Just a reminder: the due date for submissions for the Ninth Annual Felician Institute Conference on Ethics and Public Affairs is this coming Sunday, March 1. We’ve got some great submissions already, but there’s still room for more. For more information, here’s a link to the Institute’s website. The conference itself is to take place Saturday, April 25, 2015 at Felician’s Rutherford campus. The plenary speaker is James Stacey Taylor of The College of New Jersey, defending the idea of markets in political votes.

My friend Graham Parsons is organizing what promises to be a great conference on the Ethics of War at West Point Military Academy (WPMA), to take place at WPMA on Friday, March 27, and Saturday, March 28, 2015.  Nigel Biggar, Richard Miller, Fiona Robinson, and Jeremy Waldron will each address plenary sessions; Michael Walzer will provide the keynote address. I’ll be there for Walzer’s address as well as the Saturday sessions, so if there are any PoT readers at the conference, let’s meet up.

An afterthought: I’ll be giving a paper (really, a mini-paper) at the 21st annual meeting of the Association for Core Texts and Courses at the Radisson Hotel in Plymouth, Massachusetts (April 9-12, 2015), so if there are any PoT readers at that conference, let’s make sure to meet up there.  My paper is called “From Nicomachean Ethics to the Grant Study: Virtue Ethics Meets Behavioral Science” (slightly modified from what I submitted). Here’s my four-sentence abstract:

George Vaillant’s Adaptation to Life (1977) is a classic of contemporary behavioral science; meanwhile, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is one of the founding texts of ancient Greek moral philosophy. Both texts implicitly address the same topic, but each does so in ways that fundamentally contradict the claims of the other. Given this, it’s a useful (and entirely Aristotelian) exercise to read the two books in tandem, using the one to challenge and correct the claims of its rival. The resulting inquiry leaves us with a better sense of the strengths and weaknesses of both behavioral science and moral philosophy, and leaves us with some difficult questions as well.

I’ll post parts of the paper here, as well as the exact date/time I’m giving it, in a few weeks. A recent article on the Grant Study (ht: Kate Herrick).