I felt both compelled and reluctant to email my friend Tracy Isaacs to express my dismay that she is on the program for the upcoming October conference of the Public Philosophy Network (PPN). The conference will take place in the epicenter of downtown Hamilton at a satellite campus of McMaster University that is located in an old mall. The mall is a 20-minute walk from my apartment; nevertheless, I do not plan to attend the conference because it will be inaccessible in various ways and is unsustainable, that is, will contribute to climate change.

Admittedly, I was somewhat happy when Ian Olasov, the President of the PPN, initially announced on Facebook that the organization’s next conference would be held in Hamilton. Despite the fact that neither Olasov, nor the PPN in general, nor professional philosophers more widely acknowledge BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY as an important site of public philosophy, I momentarily imagined participating in a philosophy conference in my own neighbourhood.

So, I queried Olasov about the accessibility of the conference, unfortunately receiving the same sort of unsatisfactory response that I received when I inquired about the accessibility of the previous PPN conference. That is, when Olasov circulated a CFP for the previous PPN conference on Technology and Public Philosophy and I asked him if the conference would allow online participation, he replied “not this time” and changed the subject; when I asked Olasov about online participation in the upcoming conference on Social Change, he responded that most of the conference organizing committee has opposed his suggestion of it. Fait accompli.

Because the conference will be in-person only, it is environmentally unfriendly. Many, if not most, of the conference participants will engage in air travel to participate in it. The bulk of them will arrive from the United States. The PPN is, after all, an American-based organization, as the statement of the registration fees in US currency reminds one. While the PPN seems excited at the prospect of expanding its reach beyond US borders, it seems not to have considered the economic toll that would accrue to the locals with this expansion given currency exchange rates of an already hefty price-tag on the conference. (Philosophers routinely overlook such manifestations of American academic imperialism.)

In short, the upcoming PPN conference is economically inaccessible, another factor that conditions its narrow circumscription of who counts as “the public” and what counts as a “public” issue, as well as how “public philosophy” is narrowly defined by the PPN and the broader profession of philosophy. (That the PPN used part of the title of the Philosophy, Disability, and Social Change conferences that I have organized for the past five years in the name of its upcoming inaccessible conference is ironic, to put it mildly.)

The online response to the conference program has seemed tepid, despite repeated pronouncements that the conference program/lineup is “stellar.” Perhaps the consciousness of the profession has been raised with respect to conference accessibility to a greater extent than I usually assume. Perhaps philosophers have (finally) come to accept to a greater extent than I generally assume that they should regard as unacceptable organization of and participation in conferences that exclude many other philosophers.

With respect to conference organization and participation, I (admittedly) tend to assume that the profession is primarily populated by DERPs, which is the acronym that I have coined to refer to Disabled Exclusionary Righteous Philosophers. The acronym and its fuller definition should be largely self-explanatory to most philosophers. Why “righteous”? Because when a conference is identified as inaccessible (i.e., “Disabled Exclusionary”), the DERP typically reacts to this news with a shrug and thinks to themself something like this: “F*ck it. Not my problem. I want to go. I’m going.”

In the end, I did email Tracy and express my disappointment that she would be participating in a conference that excludes a variety of constituencies and does so in a variety of ways. I promptly received a response characteristic of her, that is, Tracy admitted that she had not inquired about the accessibility of the conference, apologized for this oversight, and acknowledged that she could have been a better ally in this regard. Tracy is not a DERP.