https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7794-6836
ABSTRACT
The introduction to the special issue on the Ethics and Politics of Disagreement provides a history of the Robert Papazian and PERITIA IJPS Essay prizes, announces the winners of the 2023 prizes, provides a brief overview of the articles in this special issue and highlights some of their connections, and concludes with an announcement of a new IJPS essay prize.
The special issue on the Ethics and Politics of Disagreement marks the ending of 12 years of an annual essay prize dedicated to the memory of Robert Papazian, a young political activist who was executed in Iran in 1982. Papazian was born to an Armenian family in Tehran, Iran in 1954. He studied Politics and International Relations at École des Relations Internationales in Paris. Like many other political activists abroad, Papazian returned to Iran in the summer of 1978, to join the uprising against the Shah. After the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, he continued his political activism in Tehran and then in the Kurdistan province of Iran as a political and theoretical instructor to a left-wing opposition group. Papazian was identified by a former activist turned collaborator on the streets of Tehran and was arrested in February 1982. Two weeks prior to his arrest he had turned 28. In prison, he, along with thousands of other political prisoners was not granted any legal representation nor was he permitted to have visitors. Years later the family found out that a representative of the Armenian Council had been allowed to pay a visit to ask him to recant and cooperate with the authorities as a condition of his freedom. He had refused the offer categorically.
Robert Papazian, along with a number of other political prisoners, was executed in July 1982. He was buried anonymously in the mass graves of the Khavaran cemetery in the outskirts of Tehran. However, the date of his execution as well as the exact location of his interred body are unknown. His last letter to the family sent two or three days before his execution, indicates that he had still no knowledge of the verdict. Robert Papazian’s political activism was motivated by his hatred of injustice and cruelty. He cared deeply for others and was affected by their suffering. His short life was guided, above all else, by a desire to defend the weak and vulnerable. The themes for this annual competition, first announced in 2011, were chosen to reflect the life and ideals of Robert Papazian. The themes and the winners of the prize were:
2012 Courage
Winner:Matthew Pianalto (Eastern Kentucky University)
Winning essay:‘Moral Courage and Facing Others’
2013 Integrity
Winner:Jill Hernandez (University of Texas at San Antonio)
Winning essay:‘The Integrity Objection, Reloaded’
2014 Friendship
Winner:Robbie Arrell (Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, The University of Melbourne)
Winning essay:‘The Source and Robustness of Duties of Friendship’
2015 Authority
Winner:Carl Fox (Inter-Disciplinary Ethics Applied Center, The University of Leeds)
Winning Essay:‘Political Authority, Practical Identity and Binding Citizens’
2016 Freedom
Winner:Joe Saunders (Inter-Disciplinary Ethics Applied Center, The University of Leeds)
Winning essay:‘Kant and the Problem of Recognition’
2017 Equality
Winner:Federico Zuolo (University of Hamburg)
Winning essay:‘Equality, its Basis, and Moral Status. Challenging the Principle of Equal Consideration of Interests’
2018 Trust
Winner:Paul Faulkner (University of Sheffield)
Winning essay:‘Giving the Benefit of the Doubt’
Runner up Prize:Anthony Booth (University of Sussex):
Winning Essay:‘Trust in the Guise of Belief’
Third Prize, funded by the Irish Research Council When Experts Disagree (WEXD) Project: Fay Niker, (The Center for Ethics in Society, Stanford University) and Laura Specker Sullivan (Harvard Center for Bioethics)
Winning Essay:‘Trusting Relationships and the Ethics of Interpersonal Action’
2019 Empathy
Winner:Monika Betzler (LMU Munich)
Winning essay:‘The Relational Value of Empathy’
Special early career prize:Mark Fagiano (University of Central Florida, Orlando)
Winning Essay:‘Relational Empathy’
2020 The Ethics and Politics of Vulnerability
Winner:Andrew Kirton (University of Leeds)
Winning Essay:‘Matters of Trust as Matters of Attachment Security’
Special UCD Centre for Ethics in Public Life Prize: Paul Giladi (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Winning Essay:‘The Agent in Pain: Alienation and Discursive Abuse’.
2021 Testimonial injustice
Winner:Charlotte Knowles (University of Groningen).
Winning Essay:‘Articulating Understanding: A Phenomenological Approach to Testimony on Gendered Violence’
2022 Ethics and the Emotions
Winner:Amy Sepinwall (University of Pennsylvania)
Winning Essay:‘Shared Guilt among Inmates’
Runner up Prize:Edgar Phillips (The University of St. Andrews)
Winning Essay:‘Addressing the Past: Time, Blame and Guilt’
Starting with the 2018 issue of IJPS, and the competition on the theme of trust, there was a notable change in the quality and quantity of the entries. The journal, therefore, began publishing annual special issues on the theme of the Robert Papazian prizes featuring articles by the prize winners and the shortlisted entries. Invited articles were also added to these special issues. Expanded versions of three of the five special issues were subsequently published as edited books. They were:
Baghramian, M. (Ed.). (2019). From Trust to Trustworthiness. London, New York, Routledge.
Baghramian, M., Papazian, M., Stout, R. (Eds.). (2021). The Value of Empathy. London, New York. Routledge.
Altanian, M. and Baghramian, M. (Eds). (forthcoming − 2024). Testimonial Injustice and Trust. London, New York, Routledge.
Beginning with 2019, the PERITIA prize was added to the annual Robert Papazian Essay Prize. PERITIA – Policy, Expertise and Trust in Action – a multi-disciplinary international research project, funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, explores the conditions of trust in experts. Its team members – philosophers, social and natural scientists, policy experts, ethicists, psychologists, media specialists and civil society organisations – from Armenia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and United Kingdom, investigated the role of science in policy decisions, singling out climate change as their primary case study. The PERITIA Essay Prizes were funded by the Centre for Ethics in Public Life at University College Dublin and while connecting with the theme of the annual Robert Papazian prize, they also reflected some of the main themes and interests of the PERITIA project. The themes to topics and the winning entries for this prize were:
2020 Trust and Vulnerability
Winners:Emily Sullivan (EU Eindhoven), Max Sondag (TU Eindhoven), Ignaz Rutter (Universität Passau), Wouter Meulemans (TU Eindhoven), Scott Cunningham (University of Strathclyde), Bettina Speckmann (TU Eindhoven), Mark Alfano (Macquarie University & Delft University of Technology)
Winning Essay:‘Vulnerability in Social Epistemic Networks’
2021 Trust and Testimonial (In)Justice
Winners:Havi Carel (University of Bristol) and Ian Kidd (University of Nottingham).
Winning essay:‘Institutional Opacity, Epistemic Vulnerability, and Institutional Testimonial Justice’
Winner of the early career PERITIA Prize: Inés Corbalán (ArgLab, NOVA University of Lisbon) and Giulia Terzian (NOVA University of Lisbon)
Winning Essay:‘Our Epistemic Duties in Scenarios of Vaccine Mistrust’
2022 The Social and Political Role of Emotions
Winners:Julia Mosquera and Christi M. Jylhā (Institute for Future Studies, Stockholm),
Winning Essay:‘How to Feel about Climate Change: The Normativity of Climate Emotions’.
The 2023 Prizes
The theme for the final Robert Papazian Prize was ‘The Ethics and Politics of Disagreement’. The winner of the 3000 euro prize was Nick Küspert (Department of Philosophy, University of St Andrews) with the essay ‘Conciliating to Avoid Moral Scepticism’. The Editors are particularly pleased that for the first time in the history of the prize, the external reviewers picked an essay by a postgraduate student as the outright winner of this competition.
The theme for the final PERITIA prize was Expert Disagreement. To mark the ending of a successful multidisciplinary research project and to acknowledge the high quality of the entries we had received, in consultation with the external reviewers, it was decided to award a total of four PERITIA prizes to papers that in their different ways have extended our understanding of the theme of disagreement among experts.
The winning article of the PERITIA IJPS prize of 2000 euro was ‘Disagreement about Disagreement?’ by Ruth Weintraub (Department of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University).
The runner up PERITIA prize of 1200 euro was awarded to the article ‘Hidden Depths: Testimonial Injustice, Deep Disagreement, and Democratic Deliberation’ by Aidan McGlynn (Philosophy Department, University of Edinburgh).
There were two joint winners of the third prize of 500 euro each: ‘Unknown Peers’ by Marc Andree Weber (Philosophisches Seminar, Universität Mannheim) and ‘Disagreeing with Experts’ jointly written by Manuel Almagro Holgado (Department of Philosophy, University of Valencia) and Neftalí Villanueva Fernández (Department of Philosophy I, University of Granada).
The editors of the special issue and the journal, as well as the reviewers of the competitions, would like to congratulate the winners and runner up authors for their excellent submissions.
About the Articles
The articles in this special issue cover some of the central points of discussion in the vast and still growing philosophical literature on disagreement. As we will see, the themes of conciliationist solutions to the problem of peer disagreement, the topic of deep disagreement, the relationship between disagreement and the choices of moral theories are picked up by several entries and provide a helpful roadmap to issues that are deemed central to current approaches to the topic.
According to the conciliationist approach to peer disagreement, in the face of justified and well informed views of our epistemic peers that are in conflict or even in contradiction with ours, the rational option is to modify our degree of commitment to our beliefs and convictions. When it comes to moral disagreements, conciliationist responses create the worry that revisions of our previously held convictions can lead to a lack of conviction, uncertainty or even scepticism about moral beliefs. Nick Küspert in ‘Conciliating to Avoid Moral Scepticism’ addresses this concern in a novel way. He argues that, contrary to the above widely shared criticism, moral conciliationism not only does not lead to moral scepticism but can enable us to become more confident in many of our moral beliefs. He argues that only by taking disagreements seriously as a threat to our beliefs can we utilise agreements in support of our beliefs. This creates what he calls a ‘symmetry’ between the role of moral agreement and disagreement in establishing moral convictions and shows their equal significance. Moral inquiry, he argues, should be seen as a collective endeavour where agreement on our moral judgments is needed for justifying confidence in our moral beliefs. But by symmetry, we should then also take seriously the significance of our moral disagreements. This is made possible by taking a conciliatory approach toward disagreement and modifying our beliefs in response to disagreeing moral peers.
Duncan `Pritchard and Rach Cosker-Rowland, the authors of the next two articles, were invited by the editor to contribute to this special issue. I am grateful for their willingness to be a part of this final issue of IJPS commemorating the life and ideals of Robert Papazian.
As his title suggests, Duncan Pritchard in ‘Understanding Deep Disagreement’ engages with the knotty problem of deep disagreement. Deep disagreements are by definition difficult or even impossible to resolve, a topic particularly prominent in discussions of religious, ethical and political disagreements, and are often used to motivate relativism and scepticism in these areas of discourse. There have been a variety of much discussed solutions or attempt at the dissolution of deep disagreement, including the conciliationist approaches discussed in articles 1, 4 and 6 and some versions of relativism, the topic of article 9 in this special issue. Standardly understood, deep disagreements are seen to arise from commitments to opposing fundamental epistemic principles. Contrary to this popular view, Pritchard argues for what he thinks is a more straightforward approach where the focus is on the topic of disagreement and its existential import for us rather than the depth of commitments to contrasting positions and principles.
Rach Cosker-Rowland, in ‘Ethical Theories and Controversial Intuitions’, examines the role and relevance of controversial moral intuitions to ethical theorising. She asks if intuitions about controversial moral judgments – such as retributive punishment, keeping promises for its own sake, or sacrificing an innocent person to save many – have a legitimate role in constructing explanatory normative ethical theories, theories that would explain why we ought to do what we ought to do. As a case study, she argues against a particular argument for moral relativism where normative ethical theories are seen to explain the ethical intuitions of the individuals considering the theory. In her approach, explanatory ethical theories should fit with widely shared moral intuitions rather than the controversial, and hence exceptional ones. Her treatment of the topic demonstrates some of the interesting ways in which the topic of moral disagreement impinges on metaethics and also connects with more general concerns about relativism and individually held beliefs, also discussed by Sophie Juliane Veigl’s ‘Towards a Politicized Anatomy of Fundamental Disagreement’ in article 9.
In her winning article of the PERITIA prize, ‘Disagreement about Disagreement’, Ruth Weintraub also addresses issues arising from conciliationism, discussed by Nick Küspert, but approaches the topic more generally, covering all varieties of peer disagreement. Her piece thus connects well with metaphilosophical issues arising from expert disagreement, a topic central to PERITIA’s research, and the oft repeated worry that disagreement among experts has the potential to diminish confidence in experts and expertise. The more general worry Weintraub addresses is that those defending a conciliationist approach to disagreement would have to split the difference in the strength of their commitment to conciliationism when arguing against the defenders of the steadfastness approach, so their own theory undermines the strength of their approach. Weintraub critically addresses some of the key self-undermining criticisms of conciliationism and concludes that the undermining claims are too pessimistic about the effectiveness of the conciliatory approach to controversial issues.
Aidan McGlynn’s ‘Hidden Depths’, the winner of the runner up PERITIA prize, engages with the question of deep disagreement discussed by Duncan Pritchard in article 2. McGlynn subscribes to the commonly held view that deep disagreements concern fundamental epistemic principles but develops this approach by considering the impact of testimonial injustice on assessing disagreements. Testimonial injustice, he argues, can hide from third party observers or one of the parties to a dispute the deeper nature and complexity of the issues involved in the disagreement to the detriment of the parties who, for a variety of reasons, may be susceptible to testimonial injustice. The article also discusses the ways in which such unnoticed features of disagreement can negatively affect the functioning of democracies. In doing so, McGlynn’s article establishes interesting continuities with the 2021 Robert Papazian prize articles on ‘Testimonial Injustice and trust’.
The first of the two winners of the second runner up prizes of the PERITIA essay competition is ‘Unknown Peers’ by Marc Andree Weber. This essay too engages with the conciliationist approach to peer disagreement, but from a more critical perspective than the articles by Küspert and Weintraub. Marc Andree Weber argues that the possibility of there being unknown peers creates difficulties for the conciliatory approach. Conciliationism, he argues, should take into account those peers who hold contrary positions to ours but remain unknown to us. There are two distinct problems: First, the existence of unknown peers makes it a matter of chance which peers we encounter and are compelled to be conciliatory towards and second, it allows for the possibility of deliberately isolating ourselves from any kind of intellectual exchange and thus to hold on to our cherished opinions in a steadfast manner. For these reasons, Weber urges us to take the problem of unknown peers seriously and he in the process he also outlines a solution to the problem.
The other third prize winner of the PERITIA prize was ‘Disagreeing with Experts’ by Manuel Almagro Holgado and Neftalí Villanueva Fernández. The article engages directly with a core question of the PERITIA project: Which of the many disagreeing experts in the public domain should we trust? In a technologically complex world with fine grained division of cognitive labour, trust in experts is crucial for both policy decisions and their implementation. But such trust should also be well informed and based on evidence. ‘Disagreeing with Experts’ examines the potential tension between epistemic deference and epistemic independence in our attitudes towards experts and proposes that modifying the conditions under which scientific dialogue between experts and lay people takes place can help to resolve this tension and facilitate a better understanding of what it takes to trust experts.
The article by Niclas Rautenberg, ‘Making Room for the Solution: A Critical and Applied Phenomenology of Conflict Space’ was short-listed for the Robert Papazian prize and was recommended for publication in the special issue by the referees who were impressed by its imaginative approach to issues arising from public disagreement. The article combines a Heideggerian philosophical framework with an interdisciplinary investigation of disagreement by drawing on interviews with politicians, government officials and political actors in order to discuss what Rautenberg calls ‘the normative significance of the spatial dimension of conflict events’ or the relevance of questions such as where a conflict takes place and who the parties to it are. According to Rautenberg, location together with the self-understanding of the parties to a conflict lay bare the power relationships involved in disagreements in the public sphere. This is something that purely transcendental phenomenology misses but quasi-transcendental phenomenological approaches, such as the one proposed here, can utilise in order to understand and analyse the phenomenon of disagreement in greater detail and with more nuance.
The final article in this special issue was submitted to IJPS independently of the Robert Papazian and PERITIA competitions, but because of its strong thematic affinity with the topics under discussion, it is being published here at the recommendation of the referees. Sophie Juliane Veigl’s ‘Towards a Politicized Anatomy of Fundamental Disagreement’ discusses the connection between irresolvable or deep disagreements, already discussed by Pritchard and McGlynn, and relativism, examined by Cosker-Rowland. Epistemic relativists often argue that disagreements may be irresolvable because they stem from fundamentally opposing epistemic principles or are based on fundamentally different epistemic systems, in other words they are deep. Their critics argue that seemingly opposing epistemic principles are open to reconciliation because they are derived from more basic shared epistemic precepts. Veigl, like Rautenberg in the previous article, is conscious of what she calls the ‘epistemic positionality’ of parties to a disagreement, determined by their epistemic status, epistemic power and epistemic repertoire. Awareness of this situatedness helps us to differentiate between epistemic systems more successfully and in doing so it also addresses the problem of relativism in a novel way.
With the final awards of the Robert Papazian and PERITIA prizes, the International Journal of Philosophical Studies is pleased to announce the launch of a new annual essay prize. The journal now invites submissions for its new annual essay prize of €2,000, for publication in 2024. The theme for this inaugural year is Memory and Memorialisation with a deadline of 8 December 2023. The theme is significant because this year the IJPS turns 30 and we wish to use the occasion to explore the very idea of anniversaries and how we mark them. With this in mind, we invite contributions from all philosophical traditions addressing the nature of remembrance.
Although epistemological theories like internalism, externalism, foundationalism and coherentism tend to focus on questions concerning knowledge and justification, there are also many fascinating philosophical questions to be addressed concerning the nature and role of memory. For example: what exactly are the objects of memory? Does memory provide direct or indirect access to the past? What is the difference between episodic memory and factual memory, and how are they related? Must memories only concern past events/objects/states of affairs? Can our reliance on memory be justified? Can memory be sufficient for knowledge, or does knowledge based on memory require further justification? How does knowledge itself change and reframe our memories of the past? How has recent work in psychology and neuroscience impacted on philosophical approaches to memory?
In terms of understanding the self, memory has long played a decisive role in theories of personal and narrative identity from Locke to Ricoeur. How do these different accounts of the self-relate to embodied theories of the self, and indeed embodied memory? Further, we consider the concept of collective memory and its role in the constitution of group identity. How do war memorials and days of remembrance cement national or regional identities? Are there elements of forgetting in these acts of memory and if so, are there dangers that can be guarded against here? What is the relationship between history and memory? How are lost histories, such as those from the Middle Passage, nonetheless in some way remembered, even if only as lost?
Finally, from the use of music in the care of Alzheimer’s patients, to the autofiction of Knausgård or Ernaux, to commemorative structures such as the Taj Mahal or Arc de Triomphe, various art forms act as both a guardian of memory and its trigger. How does philosophy engage with this relationship between art and remembrance?
Essays addressing these and related themes from both established and early career researchers are welcome. In addition to the cash prize, the winning entry along with a selection of runner-up essays will be published as a special issue in 2024.
The deadline for submission is Friday 8th December 2023.
Essays should be no more than 8,000 words long, including footnotes and bibliography.
Submissions should indicate that they are entries for the essay prize special issue.
Essays must be anonymized and will be subject to the journal’s standard double-blind peer review process.
Detailed submission guidelines can be found here.
Various members of the IJPS editorial board will rotate on the judging panel, to avoid any conflict of interests.
All queries should be directed to the editors, Lisa Foran, Daniel Esmonde Deasy, and Rowland Stout, via [email protected]
Winners of the Robert Papazian Essay Prize in Ethics and Political Philosophy and the PERITIA Prize
International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2012–2022
Pianalto, Matthew (2012). Moral Courage and Facing Others. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 20 (2):165–184.
Hernandez, Jill (2013). The Integrity Objection, Reloaded. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 21 (2):145–162.
Arrell, Robbie (2014). The Source and Robustness of Duties of Friendship. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 22 (2):166–183.
Fox, Carl (2015). Political Authority, Practical Identity and Binding Citizens. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 23 (2):168–186.
Saunders, Joe (2016). Kant and the Problem of Recognition: Freedom, Transcendental Idealism, and the Third-Person, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 24:2, 164–182.
Zuolo, Federico (2017). Equality, its Basis and Moral Status: Challenging the Principle of Equal Consideration of Interests, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 25:2, 170–188.
Faulkner, Paul (2018). Giving the Benefit of the Doubt. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 26 (2):139–155.
Booth, Anthony Robert (2018). Trust in the Guise of Belief. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 26 (2):156–172.
Niker, Fay & Sullivan, Laura Specker (2018). Trusting Relationships and the Ethics of Interpersonal Action. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 26 (2):173–186.
Betzler, Monika (2019). The Relational Value of Empathy. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 27 (2):136–161.
Fagiano, Mark (2019). Relational Empathy as an Instrument of Democratic Hope in Action. Journal of Speculative Philosophy 33 (2):200–219.
Kirton, Andrew (2020). Matters of Trust as Matters of Attachment Security. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 28:5, 583–602.
Giladi, Paul (2020). The Agent in Pain: Alienation and Discursive Abuse. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 28 (5):692–712.
Sullivan, Emily; Sondag, Max; Rutter, Ignaz; Meulemans, Wouter; Cunningham, Scott; Speckmann, Bettina & Alfano, Mark (2020). Vulnerability in Social Epistemic Networks. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 28 (5):1–23.
Knowles, Charlotte (2021). Articulating Understanding: A Phenomenological Approach to Testimony on Gendered Violence. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 29 (4):448–472.
Havi, Carel & Kidd, Ian James (2021). Institutional Opacity, Epistemic Vulnerability, and Institutional Testimonial Justice. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 29 (4):473–496.
Corbalán, M. Inés & Terzian, Giulia (2021). Our Epistemic Duties in Scenarios of Vaccine Mistrust. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 29 (4):613–640.
Sepinwall, Amy (2022). Shared Guilt among Intimates. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 30 (3):202–218.
Phillips, Edgar (2022). Addressing the Past: Time, Blame and Guilt. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 30 (3):219–238.
Mosquera, Julia & Jylhä, Kirsti M. (2022). How to Feel About Climate Change? An Analysis of the Normativity of Climate Emotions. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 30 (3):357–380.
Acknowledgments
The Editor’s work on this special issue was made possible by funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, for the project Policy, Expertise and Trust in Action (PERITIA) under grant agreement No 870883.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.