Senior Ethicist Investigates Role of Moral Values in Political Conflict During Visiting Fellowship at London's Institute of Philosophy

This summer, Elizabeth Edenberg, our Senior Ethicist, was based in London for a visiting fellowship at the University of London’s Institute of Philosophy. She was working on a collaborative project exploring the role of truth, knowledge, and disagreement in political life.

Elizabeth’s research investigates conflicts that arise from deep disagreements about the role of moral values in political life and how to build mutual respect in spite of these differences. In recent public discourse we've seen these disagreements extend to disagreements about facts, knowledge, and the role of truth in politics. The new project in the emerging subfield of political epistemology aims to bring together political philosophers and epistemologists to tackle these complicated questions together. She has been collaborating with the Institute's Deputy Director, Michael Hannon, to organize a series of workshops tackling these questions in both the UK and US. Next up is a workshop at the Manchester Center for Political Theory in the UK in September. In October, Ethics Lab will host an an all-star lineup of scholars working in political philosophy and epistemology who will share new work tackling these questions that will be collected in a volume Elizabeth and Michael are coediting.  

While based in London, Elizabeth has also been busy giving talks around Europe. She participated in a large conference on Political Epistemology in London, gave a talk on reasonable disagreement and mutual respect at the Bled Ethics Conference in Slovenia, spoke about the role of truth in public reason at the European Epistemology Network Conference in Amsterdam, and spoke about disagreement in the age of social media at Birkbeck’s Philosophy Department.