Conferences
Upcoming Conferences
Obligations, Individual Responsibility and Collective Responsibility Under Injustice
Part I: June 19-20, 2026 at LMU-München
Speakers
Part II: October 2-3, 2026 at NYU-New York
Speakers
Schedules
NYU Conference Schedule
[Note that Niko Kolodny will be the speaker at the NYU Colloquium in Legal, Political and Social Philosophy on Thursday October 1 from 4-7pm in the Lester Pollack conference room in Furman Hall. All conference attendees are welcome to attend. The paper will be posted here. Please email Omar Andron if you require building access: omar.andron@nyu.edu].
Day 1: Friday October 2, 2026
9am Coffee
9:30 Welcome from organizers
9:45 – 11:15 Session 1: Michele Moody-Adams, “ The Democratic Imaginary and Responsibility for Justice”
11:15 Break
11:45 – 1:15 Session 2: Jeremy Waldron, “Collective Responsibility in the Circumstances of Politics”
1:15 – 2:15 Lunch
2:15 – 3:45 Session 3: Sophia Moreau, “Dirty Hands of the Governed: Collective Responsibility for Officials’ Unlawful Acts”
3:45 Coffee
4:15 – 5:45 Session 4: Brandon Terry, “Rethinking the Idea of ‘Black-on-Black Crime’: From Ideology and Explanation to Responsibility and Solidarity”
6:30 Drinks and Conference Dinner (Free and available to all participants but please register on the website)
Day 2: Saturday October 3, 2026
9am Coffee
9:15 – 10:45 Session 5: Rahel Jaeggi, “Moral Responsibility under Authoritarianism”
10:45 – 11:15 Break
11:15 – 12:45 Session 6: Rainer Forst, “Structural Domination, Class and Democracy”
12:45 – 1:45 Lunch
1:45 – 3:15 Session 7: Lucas Stanczyk, “On Geo-Engineering and Future Wrongdoing”
3:15 – 3:45 Coffee Break
3:45 – 5:15 Session 8: Cécile Fabre, “The Duty to Vote in an Unjust World”
5:15 Closing Remarks
6pm Reception – Sophia Moreau’s home
Paper Abstracts, NYU
- The Democratic Imaginary and the Responsibility for Justice (Michele M. Moody-Adams)
Following Charles Taylor, I hold that a society’s collective imaginings are critical to its constitution and continuation as a political community. Taken together, they form a ‘social imaginary’ which includes .a general understanding of the normative expectations that must be met if citizens are to preserve their common life. In a democracy, an important subset of these expectations will be shaped by a set of civic virtues, including a complex, two-pronged virtue that I call civic grace. Civic grace involves, first, a willingness to relinquish political resentments, bitterness and revenge, and second, openness to new collaborations enabling the formation and pursuit of shared political goals. But civic grace depends upon a distinctive conception of the responsibility to promote justice. As Iris Young argued, we often have a political responsibility to acknowledge and address injustice--that is, to actively pursue justice--even when we cannot confidently assign blame for the relevant sufferings or wrongs. I explore the connections between civic grace, responsibility for justice, and democratic citizenship, drawing on the thought of Iris Young, Judith Shklar, M. L. King, and John Dewey.
- Collective Responsibility in the Circumstances of Politics (Jeremy Waldron)
My paper will focus on collective responsibility for justice and injustice in the circumstances of politics—where one belongs to a large polity, which is split on issues of justice, and in which one's own views about justice do not always prevail. “The circumstances of politics” is a term used to refer to a felt need among a group of people to act together in some situation combined with serious disagreement among the members of the group as to what that collective action should be. It is tempting to model this with a group of two or three individuals, but of course in politics such situations involve action among thousands or millions. The sheer weight of numbers brings into the picture familiar—though not easily resolved—issues about the personal responsibility of each individual in a situation where people have to act together and it is difficult or impossible to trace the difference that is made by one’s own individual choices. My paper will examine the interaction between these two parameters: the issue of large numbers and the issue of disagreement. They need to be resolved together to develop an adequate sense of individual responsibility in politics.
- Dirty Hands of the Governed? Collective Responsibility for Officials’ Unlawful Acts (Sophia Moreau)
When democratically elected political officials and those whom they appoint act unlawfully and wrong either those within their borders or those in other states, in what way, if any, are the people responsible? In this paper, I discuss two sorts of responsibility: responsibility to compensate victims, and culpability. I argue that accounts of compensatory responsibility that depend on authorization or group agency are problematic, both in circumstances of democratic backsliding and even in the case of well-functioning democracies. Instead, I defend a negligence-based account of compensatory responsibility: the people can fairly be asked to compensate victims of officials’ wrongful and unlawful acts even though these officials have acted outside their legally authorized powers, if there are certain structural steps the people could reasonably be expected to have taken to lessen the likelihood of that official committing that wrongful act, and they did not. I then argue that, when legal mechanisms for holding officials accountable have been eroded, the people may also have a collective duty to accept culpability for their officials’ wrongs –not because they are to blame for those wrongs, but because taking on culpability as a collectivity is sometimes required of us, as part of a broader duty of justice. I suggest that it is a mistake to exempt protesters and the oppressed either from this obligation to accept culpability or from compensatory obligations, as theorists often do. In their case, we can think of both obligations as what I have called “objectionable obligations.” I argue that in circumstances of injustice, we often stand under objectionable obligations; and I explain some of the consequences.
- “Rethinking the Idea of "Black-on-Black Crime”: From Ideology and Explanation to Responsibility and Solidarity (Brandon Terry)
This essay revisits the contested discourse of “black-on-black crime,” a phrase once ubiquitous in late twentieth-century academic, political, and cultural debates but now largely repudiated in the wake of Black Lives Matter. Contemporary critics rightly charge the term with perpetuating racial stigma, distorting explanations of crime, and deflecting attention from state violence. Yet such criticisms, I argue, obscure the complex genealogy of the discourse and the distinctive ethical concerns that animated its popular uses within Black political thought. First, to chasten our easy dismissal of the concept as simply racist, I differentiate “black crime” panics—historically preoccupied with white victimization—from the later category of “black-on-black crime,” which foregrounded the fraught relation between black perpetrators and black victims and was therefore of pressing and under-appreciated ethical and political interest to black activists, intellectuals, and artists. Second, I distinguish these ethical concerns from the idea that “black-on-black crime” is a phenomenon requiring a distinctive explanatory social theory rooted in psychopathological responses to racial oppression. To do so, I recover the barely remembered role of Black Power and the “Black Psychology” movement to develop such an account. The failure of this social theory suggests, I think, my third claim: that black-on-black crime discourse was, in the last instance, driven by normative concerns of how to sustain reciprocity and order in the face of a widespread sense of civic illegitimacy and deteriorating democratic faith rather than the explanatory claims now readily debunked by social scientists. Despite its epistemic flaws and susceptibility to punitive appropriation, this normative dimension represents a serious engagement with questions of agency, legitimacy, collective responsibility, and the ethics of solidarity—challenges that remain vital for any contemporary reckoning with racial injustice and crime.
- 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.
- Structural Domination, Class and Democracy (Rainer Forst)
This chapter will focus on structural domination, and will argue that it is a social and political situation of unequal power in which certain groups are subjected to a normative order that has not been and could not be justified to them as justificatory equals. To understand such structures of arbitrary rule, we need tools to analyse the forms of power that produce and reproduce these structures. I will propose that we understand them as structures of unequal noumenal power, that is, the power to make others do or think certain things that they otherwise would not have thought or done. This allows us to redefine the notion of “class” according to the “noumenal capital” certain groups hold and that give them an advantage or disadvantage with respect to others. Ultimately, this should help to understand the class dynamics in modern democratic societies – and how structural domination works against principles of democracy but is reproduced through democratic institutions. It also helps us to understand the complex class struggles of our time.
- On Geo-Engineering and Future Wrongdoing (Lucas Stanczyk)
Should we develop methods of solar geoengineering? In this paper, I argue that the standard prospective worry about solar geoengineering research is no longer accurate: the advancement of the science is already contributing to intergenerational injustice by facilitating wrongful delays in greenhouse gas emissions reductions. However, this fact does not settle whether any group or individual should work to advance solar geoengineering know-how. For the truth is that there is no agent with the power to stop all geoengineering research from happening, and eventual deployment by a global power is now likely because of the already locked-in catastrophic consequences of past emissions. Under these circumstances, the practical question for university leaders, scientists, and research groups is not whether a global “we” should develop and deploy solar geoengineering methods. Instead, the question for such people is whether the form of their existing or envisioned participation in particular research efforts will make it easier or harder for governments to continue to ‘kick the can down the road’ on emissions reductions in the future. This question is particularly sobering once we acknowledge another ominous feature of the situation. When solar geoengineering is deployed, it will be deployed at a stage in the climate crisis when further progress on global emissions reductions has become less likely—because the felt consequences of prior warming have become immensely costly and are diverting attention and resources to endeavors (such as disaster reconstruction, adaptation, and geopolitical conflict) that increasingly compete with what is necessary for a rapid and coordinated global energy transition. The paper develops a way of thinking about individual and collective duties to resist intergenerational injustice under the anticipated highly non-ideal conditions.
- The Duty to Vote in an Unjust World (Cécile Fabre)
Standard justifications for the moral duty to vote appeal to citizens' general duty of reciprocity not to free ride on the provision of the public good of democratic governance, or to a general duty of justice to support just institutions - which include democratic institutions. However, proponents of the duty have not properly addressed the question of the scope of the duty - to wit, by whom it is borne, and to whom it is owed. This is problematic: all liberal democracies (even relatively stable ones) are marred by wrongdoings, both public and private. The question, then, is whether the fact that some agent has wronged another agent makes a difference to either party's duty to vote and to their claim to be the beneficiary of the duty. While it stands to reason that, if anyone is owed a duty to vote at the bar of justice, victims surely are, it is not obvious that wrongdoers too have that claim. While it seems clear that if anyone owes a duty to vote at the bar of justice, wrongdoers do, it is not obvious that victims too owe it. I defend the following theses. First, the fact that a citizen has committed a serious wrong, of the kind described above, strengthens the case for holding him under a duty to vote. Second, the fact that a citizen has been or continues to be the victim of such wrongs does not exempt her from the duty - a duty which, moreover, she owes to wrongdoers as well as to innocent citizens, who include fellow victims.
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 Responsibilities of Legal Subjects"
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: Felix Lambrecht, "Reminders of Inferiority: How Individual Actions Can Wrong Every Member of a Group"
16:00 - End of conference
19:00 - Optional Dinner (at own expense)
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.
- On Justice in the Administration of Justice (Daniel Viehoff)
Most philosophical discussions of justice focus on such questions as: How do we fairly distribute the benefits and burdens of our property regime or employment practices? Our answers to these questions propose principles that should regulate these different social domains, and guide our thinking about specific laws, policies, etc.
Yet these principles of justice are not self-implementing. In practice, the realization of justice in particular domains requires that someone publicly promulgate relevant norms (legal or social), apply these norms to particular cases, enforce these norms when breached, etc. It requires, that is, a set of activities we may label ‘administration of justice.’
This, in turn, raises questions of fairness and justice that have received relatively little attention in political philosophy. These are questions about what fairness and justice requires, not with regard to the benefits and burdens that arise in particular domains of our lives (our property regime, tax scheme, etc.) that our political institutions regulate, but with regard to the benefits and burdens of administering justice itself: of making political decisions, of enforcing these decisions, of being subject to these decisions and their implementation, of resisting these decisions, and of being burdened by such resistance.
This essay seeks to explain what makes justice in the administration of justice distinctive, and to sketch an account of what it consists in (and why we, as ordinary citizens, may have to bear the burdens associated with our institution’s unjust decisions).
- Official Lawlessness and the Responsibilities of Legal Subjects (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.
- Reminders of Inferiority: How Individual Actions Can Wrong Every Member of a Group (Felix Lambrecht)
Actions sometimes wrong individuals qua members of a social group. Consider sexual harassment, violent hate crimes against members of the queer community, or racial slurs. Call these group wrongs. In this paper I argue for the perhaps radical position that group wrongs necessarily wrong not only the individual person they are committed against but alsoevery member of the social group to which this person belongs. In slogan form the account I develop says this: Group wrongs necessarily wrong every group member by forcing them to navigate the world reminded about their social inferiority. More precisely, group wrongs necessarily impose a risk of interference onto every group member, where this imposition consists in a risk of being reminded about, and therefore forced to deliberate about, their own social inferiority. I defend this account and demonstrate how it is superior to possible alternatives based on contributions to unjust structures, attitudes, illocutionary force, and expression.
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.
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.