1st Global Conference: Ethics in Public Life - Understandings, Applications, Controversies

Salzburg, Austria

This inter-disciplinary project seeks to explore the role, character, nature and place of ethics in public life. Politicians might use moral rhetoric and justifications for their actions, and public agencies and institutions claim to have ethically informed constitutions, policies and practices, but contemporary critiques have raised significant questions about how ethical public life is. Critics point to an absence of deliberative public engagement with ethical debates, the instrumentality and functionality to ethical processes in policies and institutions and a decided gap between moral rhetoric and ethical thinking. Ethical discourse has arguably become the domain of legitimation for self-interested and ideological preferences, mystification rather than clarity in public debate and moral imposition of rather than ethical debate in public policy, opinion formation and institutional practices and services.

The purpose of this project is to provide an international network and space to explore these issues and debates, and to explore them across disciplinary and domain boundaries. Hence, we are open to papers, panels or workshops on any areas of applied ethical thinking from business ethics through ‘bioethics' to sexual ethics and all fields in between. We are interested in papers, panels and workshops from meta-ethicists and those whose work is mainly within an applied field. We are particularly interested, however, in papers, panels and workshops that transcend both sets of boundaries, seek synergies between different domains and levels of abstraction and application, and that seek to move forward the agenda for how we promote the understanding and application of ethical deliberation in public life.

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