International Workshop Normative Conflicts in Polarized Societies: Speakers and Abstracts

Abstract 

How should medicine navigate societal polarization? In the United States, healthcare organizations increasingly find themselves drawn into debates that extend well beyond the clinic or hospital. Yet disagreement persists over whether such engagement represents a fulfillment of medicine’s responsibilities or a departure from them. In a time when social and political divisions appear pervasive and entrenched, questions about the proper role of healthcare implicate broader questions about institutional responsibility, democratic life, and the possibility of common purpose amid disagreement. Drawing on observations from U.S. healthcare organizations, this keynote examines U.S. healthcare leaders’ competing narratives of institutional responsibility and what they reveal about navigating normative conflict in polarized societies.

Abstract

Climate change is widely recognized as a shared problem, yet decarbonization increasingly turns climate politics into a conflict over costs, authority, timing, and social transformation. This keynote examines how an apparently consensual moral issue becomes politically polarizing in selected European contexts. It develops a cleavage-oriented perspective that treats climate polarization not only as a matter of individual attitudes, but as a process linking problem definitions, policy instruments, social anchoring, and organized actor conflict.

Empirically, the talk uses Germany as an entry case, where climate politics is highly visible in public salience, party competition, movement mobilization, and citizen-elite divisions over the growth-climate trade-off. It then contrasts Germany with France, Italy, and Romania to show how climate conflicts are organized through different policy objects and actor constellations, including nuclear energy, energy transition, green-economy claims, and development-oriented debates. The talk closes by asking when polarization can make climate reform democratically legible, when it blocks compromise, and how urgent decarbonization can avoid turning every instrument into an identity boundary.

Abstract

This talk rethinks normative conflicts through Indian skeptical and Buddhist philosophical traditions that foreground suspension of judgement, non-dogmatism, and coexistence amidst uncertainty. Contemporary ethical discourse frequently operates through rigid binaries and competing certainties that intensify polarization and exclusion. In response, the paper explores how Ajnanavada (Ancient Indian Agnosticism), Buddhist notions of equanimity (upekkhā), and the practice of suspending metaphysical assertions can offer an alternative ethical orientation grounded in openness, restraint, and relational coexistence.

The study engages early Buddhist sources such as the Samaññaphala Sutta and the Brahmajāla Sutta, particularly their discussions of speculative doctrines and the figure of Sanjaya Belatthiputta. It further examines the Buddha’s “noble silence” concerning certain metaphysical questions and the unresolved or unanswered questions (avyākata) as ethical and philosophical gestures that resist attachment to dogmatic certainty. These are brought into dialogue with the skeptical strategies articulated in Outlines of Pyrrhonism, especially the tropes of Aenesidemus and Agrippa, which expose the instability of fixed foundations and encourage suspension of judgement (epochè).

The talk argues that such suspension should not be understood as passive indecision or relativism, but as an ethical discipline that cultivates epistemic humility, tolerance, and coexistence amidst irreducible plurality. By revisiting these skeptical and Buddhist strands, the study proposes an ethics of coexistence relevant to contemporary normative and social conflicts in increasingly polarized societies.

Abstract

Japan offers a revealing case of normative conflict around artificial intelligence: AI is governed primarily as an engine of economic growth and national security, while its ethical and human dimensions are pursued on a separate, softer track. The result is less open confrontation than a quiet polarization — a divergence between the State, industry, and the citizen that rarely surfaces as public debate. Tracing Japan’s path from the human-centered vision of “Society 5.0” and the 2017 Advisory Board on AI & Human Society, through a decade of soft-law guidelines, to the 2025 AI Promotion Act and AI Basic Plan, this keynote argues that framing the question as a conflict, whose values should prevail, leads only to convergence without consensus, especially as agentic systems outpace the governance built to contain them.

Instead, I propose that we shift the focus of the debate by asking how we can preserve and cultivate human agency in an AI society — a question every region shares. Japan’s recent turn toward “Collaborate with AI,” a Working Group on Human Agency, and the public emphasis on human capability suggests this shift is already underway. Read this way, our differing national contexts become not competing answers but common ground for a shared reflection.

Abstract

 The so-called epistemological crisis can be regarded as one of the central factors contributing to polarization. This crisis may be understood as a normative conflict concerning how to define what counts as knowledge, what truth is, how to distinguish facts from opinions, and how to identify trustworthy sources of information. These challenges have been further intensified by social media and AI.

The relationship between the epistemological crisis and polarization appears to be bidirectional: polarization, characterized by the growing distance between groups holding opposing views, provides fertile ground for the epistemological crisis, while the latter, in turn, reinforces polarization by making it increasingly difficult to reach agreement on what constitutes evidence or truth. Addressing the epistemological crisis may therefore help reduce polarization.

Universities are key institutions within the epistemic landscape because one of their primary missions is the generation and transmission of knowledge through the pursuit of truth. This paper examines how this function of universities can contribute to addressing the challenges posed by the contemporary epistemological crisis and, in doing so, strengthen epistemic trust and mitigate processes of polarization.

The analysis explores the relationship between the epistemological crisis and polarization, while also examining some of the conditions necessary for universities to adequately fulfill their epistemic function. In particular, the paper discusses possible normative frameworks for the construction of a shared epistemology, including, among other elements, a sound social epistemology and an appropriate role for values in the production of knowledge. The paper also addresses how Catholic universities can contribute to the contemporary challenge of seeking truth.

Finally, to situate the discussion within the Chilean context, the paper provides a preliminary analysis of how different political positions address issues grounded in specialized knowledge (e.g. climate change, animal welfare, reproductive policies and digital technologies). Building on the preceding discussion, the paper closes by raising the question of what role universities should play in these debates, and how this role may affect polarization, either positively or negatively.

Abstract

It is widely thought that there is a duty of civility that imposes moral limits on the conduct of democratic discourse. At the same time, civility’s critics rightly note that limiting oneself to "civil" forms of engagement can be morally costly. When, if ever, is incivility justified, and what does its justification consist in?  This talk surveys three accounts of justified incivility and argues that growing polarization renders each less plausible. Civility is most needful when disagreements are deep and the stakes are high. However, as polarization deepens, one's opponents increasingly appear to not merely be mistaken but unreasonable, and as the perceived stakes of disagreement rise,  the expected payoff to remaining constrained by civility's norms appears to decline relative to the efficacy gains of unrestrained resistance. Standard accounts of justified incivility suggest that these considerations make civility harder to defend the more polarized a society becomes. I sketch an alternative, solidaristic account that shows how polarization actually strengthens the grounds for engaging civilly. On the practice conception of civil discourse I have developed elsewhere, civility's authority rests partly on solidarity, the recognition of one's interlocutor as a fallible co-reasoner shaped by contingencies one did not oneself escape. Polarization strengthens the normative grounds for solidarity, even as it can challenge the psychological motivation for it. 

Abstract

Human conflicts, like any other human phenomenon, are common, but they can be completely averted or resolved by adopting the correct moral criteria of normative objectivity in disposing of our ideological differences, dissonance and disagreements. Historically, the world has grappled with various conflicts, caused and fuelled by either religious fanaticism and bigotry or jingoistic ideologies driven by nationalism, chauvinism and patriotism. The rationality and morality that normative objectivity upholds have, in fact, succumbed to the polarization and politicization of such catastrophic ideologies, which sometimes drive communities and states toward religious and nationalistic protectionism and sometimes toward political revolution. The British Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1775, the French Revolution of 1787, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the socio-political revolutions of the 18th-19th centuries in India, the 19th-20th century independence struggles in the Global South, the two World Wars, and the ongoing military confrontations in the Middle East and Europe are some of the major examples of normative conflicts that question the underlying unethical human intentions and irrational thinking in dealing with issues of ideological conflicts caused by dominance of religious or nationalistic sentiments. 

In this talk, my focus will be on the very foundation of ethics of normative objectivity, religious coexistence, moral reciprocity and political tolerance, which, I will argue, should be the driving force of all our decisions in today’s globalized world, if we truly want a peaceful world based on progressive human values ​​and want to lead today's world towards moral upliftment, so that future generations can be proud of us and consider our intellectual heritage as their guide. My talk will highlight three pertinent points: Firstly, normative conflicts which arise out of numerous frictional forces of relativistic thinking often divide us into various factions and confronting socio-political contours and gradually weaken our moral strength to make correct decisions. Secondly, a world rife with conflict can learn the power of tolerance and togetherness from multicultural and multireligious countries like India, which believe in the philosophy of "One World, One Family." We can learn that most of the world's conflicts reflect our negative mental and moral state and are often harmful, while positive thinking of peace and tranquillity progressively contributes to the longevity of our mental, physical, and global lives. Thirdly, the protectionist approach present in the pragmatic thinking of some of the world's powerful countries, which promotes their religious and nationalist propaganda, cannot be considered morally sustainable for the future because it may help them progress economically but it will leave the rest of the world behind materially and morally.

Drawing on the thoughts and reflections of ancient Indic religions, the Buddha and the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, I will conclude my talk by saying that only a morally untrained mind filled with or driven by greed (Lobha), delusion (Moha) and hatred (Doṣa) engages in negative and confronting thoughts and eventually causes biased thinking and normative conflict, and that if the unnecessarily imposed theoretical contradictions are ignored, genuine normative moral dilemmas leading to such normative conflicts are logically impossible. Ethics and religion in the truest sense connects people, not divide them, but nationalism certainly divides us and creates a fragmented world that future generation will surely not like at all. 

Abstract

Debates on moral bioenhancement have focused not only on its effectiveness and safety but also on its compatibility with individual autonomy. However, many of these discussions presuppose an individualistic conception of the self and pay insufficient attention to how moral bioenhancement may be evaluated in relation to authenticity, that is, the question of whether an enhanced disposition or character can still be regarded as genuinely one's own.

This presentation examines the acceptability of moral bioenhancement in Japan from the perspectives of authenticity and relational autonomy. In particular, it focuses on social practices often associated with Japanese society, such as the emphasis on interpersonal harmony, sensitivity to the expectations of others, and the ability to “read the atmosphere” (kuuki wo yomu). I consider how these practices may be understood through the lens of relational autonomy. At the same time, I explore the possibility that such social relationships, while supporting autonomy, may also function as sources of conformity and social pressure. In addition, I examine the relationship between self-modification and authenticity by considering the value often attached to “naturalness” and being “true to oneself,” as reflected in social attitudes toward cosmetic surgery.

Against this background, the presentation argues for the importance of attending not only to autonomy but also to authenticity and social relationships in ethical evaluations of moral bioenhancement. By doing so, it seeks to explore the ethical conditions under which moral bioenhancement may be accepted or rejected in Japan and to contribute to a more culturally and socially sensitive framework for assessing moral bioenhancement.

Abstract

Over the past decade, Chile experienced three unsuccessful attempts to replace its constitution. These three processes resulted in texts that expressly enshrined the principle of the social state. This stands out for two reasons. First, it was one of the few points of agreement among the three processes, which produced very different texts and operated under different procedural rules. The processes were also controlled by political forces with different and sometimes opposing views on the role of the state and took place in contexts of high political and social polarization. Secondly, the literature that emerged during this period — both specialized and non-specialized — as well as the opinions of the key figures involved reveal a wide diversity of expectations and conceptions regarding the meaning and legal consequences of the principle of the social state, whose relationship to one another ranges from relative complementarity to near-absolute incompatibility. This paper describes and analyses these divergences, attempting to unravel their causes and possible misunderstandings, and analyses alternatives for bridging the gap between positions.