Conferences

Schedules

Each conference will last for two full days, over a Friday and a Saturday, and will involve eight papers.  A one and a half hour session will be devoted to each paper. Each session will begin with brief comments by a commentator from the local area, followed by a general Q&A. A conference dinner for all participants will be provided by the host institution on Friday night.

LMU Conference Schedule

Day 1: Friday, June 19, 2026 

9:00 - Coffee 

9:30 - Session 1: Ekow Yankah, "Civic Rights and Duties as Collective Responsibility"

11:00 - Break 

11:30 - Session 2: Serena Parekh, "Deterrence and Migrant Deaths: The Problem of Indirect Harm and Collective Responsibility"

13:00 - Lunch  

14:30 - Session 3: Daniel Viehoff, "Authority and Injustice"

16:00 - Break 

16:30 - Session 4: Liam Murphy, "Official Lawlessness and the Responsibility of Individuals"

18:00 - End of Session 4

19:00 - Conference Dinner 

Day 2: Saturday, June 20, 2026  

9:00 - Coffee 

9:30 - Session 5: Victor Tadros, "On Pacifism"

11:00 - Break 

11:30 - Session 6: Juliana Bidadanure, "Acquisitive Disobedience and the Ethics of Property Lawbreaking"

13:00 - Lunch

14:30 - Session 7: Laura Valentini, "Personal Sovereignty and Structural Injustice"

16:00 - Break 

16:30 - Session 8: Rahel Jaeggi, "Moral Responsibility Under Authoritarianism"

18:00 - End of conference 

19:00 - Optional Closing Dinner (at own expense) 

(NYU Schedule TBA)

Paper Abstracts, LMU

Civic Rights and Duties as Collective Responsibility (Ekow Yankah)

Ours is an age of individual responsibility. Across an important range of academic and colloquial contexts, claims of collective responsibility are met with hostility. This hostility is particularly acute when claims of collective responsibility are rendered in conjunction with racial justice. Describing political or legal claims as invoking collective responsibility is often seen as a way of undermining, perhaps even defeating, them. If the era of bloodstains is happily past, the over deification of individual rights has blinded us to the importance of our non-voluntary, collective responsibilities and obligations. The myopic focus on individual rights ignores the obvious fact that the bulk of our legal and political rights are derived not from individual autonomy but from our role in our collective political community.

Worse, we suffer from a sort of moral immaturity; we take too much for granted our collective and historical rights and privileges, while shrugging off our collective duties. Simply noticing how naturally we internalize our collectively shaped privileges and benefits gives lie to our rejection of collective obligations.  Recognizing this asymmetry foregrounds that our political and legal duties as of equal importance to our rights. Put less provocatively, our individual obligations stand alongside our civic duties, deeply shaped by collective responsibilities. Rescuing the concept of collective responsibility from suspicion gives us natural ways to resist the dismissal of important current egalitarian political movements, particularly in criminal law, affirmative action and reparations.

Deterrence and Migrant Deaths: The Problem of Indirect Harm and Collective Responsibility (Serena Parekh)

The focus of this paper is on responsibility for the indirect harms caused by state deterrence policies. If a state makes safe migration routes impossible, and migrants instead have to go through jungles or cross oceans, and are forced to engage professional smugglers to help them seek asylum or escape crushing poverty, is the state responsible for the violence or death migrants experience enroute? How can we understand responsibility for this kind of indirect harm? Answering this question requires that we think about historical injustice and collective responsibility. Deterrence operates against a backdrop of profound global inequality and historical injustice, where migration often follows colonial routes in reverse, complicating questions of responsibility when the conditions driving migration stem partly from colonial legacies and ongoing structural injustices that benefit receiving states. Further, ethics of deterrence must grapple with problems of collective responsibility that transcend individual state actions because deterrence operates as an interconnected system, where one state's deterrence decisions alter the migration pressures other states face. By examining deterrence through the lens of responsibility, this paper aims to clarify what states owe to would-be migrants and considers questions of responsibility of individual states as well as collective responsibility on the global level. 

Authority and Injustice (Daniel Viehoff)

Justice is often considered the ‘first virtue’ of social and political institutions, and thought to constrain the permissible pursuit of other values. Yet it is practically inevitable that political institutions at least occasionally make mistaken decisions that treat some people unjustly. Political institutions also purport to be authoritative, and claim that their decisions settle how citizens and officials are to act even when these decisions are mistaken. This paper explores how, if at all, political authority – and in particular the purported duties of public officials to apply and enforce political decisions even if these decisions treat their subjects unjustly – can be justified within the normative constraints that justice imposes. 

Official Lawlessness and the Responsibility of Individuals (Liam Murphy)

The existence of a well-functioning and just-enough legal order is justified by the good that it does. General compliance with the rules of such legal orders is better than general noncompliance, even if a more just legal order is possible. However, it cannot be said that every particular act of compliance by individuals itself contributes to the good outcome. There must nonetheless be some ethical tie between individuals and instrumentally justified legal orders. Leaving to another occasion the problem of individual compliance, the paper focuses on an issue that is, perhaps surprisingly, easier to address: What is the responsibility of individuals and private organizations in the face of noncompliance with law by the government? I argue that in many cases, individuals and private organizations may have greater reason lawfully to resist official lawlessness than they have to comply with law themselves.

On Pacifism (Victor Tadros)

In this paper I show that familiar forms of pacifism – those that depend on the general immorality of violence, either on fundamentally moral basis or an empirical basis, are false. However, I also argue that people are sometimes justified in becoming pacifists because of the good effects of becoming a pacifist. That is so even though their pacifist commitments will dispose them to wrongdoing. I then show that pacifists are sometimes excused for their wrongdoing, but that there are quite stringent conditions for such excuses. Finally, I argue that pacifists can be admirable for the good deeds that result from their pacifism even though they are disposed to wrongdoing.

Acquisitive Disobedience and the Ethics of Property Lawbreaking (Juliana Bidadanure)

In Property Outlaws, Eduardo Peñalver and Sonia Katyal distinguish between acquisitive lawbreaking—self-regarding and aimed at direct appropriation—and expressive lawbreaking—other-regarding and aimed at communicating protest. Drawing on historical cases, they contend that some forms of expressive property lawbreaking can play a constructive role in reshaping property norms and legal entitlements. This paper examines the moral significance of the distinction. I critically assess the reasons we may have for favoring expressive forms of resistance to unjust wealth distribution over acquisitive ones. I also introduce forms of financial civil disobedience that straddle the distinction. The paper examines the status that should be accorded to acquisitive lawbreaking within theories of resistance to distributive injustice.

Personal Sovereignty and Structural Injustice (Laura Valentini)

Liberals tend to agree that each person possesses a domain of personal sovereignty. In this domain, others’ actions are within one's normative control. For example, whether someone is allowed to touch me or take my property is up to me: I am “sovereign” over these matters. Consequently, when others interfere with my body or property without my permission, they are responsible for wronging me, in that they violate my sovereignty. I argue that in circumstances of structural injustice, we need to rethink both responsibility for, and the nature of, these kinds of wrongs. Structural injustice deprives its victims of a sovereignty they ought to possess as a moral matter. This sovereignty-deprivation, in turn, is not primarily the fault of whoever is guilty of unwanted interference, but of everyone who avoidably sustains social structures that disempower part of the population. Structural injustice, on the view I propose, is particularly pernicious in that its victims cannot even have their sovereignty violated, because—at least in certain domains—they lack sovereignty in the first place. These claims will be illustrated in the context of sexist and racist social structures.

Moral Responsibility under Authoritarianism (Rahel Jaeggi)

My paper develops a practice-theoretical account of moral responsibility under authoritarian conditions. It argues that authoritarian systems deform responsibility not by eliminating agency, but by reshaping the social practices through which agency and judgment are exercised. Against liberal-individualist models, the lecture proposes a two-dimensional understanding of responsibility: responsibility within practices and responsibility for their reproduction. Responsibility remains individual, but socially mediated, gradual, and structurally damaged rather than erased.

Registration

Attendance is free and open to all. Participants are encouraged to attend both conferences, but those who can only attend one part are also welcome. We ask all participants to please register in advance. 

Register

Accommodation

Accommodation is available for the LMU conference in June at the Hotel Pension am Siegestor, which is very near the university.  Accommodation for the NYU conference in October is available at the Washington Square Hotel, two blocks from the law school. Conference guests may use the following discount code at the Washington Square Hotel to book a discounted room.