Rights Workshop: Rights and Harms – Spring 2021

***We have taken the difficult decision to postpone the 2nd Annual Rights Workshop. The workshop will instead be held either 27-28th May 2021 or 3-4th June 2021. Please drop us an email if you would like to be kept updated.***

2nd Annual Rights Workshop: Rights and Harm

University of St Andrews.

Organisers: Joseph Bowen (University of St Andrews and University of Stirling), Samuel Dishaw (Harvard University), and Daniel Muñoz (Monash University).

In May 2019, the first annual Rights Workshop was held at MIT, featuring papers by Frances Kamm, Julia Driver, Julia Markovits, and Renee Jorgensen Bolinger. The was topic: “Rights and Supererogation.”  In 2021 the 2nd Rights Workshop will be held at the University of St Andrews on “Rights and Harm.”

In the last decade, there has been an explosion of work on rights and duties. Equally explosive has been the literature on the metaphysics of harm and defensive harming. Yet, these literatures on harm have not linked up with discussion of rights in a particularly explicit way. The Rights Workshop would be a chance for ethicists working on these topics to put their heads together, share comments, and make progress on an exciting and flourishing area of research.

Authors: Nicolas Cornell (Michigan), Helen Frowe (Stockholm), Kerah Gordon-Solmon (Queens, Canada), Thomas Sinclair (Oxford), Fiona Woollard (Southampton). Respondents: Lisa Bastian (St Andrews and Stirling), Rowan Cruft (Stirling), Romy Eskens (Stockholm), Clayton Littlejon (Kings), and Kieran Oberman (Edinburgh).

The format of the workshop is pre-read, with papers being made available a few weeks before the workshop. Each session will begin with a critical response to one of the papers, followed by a brief reply from the author, and then Q&A. The schedule of the workshop will be released closer to the date. Childcare facilities will be provided (please get in touch as early as possible).

For financial support, we would like to thank St Andrews’s Centre for Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Society for Applied Philosophy, and Scots Philosophical Association.

Attendance is free, but we ask that you let us know by emailing us at: [email protected].