The 18th Conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies - University of Macau

This conference will take place at the Faculty of Law, Macau University

About the Conference

The 18th Conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies will take place on 23–25 July 2026 at the Faculty of Law of the University of Macau. The Conference is generously supported by the University of Macau’s International Conference Fund.

This conference will celebrate a significant scholarly milestone: the publication of Essays on Logic, Ethics, and Universal Grammar in the new, authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. The volume, edited by Professor Philip Schofield, will be published by UCL Press in December 2025 (https://uclpress.co.uk/book/essays-on-logic-ethics-and-universal-grammar/), and promises to reinvigorate engagement with Bentham’s contributions to the philosophy of logic and language, which have been undervalued in large part due to the shortcomings of earlier editions.

Key Speakers

Professor Roger Crisp is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford, Uehiro Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, and Director of the Uehiro Oxford Institute. His main research interest is ethics, especially normative ethics, the history of ethics, and practical ethics, as well as working in other areas of philosophy, including ancient philosophy and political philosophy. He has published monographs on J.S. Mill (1997), Henry Sidgwick (2015), and the British moralists (2019), as well as Reasons and the Good (2006), a defence of various Sidgwickian positions in normative ethics. He has edited a number of collections, including the Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics, and has translated Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics for Cambridge University Press.

Professor Qiang Li is a Professor of Political Science at Peking University, where he has been teaching since 1994. He earned his BA from Peking University in 1982 and his PhD from University College London in 1993. He has held visiting scholar positions at several prestigious institutions, including the Free University of Berlin, the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and University College London. His teaching and research interests centre on liberalism, Max Weber, Eric Voegelin and German political philosophy, Yan Fu and the development of modern Chinese political thought. Professor Li is the author of several books, including Liberalism (1st ed. 1998; 2nd ed. 3—8; 3rded. 2015; 4th ed. 2025), Reflections on the Relationship between Individual and Society (2008), Intellectual Shifts in a Turbulent World: An Analysis of Contemporary Western Political Thought(2025), and The Faces of Intellectual History; From Studies of Key Thinkers to Methodological Reflections (forthcoming). In addition, he has published numerous scholarly articles in both Chinese and English and has translated several works by Max Weber and others into Chinese.

Professor Melissa Schwartzberg is Silver Professor and Chair of Politics at New York University, specializing in political theory. Her primary research interests are in the historical origins and normative logic of democratic institutions. Her books include Democratic Deals: A Defense of Political Bargaining (with Jack Knight), published by Harvard University Press in 2024 and co-recipient of the the 2025 David Easton Award from APSA; Counting the Many: The Origins and Limits of Supermajority Rule (Cambridge University Press, 2014), winner of the 2016 David and Elaine Spitz Prize from ICSPT; and Democracy and Legal Change (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Her current book projects include Sheep May Safely Graze: Juries and Local Knowledge, supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation.  

Professor Philip Schofield is Professor of the History of Legal and Political Thought, Director of the Bentham Project, and General Editor of the Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. He has edited or co-edited seventeen Collected Works volumes, acted as General Editor on a further eight, and supervised the reissue of a further six. He is editor of the most recent Collected Works volume, Essays on Logic, Ethics, and Universal Grammar (2025), and the author of Utility and Democracy: the Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham (2006), which was awarded the WJM Mackenzie Book Prize by the Political Studies Association for the best book published in political studies in 2006.

Professor Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Centre for Human Values at Princeton University. His books include Animal Liberation (1975), Practical Ethics (1980), How Are We to Live? (1993), The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (2009), The Point of View of the Universe (2014, with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek), Utilitarianism—A Very Short Introduction (2017, with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek), and Why Vegan? Eating Ethically (2020). In 2012 Singer was made a Companion of the Order of Australia and in 2021 received the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture.

Conference Programme and Abstracts

Programme and Abstracts to follow in January and February 2026

Tickets available from 5th January 2026