Panels on "Evolution and Morality" at the APSA Convention

At this year's convention of the American Political Science Association, August 28-31, in Boston, the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy will be sponsoring a series of three panels on "Evolution and Morality." The ASPLP's program can be found at their website.

For one of the panels, I will be presenting a paper on "Biopolitical Science: Darwin, Lincoln, and the Deep History of Politics." The commentators will be Daniel Lord Smail, a historian at Harvard who is the author of On Deep History and the Brain, and Richard Richards a philosopher of biology from the University of Alabama.

My panel is at 10:15 a.m. on Friday, August 29th, in the Sheraton Boston (39 Dalton Street) in the Sheraton Independence Ballroom West.

The first panel will meet at 4:15 p.m., August 28, with Philip Kitcher giving a paper on "Naturalistic Ethics without Fallacies." Kitcher is a philosopher of biology at Columbia University.

The second panel is at 8:00 a.m. immediately preceding my panel, with Nita Farahany giving her paper on "Law and Behavioral Morality." She works on the intersection of criminal law, behavioral genetics, neuroscience, and philosophy. She's a law professor at Vanderbilt University who has advanced degrees in biology and philosophy as well as her law degree. Is that sick or not?

Eventually, all of these papers and commentaries will be published together as one of the books in the Nomos annual series that has been edited for many years by ASPLP.

All of the papers and commentaries will be available before the convention at a website open only to ASPLP members. But I will also upload my paper to the APSA convention website by the end of this week.

ASPLP has a fascinating format for their yearly gatherings. They select a common theme and have three panels organized around three papers presented by a law professor, a philosopher, and a political scientist. Then, for each of these three panels, they have two commentators, preserving the mix between the three disciplines. If the paper presenter is a political scientist, the commentators are a philosopher and a law professor, and so on. They then gather all of these papers and commentaries, along with other papers on the common theme, and publish them as an annual book published by New York University Press.