AAP 2026 CONFERENCE: Full Schedule

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8:30am NZST

Check-in Desk Day 2

Monday July 6, 2026 8:30am - 9:00am NZST

MSB Foyer

Check-in Desk open.

Monday July 6, 2026 8:30am - 9:00am NZST
MSB Foyer

9:00am NZST

Indigenous Humanism(S) Against Colonial Inhumanity

Monday July 6, 2026 9:00am - 10:25am NZST

PWC

“I say that between colonialism and civilisation there is an infinite distance; that out of all the colonial expeditions that have been undertaken, out of all the colonial statutes that have been drawn up, out of all the memoranda that have been dispatched by all the ministries, there could not come a single human value.”
Aimé Césaire, 1955, Discourse on Colonialism
This paper interrogates the possibility that today, in this moment marked by genocide, violence, and the collapse of international law, by imperialist expansion and the return to colonial subjugation, humanity must be found elsewhere and elsewhen. Through examining the absent humanity inherent in any project born of colonial violence and imperialist expansion this paper turns to Oceanian futurisms and liberation movements as the prospective horizons for resurgent Indigenous humanisms. As such, reading Césaire’s diagnosis of colonialism alongside the liberatory theory of Oceanian freedom fighters, this paper concludes with a reflection on the prospect of humanity lying in rebellion against the order which has birthed and sustains these moments of genocidal and imperial violence.

Chair

Georgina Tuari Stewart

Professor of Māori Philosophy of Education, Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makau Rau | Auckland University of Technology

Speakers

Nathan Rew

University of Waikato

Nathan Rew is a Papua New Guinean/Pākehā activist and academic, and a lecturer of Indigenous Studies in Te Pua Wānanga ki te Ao – the Faculty of Māori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Waikato.

Monday July 6, 2026 9:00am - 10:25am NZST
PWC

KEYNOTE

10:30am NZST

Morning Break

Monday July 6, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am NZST

MSB Foyer

Monday July 6, 2026 10:30am - 10:55am NZST
MSB Foyer

Breaks

11:00am NZST

Beyond Accuracy: A Capacities-Based Account of First Person Authority and the Challenge of Affective AI

Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST

N3.01

Recent developments in AI, particularly in affective computing, have brought renewed attention to the question of first‑person authority—the authority subjects ordinarily take themselves to have with respect to their own avowals about their mental states. Emotion Recognition Systems, in particular, are often presented as being able to infer what you are feeling, in some cases better than you do. At the same time, recent work on self-knowledge emphasises that much of our self-knowledge is inferential, technologically mediated, and fallible. Together, these developments give rise to a tension: if AI systems can accurately infer our mental states, might they become accurate enough to override our avowals and thereby undermine our authority?
I argue that the question rests on a mistaken but common assumption that first-person authority is grounded in a form of epistemic reliability or superiority that subjects enjoy over their mental states, an assumption often inherited from accounts of self-knowledge. Instead, I develop a capacities-based, non-epistemic, account of first-person authority. On this view, first-person authority is grounded in a subject’s distinctive set of capacities to relate to their mental states—through avowal, endorsement, and related capacities—in ways that are not available to others. Although first-person avowals are often accurate as a matter of contingent fact, that is not what makes them authoritative. The upshot is that AI does not pose a threat to first-person authority simpliciter; rather, it helps reveal the types of self-avowals that are vulnerable to challenge.

Speakers

Adam Andreotta

Lecturer, Curtin University

Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST
N3.01

Artificial Inteligence, In Person

11:00am NZST

Making Sense of Pain

Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST

MSB1.36 & 37

A natural assumption is that the function of pain is to cause nocifensive behaviour. But what if this causal assumption is just wrong? An alternative theory is that the function of pain is to explain not cause behaviour. This is the sense making sense hypothesis (SMS). According to SMS, although withdrawal behaviour is caused by non-conscious neural processing, the brain needs a model of this processing that it can use in decision-making. This paper explores two questions: (1) What kind of explanation could plausibly fit a subjective experience like pain? and (2) Does it make sense to suppose that pain could have a non-causal function? The physical closure principle seems to entail that if one physical event is connected to another in an explanation, the two must be causally related. But is this really so obvious? Recent work on grounding offers one buffer against that inference, but there might be other ways without relying on grounding to question whether a commitment to physical closure entails anything about the relationship between explanation and causation.

Speakers

Deb Brown

University of Queensland

Deborah Brown is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project. She is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and past President of the Australasian Association of Philosophy. Her research interests include philosophy of mind... Read More →

Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Cognitive Science, In Person

11:00am NZST

Vallalar's Unique Epistemology

Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST

MSB1.15

"Three lenses through which Vallalar's philosophy, the Tamil philosopher Ramalinga Swamigal (1823–∞), can be considered epistemologically are: (1) as a distinctive non-Western epistemology grounded in direct luminous experience (Suddha Sanmarga), (2) as a provocation and critique of Western rationalist epistemology, whose exclusion of embodied, compassionate knowing constitutes a structural impoverishment of what counts as knowledge; or (3) as a generative frame for investigating perennial questions, the nature of consciousness, the relationship between knower and known, through the radical claim that light of absolute compassion is not merely metaphor but the fundamental substrate of both being and knowing.

This paper will argue that Vallalar's epistemological claim, that compassion (Jeevakarunyam) is not merely an ethical disposition but the very condition of possibility for direct knowing. The purification of the body, mind, soul and spirit through compassionate practice opens faculties of perception unavailable to the detached rational subject, constitutes a direct challenge to the Cartesian separation of knower from known that underwrites modern Western epistemology. Where Kant forecloses the noumenal, Vallalar proposes a phenomenology of light of absolute compassion in which the noumenal is progressively disclosed through transformed perception."

Speakers

Priyadharshini Muthukannan

Australian National University

Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST
MSB1.15

Eastern Philosophy, Remote

11:00am NZST

The Shape of Moral Risk

Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST

MSB1.05

A deontologist might refuse to kill one to save five, and yet take a one-in-a-million risk of killing one to avert a one-in-a-million risk of five dying. No prominent decision theory can accommodate this pair of preferences, as weighting outcomes by a uniform probability (or risk-weighted probability) preserves their ranking.

Risk-sensitive decision theories (which permit agents to have non-neutral attitudes towards risk) require them to have the same attitude towards all kinds of risk. But there are good reasons to think that if it can be rational to have a general risk attitude across all domains, then it can be rational to have domain-specific risk attitudes: to be, say, risk averse for epistemic goods, risk neutral for pleasure, and risk seeking for aesthetic value. I develop the formal resources to model these attitudes.

I argue that the characteristic feature of deontology is a particular kind of domain-specific risk attitude. Specifically, the deontologist thinks duty violations are worse than consequentialist harms, but is comparatively risk-seeking with respect to duty violations relative to consequentialist harms.

Speakers

Mitch Barrington

PhD Student, University of Michigan

i 🩵 philosophy

Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST
MSB1.05

Epistemology, In Person

11:00am NZST

From Measuring Moral Judges to Mapping Moral Scenarios

Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST

MSB1.01

Moral psychology has developed increasingly sophisticated tools for measuring moral judges: their values, ideological styles, and responses to sacrificial dilemmas. It has also developed substantial resources for constructing and validating moral stimuli. What remains underdeveloped is a framework for describing the moral structure of the scenarios being judged. This matters because case-level moral judgment is best understood as a person × situation phenomenon: to study that interaction, judge-side measures must be paired with scenario-side descriptions. I propose a provisional scenario-side framework that organises moral scenarios around three higher-order dimensions — Orientation, Cost, and Moral Authorship — which can later be decomposed into more specific coding questions. These dimensions ask, respectively, who or what the act is for, what is harmed, risked, sacrificed, or imposed, and whether, and how, the morally salient outcome is attributable to an agent. I defend these axes through a contrast-case argument: if a framework cannot distinguish cases that differ only in Orientation, Cost, or Moral Authorship, then it describes moral scenarios too coarsely. The proposed framework does not determine which acts are right or wrong; its task is prior, preserving the structural distinctions on which such verdicts depend.

Speakers

Scott Young

Postgraduate Presentation Prize Shortlist, Macquarie University

Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST
MSB1.01

Ethics, In Person

11:00am NZST

Whakapapa as Philosophical Method: Tracing the Genealogy of Virtue Ethics

Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST

MSB1.21

Western virtue ethics is often presented as a timeless framework for ethical inquiry, yet its historical and cultural genealogy remains largely unexamined within mainstream philosophical discourse. This paper argues that whakapapa, as a distinctively Māori philosophical method, offers a rigorous tool for tracing such genealogies, revealing the contingent cultural foundations of concepts that have been naturalised within Western ethics.
Taking Perrett and Patterson's 1991 ""Virtue Ethics and Māori Ethics"" as a point of departure, I demonstrate how whakapapa as method reorients the comparative project entirely. Rather than asking whether Māori ethical concepts map onto Western virtue frameworks, the whakapapa approach asks what historical, ontological, and relational conditions gave rise to each tradition's understanding of virtue, excellence, and moral agency. This genealogical move exposes the settler-colonial assumptions embedded in cross-cultural philosophical comparisons, while simultaneously affirming the internal coherence and philosophical sophistication of Māori ethical thought.
The paper contributes to ongoing methodological debates within Indigenous philosophy about how to engage with Western philosophical traditions on Indigenous terms, offering whakapapa not as metaphor but as rigorous philosophical methodology with genuine analytical purchase.

Speakers

Emma Maurice

Learning Advisor, Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha │ University of Canterbury

Ko Ngāti Kahungunu ki Heretaunga tōku iwi. I am an Indigenous philosopher and Māori Learning Advisor at the University of Canterbury. My research sits at the intersection of analytic philosophy and Indigenous epistemology. I work on whakapapa as a rigorous philosophical method... Read More →

Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST
MSB1.21

Indigenous Philosophy, In Person

11:00am NZST

What I'd Ask Lewis about Counterfactuals If I Could

Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST

MSB1.20

There are many philosophical questions that I wish I could ask David Lewis. Several of them concern counterfactuals. They include the following:
· You came very close to the view that most counterfactuals are false at points in your writings. Why didn’t you take the extra step and endorse the view?
· You were famously a contextualist about counterfactuals, yet that seems in tension with various things that you say. How much of a contextualist were you?
· You were not a contextualist at all about indicative conditionals. Why did you give such different analyses of counterfactuals and indicative conditionals?
· I also have some questions about the logic of counterfactuals, concerning their antecedents. What do you make of objections to your treatment of antecedent strengthening, simplification of disjunctive antecedents, counterfactuals with true antecedents, and counterfactuals with impossible antecedents?
I did get to ask David why he liked Australia so much, and I will share his answer.

Speakers

Alan Hajek

Professor, Australian National University

Probability, conditionals, decision theory, formal epistemology

Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST
MSB1.20

Philosophy of Language, In Person

11:00am NZST

Public Justification for Professional Discipline: A Convergence Liberal Approach

Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST

MSB1.03

There is much reasonable disagreement over how, when, and often whether professionals should be disciplined, punished, or formally held accountable for their errors. What follows? In this paper, I draw from recent public reason approaches to coercion, and punishment in particular, to answer that the rules that govern how, when, and whether professionals are (liable) to be disciplined for their errors must be publicly justified–that is, reasonably acceptable, or not reasonably rejectable, by any affected party. However, in contrast to recent consensus liberal approaches to punishment which ground its justification in a Rawlsian “overlapping consensus” of shared liberal values (see, e.g., Chad Flanders and Zachary Hoskins), I draw from the broader convergence liberalism of Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier to argue that the rules governing professional discipline need not, for public justification, be based on shared values, but on what all affected would minimally agree to with reasonable views, whether “political” (“public”) or “comprehensive” (“private”). I defend a version of this view on which reasonable rejection of a disciplinary rule (as worse than no rule) defeats that rule, unless it is dictated by a higher-order rule for resolving disagreements over disciplinary rules that could not itself be reasonably rejected.

Speakers

Thomas Yates

Lecturer, Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makau Rau │ Auckland University of Technology

Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST
MSB1.03

Political Philosophy, In Person

12:00pm NZST

Psychoneural Identities

Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST

MSB1.36 & 37

Among the many drivers of the 21st-century ‘practice turn’ in philosophy of science are a shift from theory construction to modelling; another was the thesis that psychoneural identity claims function as dispensable heuristics guiding discovery. An examination of the history of research on reward and motivation suggests otherwise. What are often taken to be conjectures about psychoneural identities are better understood as appeals to familiar forms of mechanistic reasoning about constitution and localisation. A clearer understanding of scientific representation does not necessarily support the rejection of traditional identity theories.

Speakers

Cory Wright

Professor & Chair, CSULB

Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Cognitive Science, In Person

12:00pm NZST

Resisting for the Wrongdoer's Sake: A Neglected Justification for Moral Resistance

Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST

MSB1.15

How can resistance to wrongful action be justified within ethical traditions that do not accept the intrinsic value of individual rights? This paper develops the concept of virtue-protective resistance: resistance justified, at least in part, by the aim of preventing the wrongdoer from suffering moral self-harm, damage to their own moral integrity through wrongdoing. I argue that this justificatory structure is conceptually distinct from rights-based and consequentialist alternatives. It operates on a different normative input (the wrongdoer’s moral integrity rather than the resister’s rights or aggregate consequences) and contains an irreducibly relational element grounded in the resister’s structural position within the wrong. Taking an initial cue from early Chinese philosophical texts but developing the argument independently, I defend the moral self-harm thesis and show that virtue-protective resistance scales from self-removal to power-restriction under graduated conditions of necessity and proportionality. Because the moral self-harm thesis is accepted across a wide range of independent ethical traditions, such as Aristotelian, Confucian, Stoic, Christian, Islamic, Buddhism, the framework supplies a justification for moral reform that is internal to traditions where rights-based critique lacks traction, addressing wrongdoers in a normative language they already speak.

Speakers

Pei Yu

Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST
MSB1.15

Eastern Philosophy, Remote

12:00pm NZST

Doxastic Dilemma and Its Normative Problem

Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST

MSB1.05

This paper examines whether doxastic dilemma pose a challenge to pragmatism. A doxastic dilemma arises when epistemic reasons support believing p, while practical reasons support believing not-p, raising the question of what one ought to believe all things considered. Evidentialists argue that pragmatists must answer this question and determine which belief is normatively required. This challenge, however, depends on a belief principle: if one ought to believe p, then one ought not to believe not-p. I argue that pragmatists need not accept this principle. By considering cases in which practical reasons conflict with one another, I show that even incompatible belief contents may each be supported by distinct reasons and thus possess their own normative standing. Therefore, the fact that one cannot simultaneously hold both beliefs does not show that only one has normative support. Doxastic dilemmas, thus, do not successfully undermine pragmatism.

Speakers

Po-Wei Chuang

National Chung Cheng University

I am currently in a master’s program at National Chung Cheng University.
I am interested in theory of reasons.

Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST
MSB1.05

Epistemology, In Person

12:00pm NZST

Relational Close-Mindedness

Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST

MSB1.02

Can our epistemic environments render us closed-minded? This paper argues that they can. Drawing insights from feminist character theory, I examine two ways in which our epistemic environments can render us closed-minded. First, they can cause us to develop the intrinsic dispositions necessary for closed-mindedness. Our environments and their structures of power and our social locations in them can cause us to be unwilling or constitutionally unable to engage seriously with relevant alternatives to our beliefs. Second, closed-mindedness can also be relational: whether a person is closed-minded will partly depend on extrinsic features of her environment—on whether or not her environment supplies relevant intellectual options with which to engage. Drawing on relational accounts of autonomy and agency, I argue that just as one won’t have autonomy or agency in an environment that severely restricts freedom and opportunity, one won’t be open-minded in an environment that severely restricts intellectual options (e.g., an echo chamber). The absence of intellectual options renders one closed-minded, even when one has the intrinsic dispositions necessary for open-mindedness. Overall closed-mindedness (CMER) is an unwillingness or inability to engage seriously with relevant intellectual options or to revise one’s beliefs.

Speakers

Heather Battaly

University of Connecticut

Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST
MSB1.02

Feminist Philosophy, In Person

12:00pm NZST

Ignorance and Māori Philosophy

Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST

MSB1.21

Three lenses through which Māori philosophy can be considered are: (1) as a special type or branch of philosophy, implying the existence of its own canon; (2) as a provocation or critique of (White) philosophy; or (3) as a frame or approach for investigating questions involving Māori knowledge. These three lenses are useful to help unpack and explain the derivation and significance of Māori philosophy, which until recently was bundled with language and culture in Māori Studies, the local postmodern offshoot of Anthropology.

This paper will argue that the current popularity of Māori philosophy (and other forms of Indigenous philosophy) is related to, if not caused by, the dilemma of Western philosophy, also expressed as the ‘truth wars’ and accompanied by the emergence of the ‘posts,’ in particular post-truth. The racist ideologies (of European exceptionalism, etc) that underwrite the Western canon of modernity constitute a form of managed ignorance, formalised as Agnotology under the rubric that ‘ignorance is to Agnotology as knowledge is to Epistemology’ (Proctor, 2008). The unmasking of such ignorance leads Māori scholars to Māori philosophy.
Māori philosophy is one of many ways in which non-elitist scholars might attempt to avoid the problems of Western knowledge, but caution is needed to avoid reinstating the same weaknesses with a different cultural face.

Reference:
Proctor, R. (2008). Agnotology: A Missing Term to Describe the Cultural Production of Ignorance (and Its Study). In R. Proctor & L. L. Schiebinger (Eds.), Agnotology: The making and unmaking of ignorance (pp. 1–33). Stanford University Press.

Speakers

Georgina Tuari Stewart

Professor of Māori Philosophy of Education, Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makau Rau | Auckland University of Technology

Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST
MSB1.21

Indigenous Philosophy, In Person

12:00pm NZST

Against the Causal Indpendence Principle of Counterfactuals

Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST

MSB1.20

Suppose Colin and Frank are both in their offices. Colin flipped a fair coin and it landed heads. Frank didn't scratch his nose. Assuming their offices are causally isolated, the following counterfactual seems true:

(1) Had Frank scratched his nose, Colin's coin still would have landed heads.

The intuition that (1) and counterfactuals like it are true motivates a general principle:

Causal Independence Principle (CIP): If A and C are true, and the mechanisms settling whether A and whether C are causally independent, then: if A had been false, C would still have been true.

I find CIP extremely plausible. Unfortunately, I'll argue it's false. I'll first rehearse an old argument against CIP, and then outline a better one, both based on considerations about chance. While this argument assumes the controversial principle 'Duality', I'll argue that views rejecting Duality fare even worse if CIP is assumed true. After briefly arguing against other views on which CIP fails, I’ll offer my own account: CIP seems true because counterfactual truth depends on which facts context tells us to hold fixed. While Context often requires keeping facts causally independent from the antecedent fixed, it need not.

Speakers

Joshua Pearson

Postdoc, Australian National University

Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST
MSB1.20

Philosophy of Language, In Person

12:00pm NZST

Making Punishment Sensitive to Deprivation

Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST

MSB1.03

A growing number of philosophers argue that we should treat disadvantaged offenders less harshly than their more privileged peers. I offer a new argument toward that conclusion. I suggest that certain members of the working poor in affluent countries lack the opportunity to make choices that reflect their held values. I then endorse a communicative theory of punishment, according to which punishment is justified by the importance of reaffirming the community’s values in the wake of a violation of those values. I argue that putting these ideas together shows that we should not punish the deprived offender harshly: their circumstances mean that their conduct may not reflect their held values, rendering the basic justification for punishment unsatisfied. The deprived offender should have access to a legal excuse given their circumstances; they should be punished less harshly, if at all.

Speakers

Corey McCabe

Postgraduate Presentation Prize Shortlist, Australian National University

Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST
MSB1.03

Political Philosophy, In Person

12:00pm NZST

This is Simply What We Do: the Normative Background of Collective Epistemic Practices

Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST

N3.01

Discussions of certainty in epistemology often focus on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of “hinges,” the background certainties that make justification and epistemic evaluation possible. While the nature and epistemic status of hinges remain contested, this paper argues that they are best understood not as propositions or merely individual commitments, but as socially grounded, non-propositional certainties. Although hinge statements often take the form of empirical propositions, they function beyond justification and empirical testing while structuring the possibility of empirical knowledge.
Engaging with interpretations such as Moyal-Sharrock’s account of verbalized non-propositional certainties and Pritchard’s notion of hinge commitments, I argue that hinges are instantiated pragmatically through action, embodied practice, and social participation. Drawing on theories of collective intentionality, I propose that hinges constitute a shared normative background that enables coordinated epistemic practices and underlies the possibility of inquiry.
This account clarifies how background certainties are acquired, maintained, and shared across individuals, while also helping explain disagreement and misunderstanding when such certainties diverge. More broadly, it highlights the fundamentally social character of human cognition and knowledge, opening new avenues for dialogue between epistemology, cognitive science, and related disciplines.

Speakers

Florencia Quiroga

National University of Córdoba

Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST
N3.01

Social Epistemology, Remote

1:00pm NZST

Lunch

Monday July 6, 2026 1:00pm - 1:55pm NZST

MSB Foyer

Monday July 6, 2026 1:00pm - 1:55pm NZST
MSB Foyer

Breaks

2:00pm NZST

Practicing Val Plumwood's Philosophy in the Indoor Spider Encounter

Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST

N3.01

Victoria LawsonIn personPracticing Val Plumwood’s Philosophy in the Indoor Spider EncounterWhen you experience physical bodily sensations of fear and disgust, beyond an immediate jump scare, of a spider inside your home, you experience a reaction informed by the separation, both conceptually and physically, of nature and culture in Western society. This separation, according to Val Plumwood, is not just a separation of distinct concepts, of a natural world and a human one, but a chasmic split between radically disparate and homogenised concepts. This informs her account of Western culture as a hegemonic centre – a dominant group forming an exclusive centre of moral and social reasoning – hyper-separating itself from nonhuman animals and the environment. This worldview requires individual maintenance, where experiences that resist conceptual separation elicit not just a physiological, but a conceptual reaction against the mixing of the boundary between nature and culture. I argue that spiders inside the cultural space of the home are an example of this boundary mixing, one in which you can choose to confront your own conceptual belief. This is important, as Plumwood argues the nature/culture dualism has given a conceptual basis for environmental destruction, a destruction which risks the ongoing existence of humans everywhere.

Speakers

Victoria Lawson

University of Queensland

Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST
N3.01

Continental Philosophy, In Person

2:00pm NZST

Redefining the Problem of Justification: On the Tension Between Language and Reality

Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST

MSB1.05

The problem of justification has long been the central question of philosophy. At stake is what accounts as sufficient justification for claiming that a statement genuinely refers to the object in question. Unless we address this ontological gap between language and the external world, we cannot confidently claim that our statements are directly related to the object we aim to describe. With this, this paper proposes a redefinition of the problem of justification by examining the persistent gap between language and the external world. Traditional accounts of epistemic justification often assume a relatively direct relation between language and reality. However, linguistic mediation complicates this relation: our access to the world is structured through concepts, interpretive frameworks, and socially conditioned practices of meaning. By clarifying the distinction between linguistic representation and worldly causation, this study redefines justification not primarily as a property of the world or isolated beliefs, but what counts as a meaningful and responsible representation of the world. By situating justification within our linguistic practices, this approach offers a more precise account of how beliefs can be answerable to a world that is never accessed except through language, concepts, and interpretations.

Speakers

Vincent Ray Daut

Ateneo de Manila University

Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST
MSB1.05

Epistemology, Remote

2:00pm NZST

Findings of a Eudaimonic Wellbeing Intervention

Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST

MSB1.01

I present findings from a 4-month Martin Seligman-inspired wellbeing intervention of keeping a diary of 1) at least one positive emotion experienced, 2) personally enacting and 3) socially modelled at least one of Christopher Peterson and Seligman’s 24 character strengths daily as a New Zealend intermediate school teacher aide. Strengths enacted were mainly my greater ones as measured by Seligman’s Values In Action test and my judgement. Strengths modelled were informed mainly by the VIA test, professional education resources, counselling theory, and Michelle Borba’s moral education research. I engage with Carol Ryff’s critiques of Seligman’s positive psychology, but Seligman’s character strength research resonates with my main previous wellbeing practice, spirituality especially meditation, and Aristotle’s eudaimonian ethics. Interpreting Aristotle, the good life comprises a contemplative and an active element, the contemplative leading to eudaimonia, and the active centrally involving cultivation of virtue. Some philosophers argue Aristotle’s social praxis surpasses his contemplative Theoria in goodness. My meditation maintains “high-quality wellbeing,” “flourishing,” according to Edward Diener and Katherine Ryan’s subjective wellbeing criteria: positive affect, limiting negative affect, increasing mental engagement and meaning in life. I observe whether TA work as social contribution, less contemplative, equals meditation in sustaining eudaimonic wellbeing.

Speakers

Victor Lusis

University of Canterbury

Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST
MSB1.01

Ethics, In Person

2:00pm NZST

Paradise Lost: Rationalist Optimisation and the Transformation of Nature

Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST

MSB1.36 & 37

The environment is immoral and needs to be engineered to accord with our measures of the good, claim animal ethics and effective altruist philosophers. We should engage in “paradise engineering”: the deliberate deployment of advanced biotechnology to engineer nature according to a welfare or utility-based metric. This movement has taken transhumanist thought, amplified and funded by the EA-rationalist movement, and then applied it to nature. This requires a denial of non-welfare-based forms of non-instrumental value. While I agree with critics that radical transformationalism is unwarranted due to feasibility and deference-based reasons, I will raise a more fundamental ethical objection. I argue that the subjugation of nature to accord with human moral metrics diminishes nature's ability to be a robust producer of non-instrumental values. I develop what I call a meta-option-value argument: nature is a robust and open-ended generator of non-instrumental value relations, and people reliably create novel forms of such valuation over time. The intentional transformation of ecological systems cuts this generative capacity in ways that no instrumentalist accounting can recover. The transformationist, therefore, needs to not only show that their displacement of existing value is legitimate but that they are justified in diminishing a source of future value.

Speakers

Chris Lean

Macquarie University

Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Ethics, In Person

2:00pm NZST

Sperm are from Mars, Eggs are from Venus: Generic Cognition and the Reification of Sex Essentialism

Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST

MSB1.02

This paper considers whether apparently non-essentialist accounts of biological sex can avoid sex-essentialist uptake when expressed via generics. Recent work in philosophy of biology has defended realist accounts grounded in anisogamy as both empirically robust and compatible with diversity. I argue that Paul E. Griffiths' sex concept is the most compelling of these views and is not vulnerable to sex essentialism in itself. However, the generics literature shows that generic statements expressing biological generalisations can nonetheless have sex-essentialist uptakes. Drawing on Sterken's account of quantificational force and Leslie's cognitive mechanisms—characteristic dimensions and counterexample resistance—I argue that even Griffiths' carefully non-essentialist account gets processed as an absolute generic, erasing the nuance that distinguishes it from traditional gametic essentialism. Once essentialised at the level of cognition, these generics feed into broader social consequences: the assumption that biological sex determines behavioural dispositions, emotional capacities, and social roles. Generic expressions about behavioural dispositions, emotional capacities, and social roles inherit their apparent biological authority from realist sex concepts, lending scientific legitimacy to stereotypes that Griffiths' metaphysics was never designed to support. Ultimately, I argue that sex-essentialist uptake places significant constraints on the ability of realist accounts of sex to remain non-essentialist in practice.

Speakers

Maisie Belle Norton

Nanyang Technological University Singapore, Postgraduate Presentation Prize Shortlist

Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST
MSB1.02

Feminist Philosophy, In Person

2:00pm NZST

Ersatz Wisdom: Suspension (and other goals) in Sextus' Outlines

Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST

MSB1.15

Sextus Empiricus plainly states that the sceptics take the goal to be tranquillity. Commentators usually understand this to be a claim about the goal of life, and note, with some discomfort, that it is a little strange for sceptics to take any position on this at all. The goal of life is a hotly contested topic, and the sceptics believe we should suspend belief in the face of disagreement. Worse still, the sceptics believe we should live in accordance with convention and appearances. Other candidates, such as pleasure and wisdom, appear to be the goal to many people and are more conventional than tranquillity.

In this paper, I argue that commentators have been misled by Sextus’ point blank statement that tranquillity is the goal. Across PH I, Sextus makes multiple and mutually incompatible claims about the sceptics’ goal. Drawing on Bett’s analysis of Sextus’ use of “variation”, I argue that these contradictions constitute a deliberate strategy to induce suspension of belief about the sceptics’ take on the goal. Moreover, I show how Sextus uses “ersatz goals” to sell scepticism to readers no matter their life-orientation. The appeal of these goals depends on the success of the sceptics at balancing arguments.

Speakers

David Merry

National University of Singapore

Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST
MSB1.15

History of Philosophy, In Person

2:00pm NZST

Pūrākau, Narrative Sovereignty, and the Whare Tapa Whā Coherence Engine

Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST

MSB1.21

This paper develops a philosophical account of narrative sovereignty by examining how people draw on layered pūrākau as the architecture through which they re‑author their stories within a contextual coherence narrative engine. Te Whare Tapa Whā provides the structural ontology for this engine: taha wairua, hinengaro, whānau, and tinana operate as interdependent narrative layers through which meaning is interpreted and balanced. Within this framework, healing is not an externally imposed intervention, but a sovereign act undertaken within a held relational space, supported by a Kaitiaki who witnesses, grounds, and protects the perimeter while the individual chooses how to weave, unweave, and reweave the stories that shape their life.
The paper shows how pūrākau function as philosophical technologies that encode whakapapa, relational ethics, and cosmological orientation. These forms challenge Western assumptions that narrative coherence is internal or psychological, instead positioning coherence as relational, embodied, and ancestrally situated. As tauiwi, I approach pūrākau as methodological guides rather than symbolic resources. The paper proposes that contextual coherence grounded in Te Whare Tapa Whā offers a culturally respectful model of narrative healing that protects individual sovereignty while honouring relational, spiritual, and ancestral dimensions of coherent self‑stories.

Speakers

David McCurdy

Academic Lead & Chair Programme Committee, Te Whare Takiura o Manukau | Manukau Institute of Technology

I’m Programme Chair & Academic Lead at Manukau Institute of Technology, specialising in software engineering, data analytics, AI, and interdisciplinary programme design. I’ve led the development of multiple NZQA-accredited programmes and supervise capstone and work-based learning... Read More →

Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST
MSB1.21

Indigenous Philosophy, In Person

2:00pm NZST

The Ins and Outs of Meaning

Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST

MSB1.20

The term ‘meaning’ has a broad and expansive scope. Linguists and philosophers sometimes focus on some notion of literal or conventional meaning described under the heading ‘semantics’ while being well aware of various phenomena falling under the heading of ‘pragmatics’, including metaphor, emotive meanings, social and political meanings and so forth. We need to think where there are the best prospects for developing systematic theories. My focus will be mostly on the semantics, using as a lens a rough contrast between the inner, that is a mental or psychological basis of meaning and the outer, which can include the behavioural, the physical context and broader social context of an utterance. Arguably a satisfactory account of meaning will involve a suitable interaction between the inner and the outer. As an example, I shall briefly discuss a familiar style of truth conditions approach to meaning with a look at the notion of direct reference to see how different styles of theory can be appropriate for different purposes.

Speakers

David Lumsden

Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato │ University of Waikato

Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST
MSB1.20

Philosophy of Language, In Person

2:00pm NZST

The Profit Motive, Meaning and Meaningful Work

Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST

MSB1.03

This paper explores the vexed relationship between the profit motive and meaningful work; more specifically it considers the extent to which the pursuit of commercial profits at work typically undermines, diminishes or even eliminates possibilities for engaging in activity which provides genuine satisfaction in and of itself. In political philosophy, there is a long tradition of regarding profit-seeking as necessarily devoid of meaning for the profit-seeker. Think here of Aristotle who, in the Politics, suggests that the pursuit of wealth is unnatural since it does not possess what we might now call “satisfaction conditions”. Equally, if we consider the circumstances of those working in businesses where the primary organising principle is the maximisation of profit, then again there is no shortage of political philosophers (most notably in the socialist tradition) who are sceptical that such work can reliably provide opportunities for meaningful agency.

Should we regard the profit motive as necessarily (or even typically) inimical to the pursuit of meaning at work? Herein I suggest that if reject conceptions of the profit motive which regard it as involving only one kind of motivational set, then we can develop a plausible compatibilist account of the relationship between profit-seeking and meaningful work.

Speakers

Adrian Walsh

University of New England

Adrian Walsh is Professor in Philosophy and Political Theory - at the University of New England. He is known for his expertise on political philosophy, philosophy of economics and applied ethics. Walsh is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Applied Philosophy.une.edu.au/staff-p... Read More →

Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm NZST
MSB1.03

Political Philosophy, In Person

3:00pm NZST

Thinking with Other Minds: A Sociocultural Enactivist Approach

Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST

MSB1.36 & 37

My paper argues that cognition is fundamentally and constitutively structured by an agent’s ongoing engagement within social roles and shared norms. It investigates how socio-cultural structures constitute the space of possible actions and inferences available to embodied agents. I propose that roles, and the expected and regular norms that individuate them, function as dynamically evolving constraints on shared state spaces, shaping trajectories of action and forming the basis of habitual, socially situated cognition. On this view, sociocultural structures are not merely external influences but organizing conditions that co-constitute what counts as intelligible action.
Conceptually, the project defends the claim that the stabilizing patterns of sociocultural structures should be treated as constitutive elements of distributed cognitive systems. Norms and shared practices organize what actions make sense, shape the appearance of reasons, help determine what is experienced as appropriate, expected and possible for agents as they skillfully navigate the world. Drawing on enactivism, I develop an account in which social practices sediment into habits, stabilize as institutions, and recursively structure future cognition and action. This framework integrates distributed cognition, social ontology, and collective intentionality.

Speakers

Will Wright

University of Memphis

Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST
MSB1.36 & 37

Cognitive Science, In Person

3:00pm NZST

The Divergence of Reason between Lukacs and Horkheimer

Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST

N3.01

Georg Lukács’ The Destruction of Reason and Max Horkheimer’s The End of Reason both center on the theme of reason, as their titles indicated. However, there is a profound divergence in their intellectual foundations and teleological outlooks. This study examines these divergences through two core lenses: the philosophers’ contrasting attitudes toward Stalinism and their differing conceptions of reason’s prospects. As a consequence, their views on praxis, individuality, and the role of collective vs. individual struggle diverge: Lukacs prioritizes material transformation and collective action, while Horkheimer emphasizes critical reflection and the preservation of individual autonomy. Despite both being considered as foundational figures of Western Marxism, their disagreements reflect deeper tensions within Marxist thought regarding emancipation, rationality, and the relationship between theory and political practice. This paper argues that these differences stem not from contradictory commitments to Marxism, but from distinct responses to 20th-century political realities (e.g., fascism, Stalinist governance) and divergent interpretations of Marxism’s core tenets, particularly regarding the nature of reason and the path to human emancipation.

Speakers

Hexiong Yang

University of Macau

Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST
N3.01

Continental Philosophy, In Person

3:00pm NZST

Higher-Order Evidence and Bayesian Orthodoxy

Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST

MSB1.05

It's widely reported that the classical Bayesian norms of rationality break down in the face 'higher-order evidence'. On first pass, this needn’t be particularly troubling. Classical Bayesianism has many well-documented limitations. However, these limitations don't undermine its application across a wide range of cases. So, they don't directly challenge Bayesian orthodoxy. On close inspection, the problem runs deeper though. Hedden & Dorst (2022) have recently argued that almost all evidence is (in part) ‘higher-order evidence’. If they are right, and it is in fact the case that the classical Bayesian norms break down in the face of ‘higher-order evidence’, it follows that the classical Bayesian norms break down in almost all cases.
In this paper, I defuse this problem. I show that it rests on the conflation of two distinct kinds of 'higher-order evidence’. Once we properly attend to the distinction between these two kinds of higher-order evidence we can accept Hedden & Dorst’s (2022) initial observation without endorsing wide-spread violations of classical Bayesianism. Hence, we can make a more accurate assessment of the scope and limits of Bayesian epistemology.

Speakers

Magdalen Elmitt

Postgraduate Presentation Prize Shortlist, Australian National University

Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST
MSB1.05

Epistemology, In Person

3:00pm NZST

Moral Appreciation and Moral Virtue

Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST

MSB1.02

This paper proposes a novel account of the conditions for moral virtue centered on an important but overlooked notion: appreciation. I begin by challenging an intellectualist tradition in the literature, which I call the Cognitive Requirement Thesis (CRT): that moral virtue requires the cognitive ability to explain why one’s action is right (Hursthouse 1999; Annas 2011; Hills 2009, 2015). Targeting Hills’s version in particular, I argue that CRT sets the cognitive bar too high, and propose instead the Moral Appreciation View: one is morally virtuous when and because one is able to appreciate the relevant moral features of a situation. By appreciation, I mean a distinctive kind of sensitivity manifested in three dimensions: (i) perceptual sensitivity: recognizing the presence of a morally relevant feature in a situation, (ii) normative sensitivity: capturing that feature’s normative significance, and (iii) affective sensitivity: being affectively moved and motivated in a way that is responsive to that feature. I further distinguish appreciation from knowledge and understanding, suggesting that it entails neither, and argue that it is necessary for virtue: an agent who appreciates the right-making features of situations is thereby disposed to perform right action in a reliable, non-lucky manner across a range of cases.

Speakers

Wenwen Li

PhD Student, UW-Madison

Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST
MSB1.02

Ethics, Remote

3:00pm NZST

Why Consequentualism Should Be Freedom-Based

Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST

MSB1.01

In this presentation I demonstrate how many of the problems with utilitarianism and rights-based theories of morality can be solved by a kind of consequentialism based on freedom. I show how this avoids happy torturers, resolves conflicts between rights, and applies better to all possible persons. I also demonstrate how freedom can be weighed sufficiently for consequentialist calculus to take place.

Speakers

Daniel McKay

University of Canterbury

Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST
MSB1.01

Ethics, Remote

3:00pm NZST

Freedom and Servitude: The Construction of Political Norms in Early-Modern Europe

Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST

MSB1.15

The paper seeks to examine Spinoza’s theoretical relationship to slavery through a historical and political perspective. Early modern natural law tradition, in which (as Grotius argued) slavery was consistent with natural justice and the slave could freely sell their own liberty forces us to confront the paradoxical ways in which modern notions of freedom were articulated in relation to increasingly abstracted uses of slavery. I focus my attention on Spinoza’s paradoxical formulation of servitude. The source of Spinoza’s characterisation of slavery is found in Chapter 16 of the TTP, positing the foundations of the state in terms of mutual utility rather than a Hobbesian absolute transference of right to a sovereign authority. Yet Spinoza defines the figure of the slave as someone who fails to actively pursue their utility. Inscribed at the very heart of Spinoza’s political vision is an unsettling reality – the condition of slavery reveals itself to be a permanent condition and limit of the political, the ever-present possibility of a catastrophic collapse of social relations and the inability to form secure and durable relationships with others.

Speakers

Michael-Francis Polios

PhD, Duquesne University

Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST
MSB1.15

History of Philosophy, In Person

3:00pm NZST

Truth-Telling and Environmental Policy

Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST

MSB1.21

Indigenous communities in Australia have ancestral philosophies for caring about their local environments. As an aftermath of European imperialism, such philosophies have been racialized and silenced in attempted genocides and epistemicides by governing institutions in settler-colonial states. When environmental policies in most industrialized states have failed to prevent cascading environmental crises, how should we understand the relationship between the environmental philosophies of Indigenous peoples and the policymaking of settler-colonial states? Can such an understanding inform responses to environmental crises and the bestowment of collective reparations on Indigenous communities? We propose the Truth-Telling and Environmental Policy (TTEP) model to address these questions. Focused on case studies from Australian history, the TTEP model examines both vicious and virtuous cycles of cultural transmission in the relations between the philosophies of First Australians and environmental policy. The vicious feedback loop maintains the epistemic malpractices and falsehoods caused by racialization and settler privilege. According to TTEP, virtuous and reparative feedback loops are established by using truth-telling and rational understanding to remediate injustices and pass decolonial knowledge intergenerationally. Truth-telling operates as a circuit breaker of racialized ignorance and collective silencing.

Speakers

Kylie Bishop

Charles Darwin University

Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST
MSB1.21

Indigenous Philosophy, Remote

3:00pm NZST

Wittgenstein's Tractatus on a Conception of the Philosophy of Language

Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST

MSB1.20

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of Philosophy of language forms a very important component of the study is the Tractatus. The earlier theory provides the philosophical background to the later concept of language of meaning and truth. The two are conceptually linked up for truth and reality. The main objectives of Tractatus is to construct an ideal language with view describe the world. Wittgenstein’s argument is that the world consists of a multitude of empirical facts and state of affairs and the truth function of language is a copy, mirror or representation these facts and state of affairs in the same way as a picture of the world or a photograph said to be representing something in the world. Language fails to function in this way because of its inherent ambiguities and vagueness. In order to remove these defects the only option left is to construct ideal language to be governed logical grammar and syntax. Language consisting primarily of an elementary proposition and names which assert the nature of things or state of affairs. The linguistic programme of the Tractatus offers a conception of philosophy. The construction of purified language is taken to be the task of philosophy.

Speakers

Limmalu Udaya Kumar

Acharya Nagarjuna University

Prof. L. Udaya Kumar M.A, M.Phil., Ph.D. (UOH)Professor of PhilosophyHead of the Department Vice-Principal, University College of Arts, Commerce & LawChairman UG and PG Discipline of Philosophy in AP.Department of Buddhist Studies,Acharya Nagarjuna... Read More →

Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST
MSB1.20

Philosophy of Language, In Person

4:00pm NZST

Afternoon Break

Monday July 6, 2026 4:00pm - 4:25pm NZST

MSB Foyer

Monday July 6, 2026 4:00pm - 4:25pm NZST
MSB Foyer

Breaks

4:30pm NZST

Diachrony and Hopeful Asymmetry in Levinas: Shame Beyond Ethical Collapse

Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST

N3.01

This paper investigates a fundamental aporia within the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas: how can ethical responsibility endure when infinite responsibility exceeds the finite subject’s capacity to fulfill it? Levinas grounds subjectivity in an asymmetrical responsibility for the Other that precedes freedom, reciprocity, and self-possession. Yet such radical responsibility threatens the subject with ethical exhaustion, shame, and retreat into ontological self-enclosure.
Against interpretations that soften Levinasian asymmetry through reciprocity or mutual recognition, this paper argues that asymmetry remains irreducible. At the same time, however, asymmetrical responsibility generates what I call “hopeful asymmetry”: a fragile ethical hope directed toward the Other. Through an analysis of shame, substitution, and diachrony in Levinas’s major works, I argue that this hope functions as the transcendental condition that prevents ethical responsibility from collapsing into nihilistic absurdity. Hope does not resolve impossibility; rather, it suspends impossibility so that ethical responsiveness may continue despite constitutive inadequacy.
Ultimately, the paper proposes a new interpretation of Levinasian ethics in which ethical shame becomes bearable only through the irreducible hope awakened by asymmetrical responsibility itself.

Speakers

Jaeseok Choi

Master, Boston College

Jaeseok Choi is a Jesuit priest and a first-year M.A. student in the Department of Philosophy at Boston College. He received his B.S. in Civil Engineering and his M.S. in Urban Planning from Seoul National University in South Korea. He also holds an M.A. in Philosophy and an M.Div... Read More →

Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST
N3.01

Continental Philosophy, Remote

4:30pm NZST

Higher Uncertainty and Epistemic Vagueness

Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST

MSB1.05

Following Dorst (2026), this paper develops a higher-order account of epistemic vagueness. I begin by reconstructing Williamson’s epistemicist account of vagueness, focusing on the margin principle. I argue that epistemic vagueness cannot be explained by first-order indiscriminability alone, since such an explanation is self-undermining. A satisfactory account therefore appeals to higher-order uncertainty. I then clarify that the margin principle rests on two assumptions: the indiscriminability of just-noticeable differences (JNDs) and gradualness. I suggest that the former must be restricted, while the latter is incompatible with empirical data and unnatural. Finally, I argue that higher-order uncertainty provides a better explanation of non-gradual patterns in epistemic vagueness, and that this explanation is supported by psychological studies on discrimination and metacognition.

Speakers

Ming Dai

Zhejiang University

Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST
MSB1.05

Epistemology, Remote

4:30pm NZST

A Brentanian Solution to the Partiality Problem

Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST

MSB1.15

A number of philosophers analyse value in terms of fitting attitudes. On such views, very roughly, something is valuable just when it is a fitting object of certain favourable responses. However, these views face a problem about partiality. Suppose that either my friend or a stranger can be rescued from drowning, but not both, and that the two rescue outcomes are equal in intrinsic value. It still seems fitting for me to prefer my friend’s rescue. This creates a difficulty for fitting-attitude analyses: if the two outcomes are equal in value, why is it fitting for me to prefer one to the other?

The main aim of this paper is to offer a Brentanian solution to this problem. I argue that the difficulty arises because we fail to distinguish two different roles that preference can play. In one role, preference is a way of assessing which object is better. In another, it is a practical response involved in deciding what to do. Once this distinction is made, we can say that my friend’s rescue and the stranger’s rescue are equal in value, while also allowing that it is fitting for me to choose my friend’s rescue. This preserves the intuition that partiality can be fitting without implying that my friend’s rescue is intrinsically better.

Speakers

Shintaro Takahashi

Hokkaido University

Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST
MSB1.15

Ethics, Remote

4:30pm NZST

Gossip and Acquaintance

Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST

MSB1.01

Let ‘gossip’ be the practice of discussing a person’s character, conduct, or relationships in that person’s absence. Commonplaces about gossip include that it is an ordinary and ubiquitous part of human life, that it plays important social and even evolutionary roles, and that the mores of various times and places nonetheless view it with suspicion. What major ethical theories should say about gossip remains ambivalent. On the one hand, ethicists have called it a pleasant and often harmless pastime, praised its ability to promote self-knowledge and social cohesion, and recommended it as a tool for combatting pernicious power imbalances. On the other hand, ethicists have also wondered why gossip sometimes inspires feelings of guilt in its practitioners, cautioned that it runs a risk of disrespecting the personhood of those involved, and worried that it might foster undeserved isolation. In this talk, I focus on a distinctly epistemic cost of gossip. I argue that gossip eliminates opportunities to garner ‘acquaintance’—understood in the technical sense as a relationship of direct awareness—between those whose story the gossip narrates and those who listen. This matters because, according to influential views in epistemology, acquaintance so understood possesses a special kind of value.

Speakers

Michael Bruckner

New York University Shanghai

Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST
MSB1.01

Ethics, In Person

4:30pm NZST

Andrea Dworkin's Sexual Ethics: A Pro-Sex Feminist After All?

Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST

MSB1.02

Andrea Dworkin (1946 – 2005) is perhaps best remembered as the militant feminist who, in 1983—alongside feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon—drafted an ordinance defining pornography as ‘a violation of women’s civil rights’ for the City of Minneapolis. Though this ordinance was vetoed, Dworkin’s reputation as a porn-opposing, (cis-hetero) sex-negative feminist never died. Dworkin saw woman-hating everywhere, and she saw pornography—and intercourse more broadly—as a central site where this hate was realised. But does Dworkin’s opposition to pornography really rightfully earn her a ‘sex-negative’ reputation? This project proposes to undertake a close study of Dworkin’s oeuvre in order to reveal the contours of her views about sex. In bringing the nuances of her views about sex to light, I will argue that Dworkin’s observations may be central for an emancipatory feminist sexual ethics in the present.

Speakers

Louise Richardson-Self

University of Tasmania

Senior Lecturer in Philosophy & Gender Studies University of Tasmania

Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST
MSB1.02

Feminist Philosophy, In Person

4:30pm NZST

What Can Philosophers Do to Support Victims of Gendered Violence & Racialization? Inquiries into Doura Truth-Telling Indigenous Feminism & Moral Revolution in Australasian Philosophy

Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST

MSB1.21

The panel will deploy a reversed ‘anthropological gaze’ to examine and expand the practices of academic philosophy in Australasia. For the first time in its history, the AAP has invited Indigenous women from the Doura tribe (Hiri Koiari district, East of Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea [PNG]) to discuss the contributions that philosophers could make to support victims of gendered violence and racialization. The leading guest speaker from the Doura team is Elder Helen Vai’i Gorogo, who presides the Doura Kabema’una Cooperate Society and has decades of experience in redressing colonial and patriarchal injustice. A key task for the cross-cultural panel will be to evaluate proposals for the delivery of moral and epistemic reparations to victim-survivors in PNG. Moreover, each contributing panellist will be invited to consider how culturally entrenched moral change – ‘moral revolution’ in Appiah’s (2010) sense – could be triggered when communities use Indigenous narratives to confront histories of exclusion, colonialism, and injustice (Rigney, 2017). Thus, the panel will seek to weave Indigenous philosophies, truth-and-reconciliation scholarship, and cultural change theory to elaborate the groundwork of an innovative decolonial philosophy. The panel will be a unique opportunity to celebrate Melanesian philosophies and pay respect to the underrepresented First Peoples of PNG.

Speakers

Collethy K Jaru

Charles Darwin University/Western Sydney University

My research interest in mainly around Geography and Indigenous knowledge philosophy, cultures, native languages and traditions.
I'm also interested in climate change, food security and empowering community development projects

Nicolas Bullot

Charles Darwin University

Helen Gorogo

Chair, Kabema’una Co-operative Society Limited

Joe Ulatowski

Conference Organiser, Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato │ University of Waikato

Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST
MSB1.21

Indigenous Philosophy, Remote

4:30pm NZST

Dirty Hands, Paragons and the Symbiotic Ethics of Activism

Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST

MSB1.03

Contrary to the view that ideological purity and practical politics are fundamentally incompatible, this paper theorises a symbiotic, self-correcting relationship between deontological purists and pragmatic incrementalists as essential to sustainable social justice movements. Through a pop-culture thought experiment contrasting Barry Allen (The Flash)—whose “deontological narcissism” externalises catastrophic fallout onto others—with Oliver Queen (Arrow), a tragic “dirty hands” agent, I examine the morality-preserving conditions required for both forms of ethical agency. Drawing on Walzer’s dirty hands, Bernard Williams’ moral remainder, Weberian responsibility, and Kantian universalisability, I argue that deontological purists serve as uncompromised moral anchors only when motivated by radical solidarity with the most vulnerable rather than the preservation of personal moral purity. Conversely, pragmatic incrementalists retain moral legitimacy only by refusing to sanitise or universalise their compromises, instead maintaining a painful awareness of the human cost left behind in bartering away an erased minority’s immediate safety to secure survival for the majority. I conclude by applying this framework to the ethics of contemporary social activism using the lived narrative of implementing restricted sex-education curricula under state bans in India.

Speakers

Gurleen Khandpur

Recent MA Graduate (Philosophy)., Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka | University of Otago

I've recently completed my Master's in Philosophy at the University of Otago. My research interests include feminist philosophy, political philosophy, applied ethics, queer and trans, disability, mad, and fat studies. I've always been keen to bridge the gap between academia and activism... Read More →

Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST
MSB1.03

Political Philosophy, Remote

6:00pm NZST

MADE - Tasting Night

Monday July 6, 2026 6:00pm - 8:00pm NZST

MADE

Whisky & Wine Tastings @ Made, 401 Grey Street, Hamilton East.

Whisky @ Neat, Made Mess Hall
Join fellow conference registrants for an evening whisky tasting at Neat, a relaxed and convivial way to continue conversations after the day’s sessions.

The tasting will begin at 6.00pm and run for approximately two hours. Nibbles will be provided, including bread, dips, olives, and arancini. Dairy-free, gluten-free, vegetarian, and vegan options are available.

Time: 6.00–8.00pm
Cost: NZD $80 per person, including nibbles
Please note: This is an optional event for conference registrants and places are limited. Advance sign-up is required.

Sign up HERE

Wine @ Reggies, Made Mezzanine
Join fellow conference registrants for an evening wine tasting at Reggies, a relaxed opportunity to unwind after the day’s sessions and continue conversations with colleagues.

The tasting will begin at 6.00pm and run for approximately two hours. Nibbles will be provided, including bread, dips, olives, and arancini. Dairy-free, gluten-free, vegetarian, and vegan options are available.

Time: 6.00–8.00pm
Cost: NZD $70 per person, including nibbles
Please note: This is an optional event for conference registrants and places are limited. Advance sign-up is required.

Sign up HERE

Monday July 6, 2026 6:00pm - 8:00pm NZST
MADE

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