AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

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.

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.
 

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.

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.

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.