Workshop on Sincerity in Ethics, Politics and International Relations

Start
12 Apr 2011
End
17 Apr 2011
Location
University of St. Gallen, Switzerland

WORKSHOP ON SINCERITY IN ETHICS, POLITICS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Workshop organised by Sorin Baiasu (Keele) and Sylvie Loriaux (Nijmegen, Radboud) with the support of the Kantian Standing Group of the European Consortium for Political Research and the UK Kant Society. The workshop will take place at the ECPR Joint Sessions (12-17 April 2011, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland).

Workshops at the ECPR Joint Sessions have between 16 and 18 scholars, who meet during the five days of the event to present and discuss papers on a particular topic. Papers are circulated in advance and the time allocated for the discussion of each paper is quite generous.

We invite applications for participation to the workshop: please send a 2-page detailed outline of the paper by 1 December 2010 (either to Sorin Baiasu, s.baiasu@keele.ac.uk or to Sylvie Loriaux, sylvie.loriaux@gmail.com). Papers (around 6,500-7,000 words) will then have to be circulated to all participants to the workshop at the beginning of March 2011. There is no conference fee for members of ECPR institutions. Grants for participation are available for graduates, young academics and retired members of the profession. For more information, go to:

www.ecprnet.eu/funding_and_awards/documents/ECPR_joint_sessions_grant.pdf

Workshop Outline

(Full Outline can be found at:

www.ecprnet.eu/joint_sessions/st_gallen/documents/outlines/21.pdf)

Recent controversial events illustrate fully the relevance, significance and complexity of a requirement of sincerity or truthfulness in politics. Consider, for instance, the context preceding and following the war in Iraq: it seems clear that the condition of sincerity has been functioning on various levels, as an unquestioned assumption, ever since the conflict started. Sincerity has played the role of a personal value, which can be invoked in justification of particular decisions, it has played a legitimizing function as a norm in political relations among the members of a nation or state, or between nations or states at the international level. Given the relevance of the question of sincerity, it is not surprising that it occupies such an important place in contemporary philosophical debates, where the existence of the important philosophical legacy, in particular the Kantian one, is easily noticeable. Against the background of the Kantian legacy, the proposed workshop aims to approach the question of sincerity in a distinctive way, more exactly, from the perspective of the following two sets of questions: first, we are interested in whether and in what ways a principle of sincerity is politically relevant and can be justified in concrete political contexts; secondly, we are interested in the particular factors which, in those concrete political contexts, limit (in part or completely) the validity of a principle of sincerity (or related principles or values, such as standards of truthfulness, of prohibition