AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

A (legitimate) authoritative command provides its subject with a reason for action. Many also think it provides its subject with a peremptory reason to refrain from acting for certain kinds of countervailing reasons. When a father tells his daughter to go to bed, the consideration that she “doesn’t feel like it” is not only insufficiently weighty to challenge her father’s command, but is also a reason that ought to be excluded.

The capacity of commands to exclude competing reasons has received extensive discussion, most famously by Raz (1986). Less has been said of the nature this exclusion. How is the father’s command supposed to impact upon his daughter’s deliberation? What kind of weight does this exclusionary reason carry for its subject?

I propose that a command’s exclusionary force is a property that modulates in robustness. Some commands carry a more robust exclusionary force, in the sense that they continue to be relevant and retain exclusionary force across a wider range of circumstances, while other commands carry a more fragile exclusionary force, relevant over a narrower range of cases. This interpretation helps illuminate how authoritative directives can be both binding and non-absolute.

In this paper, I argue that there is a general class of label that purports to track problematic behaviours, beliefs, motives, or vices. I call these demeriting labels. Some examples are “liar”, “racist”, “tattletale”, “creep”, “virtue signaller”, “snowflake”, and “slob”. When someone is labelled, lead to social sanctions, tarnish their character, and block them from making conversational moves.

While demeriting labels sometimes have appropriate uses, they can be weaponised to misassign demerits to people innocent of wrongdoing. I worry that this makes demeriting labels particularly effective for the reproduction of social hierarchy, especially given that demeriting labels do not stick to all people with equal ease. For example, dominantly situated people can sometimes get away with bad behaviour because their social position grants them a Teflon coating that makes it harder to get demeriting labels to stick. At the same time, demeriting labels often stick to marginalised people far too easily. Similarly, labels like “slut”, “snowflake”, and “DEI hire” misrepresent something as problematic, but for certain audiences, they have considerable sticking power. This allows demeriting labels to function as the strong arm of prejudiced ideologies, which is I argue that why they demand our attention.

Some ‘responsibility-sensitive' theorists of justice have argued that because parents are responsible for the existence of children, only they are responsible for the costs of those children. Others have argued that because children are akin to public goods, the costs of children should be socialised between parents and non-parents.
I argue that both analyses are incomplete.
To focus only on costs neglects that I should receive the benefits that flow from my choices. The relevant benefit of having children is demographic renewal, ergo parents should receive the benefits of demographic renewal to the exclusion of non-parents. However, because demographic renewal is embedded in children, it presents itself as a non-excludable public good, motivating the argument for cost socialisation.
But this is not a necessary conclusion.
I argue that a case for directing to parents the hypothetical market price of demographic renewal can be made by reference to Ronald Dworkin's theory of distributive justice, Equality of Resources.
In my talk, I explain how Dworkin's principle of abstraction grounds fertility rate targeting as a price discovery mechanism, why a state might choose various forms of parental compensation, and why cost socialisation is appropriate only between parents.

In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant argues that there is only one innate right: the right to be free from determination by another’s will. There and in his late political essays, Kant argues that the fact that human beings reside on the watery spherical surface of the earth (globus terraqueus) provides a rare instance of material fact conditioning right. As Jakob Huber has recently argued, innate right to be free of arbitrary determination combines with the material fact of the limited and interconnected nature of the planet’s surface to produce what Huber calls “a right to be somewhere” (Huber, Kant’s Grounded Cosmopolitanism). In this essay I follow Huber’s focus on the physical conditions constraining the exercise of Kantian right, but I focus on the circumstances of the Anthropocene as even more demanding than the globus terraqueus. Humanity under Anthropocene conditions constrains the freedom of future generations to make choices about their own interactions, in much the same way that the would-be intergenerationally tyrannical church synod criticised by Kant in “What is Enlightenment?” sought to constrain the freedom of future generations to inquire into the truth of their religious commitments. I argue that humanity’s new circumstances make Kant’s account of provisional right much more widely relevant than has previously been recognised, because the intergenerational equivalent of the civil condition is unavailable.

In recent years, global demonstrations and social movements such as Black Lives Matter have mobilized diverse people to contest systemic discrimination, inequality, and genocide. Judith Butler has analyzed these modes of resistance and posits that performative resistance takes effect in assemblies formed when multiple individuals convene in public spaces, such as squares and streets. In other words, when individuals from diverse backgrounds come together, there are performative oppositions to the status quo of discrimination and inequality. This paper will analyse the performative effects of the assembly Butler discusses, focusing on the ‘right to appear’. The ‘right to appear’, variously described by Butler, may be seen as the right to appear in the public/political space and in relation to others. Butler's concept of the right to appear can be understood as combining two perspectives. First, it draws upon Arendt's analysis of the public sphere. Second, it is informed by Arendt's concept of 'the right to have rights'. Butler speaks of a mixture of these two perspectives, referring to Arendt but partly disagreeing with her. This paper aims to highlight the features of the right to appear by comparing Arendt's argument with Butler's analysis.