Conference on Devotion, Commitment, and Ethics

Day two of the third and final two-day conference in Professor Paul Katsafanas's devotion grant project. It will have talks by Sharon Street, David Shoemaker, Fiery Cushman, and others (about ten talks total) (Blurb taken from website linked below) Our lives are pervaded by commitments: you might be committed to meeting a friend for dinner, exercising four times per week, learning a language, being considerate, sustaining a friendship, promoting a political cause. Some commitments are relatively trivial and readily set aside. Others are deeper and more resistant to change. They persist through doubt and difficulty, giving shape to a person's life. When people display extreme degrees of commitment, we sometimes describe them as devoted. Devotion seems to involve a particularly robust form of commitment, which might differ from standard forms of commitment in its intensity, stability, resistance to compromise, epistemic status, or deliberative weight ​ This conference investigates the ethical significance of devotion and other robust forms of commitment. Topics might include: - the nature and structure of deep commitment - existential, ethical, or political forms of commitment - devotion as a source of meaning, purpose, or identity - connections between devotion and love, responsibility, or integrity - the impact of devotion and robust commitment on individual or collective flourishing - the way in which devotion might interact with epistemic virtues and vices - pathological or problematic forms of devotion/commitment, such as fanaticism - devotion, commitment, and responsibility