January 2014 Contact: Marie Lemaire, Conference Programme Manager Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Alison Richard Building West Road Cambridge, CB3 9DT United Kingdom Email: conferen...@crassh.cam.ac.uk Web: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/25021 __________________________________________________ InterPhil List Administration: http://interphil.polylog.org Intercultural Philosophy Calendar: http://cal.polylog.org __________________________________________________
