AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

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.

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.

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.

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.