In the Midis de l’éthique du CRÉ series, Julie Agnaou will be presenting on “Santé et vécu carcéral féminins: l’expérience de la double peine?” The presentation will be in French.

To participate online, via Zoom, clic here.

Abstract

he aim here is to focus on the health of incarcerated women in France, and more specifically on the obstacles to their access to healthcare. We’ll be asking whether the fact of being a woman subject to legal proceedings and/or incarcerated constitutes a double barrier to her right of access to healthcare. In other words, isn’t the female prison experience an extension of the prison sentence? We’ll be looking at inequalities in access to social and health care spaces and resources, as well as inequalities in access to and appropriation of knowledge.

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‘Public Trust in Science and the Justification Dilemma’

Conference by Gabriele Contessa (Carleton University)

*The conference will also be presented on Zoom.

Abstract:

Over the last couple of decades, a growing number of academics and commentators have become increasingly concerned about expanding pockets of mistrust of science among the publics of liberal democracies. In order to address these concerns, however, we need an adequate account of public trust in science. In this talk, I argue that the dominant individualistic approach to public trust in science, which takes public trust in science to be a trust relationship in which individual citizens are the primary trustors, is inadequate and that it should be replaced with what I call a social approach, which takes groups to be the primary trustors. I present a dilemma for the individualistic approach. If we set the bar low enough for ordinary people who trust science to be justified in their trust, then we must conclude that many cases of mistrust of science are also justified; but, if we set the bar so high that most cases of mistrust are not justified, then no ordinary people can have justified trust in science. The social approach takes the second horn of this dilemma. It maintains that, individually, most of us are not justified in trusting science (except, possibly, in a derivative sense) but that, nevertheless, some of us are part of a community that is collectively justified in trusting science. Our focus should therefore not be on how to persuade those who do not trust science to trust it but in building communities that are collectively justified in trusting it.

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On the occasion of Astrid Von Busekist’s (Paris Science Po) research stay at CRÉ, we will hold a symposium on her book La religion au tribunal (Albin Michel, 2023). The activity will be conducted in the presence of the author and respondents Marc-Antoine Dilhac (UdeM),  Victor Muniz-Fraticelli (McGill), Christian Nadeau (UdeM) et Daniel Weinstock (McGill). The event will be hosted by Ryoa Chung (UdeM).

To participate via Zoom, click here.

Book Summary

“Homeschooling, circumcision, religious divorce. Against the common belief that the political and religious could not work together without upsetting the principle of separation, this book demonstrates that the interactions between state law and religious commands are more complex. The State, sensitive to unique situations, can show flexibility and accommodate the belief obligations of individuals. Attentive to the integrity of believers, it can even occasionally cooperate with representatives of religious communities. This book examines three cases where the confrontation between civil and religious is resolved by unique arbitration between public virtues and individual freedoms. Not to harm individual religious freedom or the making of a democratic citizen? To bodily integrity or civic inclusion of minority communities? To religious freedom or democratic equality between women and men? A sometimes thwarted alloy between democracy and liberalism, deliberalism, a doctrine of the right measure, attempts the bet to paint a more flexible, more pragmatic picture than the idea of separation between the common good and the unique aspirations of believers suggests.”

About the Author

“Astrid von Busekist is a Professor of Political Theory at Sciences Po and the director of the journal Raisons Politiques. She has published, among others, at Albin Michel, Portes et murs. Des frontières en démocratie (2016) and Penser la justice. Entretiens avec Michael Walzer, 2020.”

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Emil Andersson (McGill University) and Iwao Hirose (McGill University), for the research team in Value Theory and the Philosophy of Public Policy at McGill University, will host a two-day conference on the moral challenge of future people, broadly construed.

Program:

Registration:

Presentation:

As John Rawls once remarked, the question of justice between generations “subjects any ethical theory to severe if not impossible tests”. One of the difficulties is, of course, to correctly determine what our duties of justice towards future people are. But for social contract theory, where justice is understood as the fair terms of cooperation among the participants of a joint practice, the more fundamental challenge is to make sense of the very idea of intergenerational cooperation. If justice requires some form or reciprocal cooperation, can our duties to future people really be duties of justice at all? Rather than a mere problem of extension, the case of future people puts the social contract approach as such into question.

However, though modern moral philosophy has confirmed the severity of the challenge, it has also shown that it goes well beyond the topic of intergenerational justice. In particular, the fact that our actions affect who will be born, and how many people there will be, raises deep questions for moral theory as such. It has proven to be extremely difficult to find a normative theory that not only successfully deals with the non-identity problem, but at the same time also avoids implausible results such as the repugnant conclusion. Thus, the challenge of future people not only raises difficult theoretical problems for the main approaches to moral theory – deontological as well as teleological ones – but also puts many of our most deeply held intuitions into question. An appreciation of the moral significance of future people may also lead to radical conclusions regarding what our most pressing political problems are, and what we ought to do.

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Zoey Lavallee and Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien will give us a presentation for CRÉ’s lunch series “Les midis de l’éthique”.

More information to come.

To attend on Zoom, it’s here.

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Artūrs Logins (Université Laval) will give a presentation titled “Inquiry and Reasons” in the GRIN conferences series,

*The conference will also be presented on Zoom.

Abstract

Knowledge, certainty, and understanding are all plausible candidates for constituting aims of genuine inquiry. However, a mere pluralist account of aims (and corresponding norms) of inquiry that lacks a more fundamental theoretical motivation is somewhat arbitrary. The aim of this paper is to provide further motivation for a pluralist approach. The key aspect of our proposal is to focus on the possession of sufficient reasons to believe as an overarching aim of theoretical inquiry.

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