March 26, 2011
McGill University, Montreal, Canada
How do we decide the optimal size of future population? What is the value of a future individual’s life? What do we owe to future individuals? Is social contract with future individuals possible? Is it better or worse to add an extra person to the world? How do we weigh the life of a present person and the life of a future person? This workshop will offer an opportunity to discuss these fundamental ethical questions and to examine the recent theoretical discussions provoked by Derek Parfit (Reasons and Persons), John Broome (Weighing Lives), and so on.
Speakers:
Gustaf Arrhenius (Stockholm) "The Impossibility of a Satisfactory Population Ethics"
Ralf Bader (NYU) "Neutrality and Conditional Goodness"
Ben Bradley (Syracuse) "Asymmetries in Benefiting, Harming and Creating"
Rahul Kumar (Queens) "Risking and Wronging Future Generations"
Melinda Roberts (College of New Jersey) "A Variabilist Approach to the Asymmetry"
This workshop is organized by Iwao Hirose and supported by SSHRC, CIHR, le Groupe de Recherche Interuniversitaire sur la Normativité (GRIN), and the McGill School of Environment.