The Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Macau will host the International Conference “The Moral Roots of Quarantine: the East and the West” on December 16-17 2021.

Given the current situation due to the pandemic, the conference will be held online on Zoom to allow broad participation. The event is free and all are invited to attend. Access to the zoom link can be requested in advance by email at mrqconference2021@gmail.com.

The conference aims at bringing together scholars from the East and the West currently working on Covid19, and, more specifically, on anti-pandemic measures and their diverse justifications, from an interdisciplinary perspective (philosophy of science, philosophy of politics, philosophy of medicine, among others).
While there is an abundance of scholarship on the responses to infectious diseases in the European tradition, there is a lack of scholarship comparing these responses to related phenomena in other non-Western traditions. As the Greek term “pandemia” comprised of the prefix “pan” (all) and the term “demos” (people) rightly suggests, the current pandemic is a global phenomenon that affects all people, even if in different ways, which may be, at least in part, shaped by cultural factors. The global nature of the current emergency calls for an interdisciplinary as well as intercultural investigation. The conference invites scholars, for the first time, to carry on a comparative investigation of:

(i) The different preventive measures taken by legislators in different countries and regions to respond to the same emergency and the moral justifications (made more or less explicit in the public discourse) provided in their support;

(ii) The different reactions of citizens in countries with different historical experiences and cultures to the same measures and non-homogeneous moral justifications.

The conference flyer can be found here.