Sincerity in Ethics, Politics and International Relations

Recent controversial events illustrate fully the relevance, significance and complexity of a requirement of sincerity or truthfulness in politics. Consider, for instance, the context preceding and following the war in Iraq: it seems clear that the condition of sincerity has been functioning on various levels, as an unquestioned assumption, ever since the conflict started. Sincerity has played the role of a personal value, which can be invoked in justification of particular decisions, it has played a legitimising function as a norm in political relations among the members of a nation or state, or between nations or states at the international level. Given the relevance of the question of sincerity, it is not surprising that it occupies such an important place in contemporary philosophical debates, where the existence of the important philosophical legacy, in particular the Kantian one, is easily noticeable. Against the background of the Kantian legacy, the proposed workshop aims to approach the question of sincerity in a distinctive way, more exactly, from the perspective of the following two sets of questions: first, we are interested in whether and in what ways a principle of sincerity is politically relevant and can be justified in concrete political contexts; secondly, we are interested in the particular factors which, in those concrete political contexts, limit (in part or completely) the validity of a principle of sincerity (or related principles or values, such as standards of truthfulness, of prohibition of lying or deception).