political philosophy

CFP: 4th Annual Northwestern Ethics Conference

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
SOCIETY FOR ETHICAL THEORY AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
FOURTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE
MAY 20-22, 2010

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

Elizabeth Anderson, University of Michigan
Christine Korsgaard, Harvard University

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: The deadline is February 15, 2010. We welcome submissions from faculty and graduate students, as sessions will be reserved for student presentations. Essays should be roughly 4000 words, with an abstract of at most 150 words. Essays in all areas of ethical theory and political philosophy will be considered, though some priority will be given to those that take up themes from the works of Elizabeth Anderson and Christine Korsgaard, such as value theory, philosophy and economics, democratic theory, practical reason, constructivism, personal identity, and the moral status of animals. Essays and abstracts should be prepared for blind review in word, rtf, or pdf format. Students should submit by e-mail to leegoldsmith2012 [at] u.northwestern.edu; faculty should submit by e-mail to garthoff [at] northwestern.edu. Notices of acceptance will be sent by March 31, 2010. For more information, please contact Jon Garthoff at the e-mail address above or visit the conference webpage.

I’ve been working for a while on a entry on libertarianism as a political philosophy for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It’s meant to explain the theory and some of the most common objections to it to a undergraduate/graduate student audience. My main goal in writing it was to move beyond the standard Nozickian/self-ownership varities of libertarianism and provide an overview of consequentialist versions of the theory as well. Some mention is also made of teleological and contractarian approaches as well, but mostly just to alert the reader that they exist. At any rate, I think the piece does better than most existing summaries at reflecting the diversity of libertarian theories, even if it isn’t always able to go into great depth regarding the arguments for and against.

The work is still under some revision, so I’d be happy for any feedback I can get. If you think it’s a useful resource for your students, please feel free to share it with them (and I’d be happy to hear about it!). If you think it’s horribly biased, poorly written, conceptually sloppy, etc., I guess I’d be happy in some sense to hear that too.

The article is not up yet on IEP, but can be accessed off of SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1069042.

Thanks!