
Jonathan Gingerich reports — A conference titled ‘Humanistic Ethics in the UK’ was held at King’s on 16 and 17 June 2023. The conference was co-organised by Dr Gingerich together with Dr Adam Etinson (St Andrews) and Dr Daniela Dover (Oxford). The conference brought together moral, legal, and political philosophers from North America, the UK, Europe, and Asia, for discussions of research that builds connections between philosophy and other humanistic disciplines. Speakers included Adam Etinsion (University of St Andrews), ‘On Falling Short’; Robert Simpson (University College London), ‘Free Speech Psychodrama’; Vid Simoniti (University of Liverpool), ‘Artworks as Arguments Without Conclusions’; Vida Yao (University of California, Los Angeles), ‘The Avoidance of Intimacy: A Reorientation in the Moral Philosophy of Love’; Samuel Reis-Dennis (Rice University), ‘Guilt: The Debt and the Stain’; Francey Russell (Barnard College, Columbia University), ‘“A Wedge-Shaped Core of Darkness”’; Kyla Ebels-Duggan (Northwestern University), ‘More than Moore: Murdoch and Korsgaard on Value’; and Olúfẹ́mi O Táíwò (Georgetown University), ‘Security, Freedom, and Arguments from Scale’. The conference provided extensive opportunities for conversation among researchers who had not previously encountered one another’s’ work, and multiple research collaborations are expected to grow out of the conference, including the potential for further collaboration between King’s College London and the Universities of Oxford and St Andrews. Many participants reported that they found the conference extraordinarily intellectually stimulating and philosophically productive.