The 11th Annual Felician Ethics Conference takes place this Saturday, October 14th, at Felician’s Rutherford campus: that is, roughly 9 am to 6 pm, at 227 Montross Ave, Rutherford, New Jersey 07070. Registration and plenary take place on the first floor of the Education Commons Building (the modern-looking white building on Montross); concurrents take place in Martin Hall (the old-fashioned brick building right next to it on Montross).

The plenary couldn’t be more topical:

Michele M. Moody-Adams
Joseph Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory
Columbia University

“Taking Expression Seriously: Liberty, Equality, and Expressive Harm”

The paper will discuss some implications and challenges of the claim (accepted by theorists as varied as Elizabeth Anderson, Richard Pildes, Jeremy Waldron,  Catharine Mackinnon and  Charles Lawrence) that (a) expression can sometimes be the cause of direct, ‘non-material’ harm to persons and their interests and (b) the seriousness of some kinds of expressive harm make it reasonable to consider content-based restrictions on free expression and academic freedom.

And here’s the program.

Though we won’t have quite the PoT-person quorum we had in 2016 (when David Potts and Derek Bowman gave papers, and Michael Young and I chaired sessions), Michael, Alison Bowles, and I will be there this year. Michael and I will once again be chairing sessions, and I’ll be giving a version of a paper that started life as a blog post here.

If it’s any consolation, plenty of other people will be there, too.