Fifth Annual PPE Society Meeting in New Orleans

After a two-year hiatus from in-person conferences, on February 3-5, 2022, Gil Hersch and Fabian Wendt, both PPE Core Faculty members at the Kellogg Center, hit the road to Charlotte, NC, to get on a plane to New Orleans and attend the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society Fifth Annual Conference.

Dr. Hersch states: “While we attended previous PPE society conferences, the excitement many of us felt at getting together in person to talk about all things PPE was palpable. We had the pleasure of attending interesting talks on the most cutting-edge research in the field, chat with some of the best researchers in PPE from the U.S. and around the world, and present our own work and receive valuable feedback as well”

Dr. Hersch presented a paper in which he argued that, while there is currently a debate in the well-being literature between those who hold that well-being ought to primarily be understood as a temporal concept and those who hold that it only makes sense to talk about a person’s well-being over their whole lifetime, how this principled philosophical disagreement is settled does not have substantive practical implications for well-being science and well-being policy.

Dr. Wendt presented a paper exploring the limits of liberty-based arguments for a universal basic income. Liberty-based arguments, he argued, are indecisive and leave alternatives to UBI on the table. One needs other arguments, in particular economic arguments, to establish the superiority of a universal basic income over conditional programs.

The meeting’s keynote lectures were given by Kaushik Basu (Cornell University, Economics) and Elizabeth Anderson (University of Michigan, Philosophy). Professor Basu, among other things, presented an argument for why there is an incentive for dictators to become more oppressive over time. This work is related to Professor Basu’s recent contribution in the forthcoming topical collection on strategic justice, conventions, and game theory that is co-edited by Dr. Moehler, Director of the Kellogg Center.

Professor Anderson presented the fascinating history and legacy of Protestant work ethics and sketched a more humane alternative. Overall, there were close to 150 talks over three days.

Dr. Wendt states: “It should go without saying that New Orleans is a wonderful place to spend a few days, and we got to enjoy some of the great food and culture that this amazing city has to offer. We are grateful for the support that the Kellogg Center provided us that made attending this conference possible.”

To learn more about the work of PPE Core Faculty, please follow this link.