Conference dates: 10-12 September 2025
Venue: The historical building of the University of Pardubice, nám. Čs. legií 565, 530 02 Pardubice, Czech Republic, Room 03004.
Recent years have seen widespread concerns about the quality of our public moral and civic discourse, especially but not only online. Misinformation, disinformation, epistemic bubbles and echo chambers, increased polarisation, moral grandstanding: all have been claimed to harm the quality of such discourse. Recent philosophical work in this space has included analyses of the pros and cons of moral grandstanding (or ‘virtue-signalling’); informal ‘social punishment’ (e.g. sanctions such as boycotts or online naming and shaming campaigns); and the rise of ‘private censorship’ (e.g. social media deplatforming). How, in such an environment, should we pursue the necessary task of public moral discourse?
Keynote speakers
- Linda Radzik (Texas A&M), Moral Criticism of the Dead
- Brandon Warmke (Florida), Grandstanding and Cancel Culture
Contributing Speakers
- Alexei Anisin (Pardubice), Polarization, Self-Righteousness, and Increased Offline Political Interactions
- Wojciech Ciszewski (Jagellonian), Freedom Objection to Social Punishment: Liberal and Republican Perspectives
- Leslie Howe (Saskatchewan), Vacuous Virtue: Moral Coercion, Self-conceit, and Bad Faith Righteousness
- Lesley Jamieson (Pardubice), Cynicism, Behaviourism, and the Ethics of Moral Grandstanding
- Marianna Leventi (Lund), Fitting Fury: Anger as a Catalyst for Justice
- Sergei Levin (Trinity College Dublin), The Complexity of Corporate Grandstanding: Scepticism, Transparency and Impact
- John Lippitt (Pardubice/Notre Dame Australia), Self-righteous Moral Criticism, Social Punishment and the Problem of Overreach
- Marek Malinowski (Jagiellonian), Group Coherence Argument for Informal Social Punishment
- Jaclyn Rekis (Hebrew U, Jerusalem), Shame, Religion and Understanding
- Adam Piovarchy (Notre Dame Australia), Signalling, Sanctioning and Sensitising: How to Uphold Norms with Blame
- Philipp Schwind and Simon Ewers (Zurich/Salzburg), Meddling: A Bipartite Typology of Improper Moral Intervention
- Eric Wilkinson (British Columbia), Against Anger
- Natalia Witosza (Jagiellonian), Should We Shame Ordinary People? Social Status and Legitimacy of Social Punishment
Organisers: John Lippitt, Alexei Anisin, Kamila Pacovská.
Attendance is free of charge. Registration is required for both in-person and on-line participation. Please follow this link.
Link for on-line participation: Join MS Teams meeting
For further information please e-mail Alexei Anisin (alexei.anisin@upce.cz).
This conference is hosted under the auspices of the ERC-CZ project “Combatting Self-Righteousness” (grant no. LL2308) led by Professor John Lippitt and generously supported by the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (MŠMT).