What role should empirical methods play in political philosophy? What might be the merits of employing social science methods to address the fundamental questions political philosophers explore, such as what makes the state politically legitimate or what is the nature of a good society? A useful point of comparison here is political science. Although political science and political philosophy are closely adjacent disciplines, political scientists typically make far greater use of empirical methods. Moreover, many political scientists are highly critical of what they see as the unacceptable aprioristic methods employed by great deal of contemporary political philosophy. Such criticisms are, however, highly contentious and contested. Many political philosophers are opposed, on primarily normative political grounds, to such moves that they regard as embodying the methodological vice of “scientism”. What should we think? Might there be specifically political reasons for rejecting some methodological practices? Might there also be straightforward philosophical grounds for objecting to strong empiricist programs of reform? In this talk, I shall begin by considering the disagreement between the Vienna Circle and the Frankfurt School on whether philosophy should model itself on the natural sciences before providing a defence of the thought that when investigating the normative questions that lie at the heart of political philosophy, non-empirical philosophical speculation has a significant role to play. In the final section, I shall briefly outline some reasons why this methodological stance matters politically.
“First-person authority” refers, roughly, to the deference that we owe one another’s self-ascriptions of mental states in ordinary contexts. What justifies this deference? Here I argue for a pluralistic answer. I argue, first, that the hearer of a self-ascription is justified in deferring to the speaker in part because the speaker expresses her attitude to the hearerby self-ascribing it, and in part because the hearer inferentially determines the content of the attitude expressed by the speaker. I argue, second, that the hearer is justified in deferring to the self-ascriptions of young children because those children thereby express their mental states, whereas the hearer is justified in deferring to at least some self-ascriptions of older people because hearers recognize that more mature cognizers have the authority to self-determine at least some of their mental states through reflective reasoning. I argue, third, that an agent’s justification to regard her own self-ascription as first-person authoritative differs from the justification that others have to regard her self-ascription as such, and that this makes a difference for navigating contexts where one’s first-person authority is challenged.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST GCI-275 HYBRID
Kantian constructivism (KC) highlights the sociopolitical dimension of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. While there is extensive literature on KC, its educational implications remain understudied. In this paper, I posit the cultivation of responsible reciprocity (RR) among teachers and students in classrooms as the foremost educational implication of KC. By focusing on Kant’s On Education (2003) and Critique of the Power of Judgment (2000), and Christine Korsgaard’s Creating the Kingdom of Ends (1996), I clarify why the cultivation of RR is the foremost educational implication of KC and how RR can be manifest in classrooms. I underpin the sociopolitical dimension of Kant’s idea of Kingdom of Ends in the context of education by highlighting Korsgaard’s notion of RR vis-à-vis Kant’s three rules for thinking: think for oneself, think in the place of every other, and think universally. I argue that education institutions must recognize that people can think for themselves and with each other and that such institutions must provide spaces where people can realize their capacity for thinking. I conclude that settings as small – but as fundamental – as classrooms must empower teachers and students not only to think for oneself but also to think with each other, and ultimately, cultivate RR.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST GCI-273 HYBRID
Animal laboratory technicians (henceforth lab technicians) are at risk of sustaining moral injuries when complicit in unethical experiments. Prima facie, it would be puzzling to offer the perpetrator of an unethical experiment psychological support in the form of moral repair. However, we argue that lab technicians are owed moral repair as a special case of our proposed duty of special concern. The duty of special concern states that special consideration must be given to the wellbeing of those who undertake substantial risks for the benefit of others. We make sense of the substantial risk of moral concern lab technicians face by drawing on Rawls’ notion of imperfect procedures of justice. Imperfect procedures of justice are those that aim for just outcomes, but procedures do not guarantee those outcomes. Animal experimentation belongs to this category, as it aims for only ethically permissible experiments to be conducted, yet this is not guaranteed by the procedures that determine which experiments are approved. The risk of moral injury falls heavily on lab technicians as they are charged with undertaking an unethical experiment. Hence, we make sense of the otherwise puzzling intuition that lab technicians have conducted an unethical experiment, yet are owed psychological support.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Supporting the development of children’s autonomy is widely recognized as a fundamental good. Despite this, social practices that reflect and reinforce patriarchal gender norms are ubiquitous. These norms, however, curtail the development and exercise of children’s autonomy by constraining their opportunities along gendered lines and promoting falsehoods about ‘natural’ identity expression. In recognition of these limitations, many parents across the political spectrum are pushing back against patriarchal gender norms in their parenting approaches. One particular model that aims to fully embrace a progressive parenting methodology is the “gender-open” model of parenting (GOP). Broadly, the GOP methodology involves withholding disclosure of a child’s biological sex as assigned at birth from public knowledge. With the necessary support, this approach aims to encourage children to choose their own gender in their own time. Advocates of this model claim that adopting the GOP ensures a child’s autonomy in self-expression. However, despite these claims, none of the advocates clearly articulates how the model promotes children’s autonomy. My aim in this paper is to demonstrate how the GOP protects and promotes children’s autonomy in robust ways, making a strong case for its adoption.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-206
Probabilism is the thesis that the degrees of belief of rational agents behave like mathematical probabilities. There are quite different lines of argument for probabilism in the literature, including dutch book arguments, arguments based on representation theorems (which concern the representation of preference orderings by assignments of numerical utilities and degrees of belief) and epistemic utility (in particular, accuracy) arguments. This paper focusses on the dutch book line of argument. My aim is to develop a better version of the argument that avoids problems faced by previous versions -- and then show that it still fails to establish probabilism. The upshot is that ultimately the dutch book line of argument is not a viable route to probabilism -- but does lead nonetheless to a weaker yet still substantive conclusion.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3153 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Presentism is often seen as the simplest most intuitive ontology of time, yet direct comparisons between presentism and eternalism based on simplicity are limited. Philosophical consensus holds that presentism is quantitatively parsimonious but qualitatively identical to eternalism. Presentists also risk introducing qualitative and scientific/structural extravagance in addressing standard objections.
This paper defends presentism on all fronts – quantitative, qualitative, and structural. I, first, examine arguments extolling quantitative parsimony as incidentally virtuous but not inherently virtuous. I propose, instead, a ‘Principle of Sufficient Explanation,’ where inclusion of any explanans must be justified, undermining the traditional quantitative-qualitative asymmetry.
I, then, argue accepting qualitative equivalence between presentism and eternalism concedes the latter’s truth. Instead, presentists should assert that non-present objects are fundamentally different from present ones by undermining space-time analogies and accusing eternalists of inexcuably gerrymandering qualitative categories. Furthermore, I bypass any extravagance introduced by presentist solutions to semantic objections, defending a novel justification of ‘ontological cheating’ grounding truth not in being but in what statements are 'about'.
Finally, I address objections from special relativity, arguing that any structural bloat introduced by presentism in this regard is either subject to uncertain future empirical investigation, justified metaphysically, or simply a descriptive theoretical artefact.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-2373 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Izydora Dąmbska and Maria Kokoszyńska may be listed among the most accomplished philosophers of twentieth century philosophy. Despite this, their work has been largely underappreciated, especially by truth-theorists working in the Anglo-American analytic tradition. I seek to rectify this injustice by showing how their ideas represent an important innovation in truth-theory. Izydora Dąmbska has argued that the concept of truth does not boil down to a choice between different theories of truth, i.e., correspondence, coherence, or pragmatic. Her reason for holding this position is that linguistic concepts, such as truth, cannot escape the confines of language. For Dąmbska, the concept of truth cannot be primitive since it is inextricable from language. We must, she says, return to the “epistemological issue of the definition of truth” (2015, p. 146). Maria Kokoszyńska’s two-fold attack against truth relativism, which is an amplification and formalisation of Twardowski’s argument in “On So-Called Relative Truth” (1901), serves as an epistemological foundation for a theory of truth. Using Kokoszyńska’s argument from illusion and argument for a principle of charity, I show how Dąmbska and Kokoszyńska’s work suggest a way forward for functionalism about truth.
I am Assistant Vice-Chancellor Sustainability, as well as Senior Lecturer and Graduate Advisor in the Philosophy Programme at the University of Waikato in Aotearoa New Zealand. I am also Director of the Waikato University Experimental Philosophy Research... Read More →
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
I propose a contextualized conception of proportionality, which requires bringing the concrete context of answering/raising a particular causal inference question into the picture when assessing proportionality. So, the new formula is this: a cause-variable C is proportional to an effect-variable E relative to a given context T. This conception is bolstered by a brief exposition of recent scientific practice in causal feature learning. Moreover, it gets further support by showing how it readily and elegantly resolves a threat posed by Franklin-Hall (2016).
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3203 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Skeptical invariantists say that “know” refers to a very demanding epistemic relation – call it “absolute knowledge.” Standard invariantists say that “know” refers to a much less demanding epistemic relation – call it “standard knowledge.” Suppose that standard invariantists are right. Suppose also that standard knowledge (i) helps to causally explain behavior and (ii) sets one important kind of normative bar for assertions and actions, just as many standard invariantists think. Does this mean that absolute knowledge is of little epistemological interest? I think not. I will suggest that even given these assumptions, absolute knowledge would still (iii) play a different but powerful role in causally explaining behavior and (iv) set another important kind of normative bar for assertions and actions.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST GCI-275 HYBRID
Communicative-functional accounts of blame are gaining in popularity. Several of these accounts hold that blame plays a significant role in influencing moral norms (e.g. Fricker, 2016). In response, some have raised what I call the ‘might-makes-right’ worry: what if blame pushes us towards bad moral norms? Blame’s often angry, spontaneous, reactive nature might make it seem likely to push us towards accepting oppressive (or otherwise problematic) norms. In this paper I provide some reasons for optimism in the face of this worry. I provide reasons to think that blame generally guides us towards the right moral norms. First, blame’s motivational trajectory—including strong emotions like resentment and guilt—brings unique, underappreciated benefits. Second, insofar as blame empowers agents to influence moral norms, some of blame’s properties naturally distribute this power. This second set of reasons parallels some justifications for democracy in political philosophy, hence the title. Finally, I review the limits of my proposed optimism, pointing out ways that things can still go wrong that warrant vigilance going forward.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Many of us – ordinary people and moral philosophers alike – sound very much like rule-consequentialists. We are willing to revise and refine the rules that we endorse, the institutions that we embrace, the virtues that we espouse, and vices that we deplore; moreover, we believe – quite rightly – in doing so in light of the consequences that such things produce. But of course if we think that consequences are so important, shouldn’t we simply be an act-consequentialists instead? In this paper I will be pointing out the curious sense in which act-consequentialists are deeply untrustworthy; recognising the practical wisdom imbedded in various established rules, practices, institutions, virtues and attitudes; and generally trying to show how to avoid sliding down the notorious slippery slope that can lead to a collapse into act-consequentialism. While it can be tempting to think that moral philosophy is largely concerned with devising an ideal procedure for decision-making, my suggestion is that it should also be focussed – perhaps amongst other things – on articulating a shareable ethos, on the cultivation of certain feelings and emotions, on the development of virtuous and flourishing human beings, and on defending – via consequentialist reasons – the prioritisation of various agent-relative obligations over impartial obligations.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST GCI-273 HYBRID
Oppressive double binds are those situations where, due to oppressive forces, no matter what choice the oppressed person makes, they contribute to their own oppression. Present and historical patterns of discrimination often give rise to dilemmas around distrust which I argue can best be described as distrust-based oppressive double binds.
On one hand, for members of oppressed groups, it often seems that distrusting others is justified, because unjustified trust can be harmful. On the other hand, however, persistent distrust of others is also burdensome for the person who is distrusting. This means that, whether the distrusting person acts on their distrust or chooses to rely on the distrusted person anyway, they open themselves up to unjust burdens or harms and contribute in some small way to their own oppression.
After establishing this concept, I argue that viewing certain common patterns of distrust among oppressed groups through this lens allows members of oppressed groups to better understand and resist their oppression, illustrates one of the mechanisms through which justified distrust can lead to unjustified distrust, and helps us understand how we can reduce some forms of distrust and when we should focus on others becoming more trustworthy instead.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-206
It has long been observed that many bad logical results—especially Curry's paradox—rely on a rule called contraction. Logics without contraction thus point in a more promising direction. But it has also been observed, for almost as long, that paradoxes are very resilient; each step down the non-contractive path neutralises one variant of the paradox only for a new, more terrible one to appear. After sketching the basics, I will review a few of these successive problems, including some very recent. Does this story show we been running around putting out fires, instead of getting to grips with what is really going on? Or are we closing in on the true source of the problem, approaching an Ultimate Curry? The goal is to get a higher-level view.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3153 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Much of my recent research has centred on the polemic between Henri Bergson and Gaston Bachelard. In particular, I have focused on the notions of continuity and discontinuity within the two philosopher’s work. I have found that recent Bergsonian scholarship has, at times, dismissed Bachelard uncharitably. I ask, however, whether such a hasty dismissal of Bachelard is necessary, let alone justified. My argument is that Bachelard understood Bergson’s work at a depth greater than what he is often credited, and therefore, he provides a critique that warrants a deeper level of engagement from Bergsonians in return. My aim here is not to discredit Bergson so much as it is to develop an interpretation of Bergson that has sincerely engaged with Bachelard’s novel and insightful critique.
Both philosophers present compelling philosophies of temporality that, at the very least, generate an interesting polemic. At most however, I have found that a sincere engagement with the tension found in their opposition has led to a deeper appreciation of both. Personally, I have not concluded my research and my ultimate position on the matter remains indefinite. That being said, I am certain that Bergsonian scholars will benefit from an encounter with Bachelard’s critique.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-2373 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
According to Grice’s Cooperative Principle (CP) and maxim of Quality, it is rational to presume our interlocutors are being truthful, or at least, are trying to be truthful during conversation. However, I argue that presuming the truthfulness of an interlocutor, i.e the maxim of Quality holds, is not necessary for the CP to be operative. More generally, I argue that the CP and Grice’s conversational maxims come apart; a common misunderstanding is to take the conversational maxims as part of what it means to be cooperative, but Grice’s maxims are only generated by specifying the goal of conversation as the maximal exchange of information in conjunction with the CP. The second aim of my paper is to analyse a conversational context where the goal is not the maximal exchange of information: the British comedy panel show Would I Lie to You?, where panellists are "cross-examined" and tasked to deceive each other. I argue that it is rational to presume that one’s interlocutor is both trying to deceive and trying to be truthful in the show’s context, as part of what it means to uphold cooperativity.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Daniel Dennett was a compatibilist. He attempted to carve some elbow room for freedom of decision-making by inserting some indeterminism in his ‘practical free will’ model. The purpose of inserting indeterminism in decision-making processes was to break the causal chain of hard determinism and to provide a source for novelty not already implicit in past events. This would explain creativity and also allow for indeterminism required for free will. However, he falls short of allowing indeterminism to break the causal chain and accepting that free will could reconnect it with novel links. The ‘practical free will’, he says, ‘installs indeterminism in the right place for the libertarian, if there is a right place at all’. This cautious acceptance of indeterminism in causal chains did not succeed, because it was randomness that he was inserting, not indeterminism of well-defined alternatives. I will demonstrate a form of indeterminism based on the instability and criticality of some physical states, which offers well-defined alternatives in the physical world at the classical (not quantum) level. This form of indeterminism fits perfectly into causal chains and opens the door to reconciling libertarian free will with the physicalism of the world more elegantly than Dennett's model.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-262
My PhD research has been focussed on addressing the problems associated with what Sarah Myers West terms ""data capitalism"" through experiments in the two forms of political economy endorsed by John Rawls – Property-Owning Democracy or a Liberal Socialism. This paper will focus on the solution I offer for the licensing rights over what I term ‘consumer data,’ a solution, I contend, which will provide citizens with an experiment in Property-Owning Democracy
I will first offer a definition of ‘consumer data’ and Property-Owning Democracy. I will then detail my proposal for a system of compulsory trusts which manage the licensing rights over consumer data. Finally, I will consider some of the major issues that may arise from the scheme, and some potential objections to the scheme.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3093 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In metaethics, it is widely held—following Smith (1994)—that only de re desires (wanting to perform a particular act which happens to be right) are praiseworthy, whereas de dicto desires (wanting to do whatever is right) are fetishistic. In this paper, I argue that moral fetishism extends equally to what I call “right-making-feature desires,” i.e. wanting to perform an act insofar as it instantiates its right-making feature. If either class were exempt, the very notion of fetishism would collapse. Drawing on two parallel thought experiments, I show that both de dicto and right-making-feature motivations sever the agent from the act qua token, thus lacking genuine praiseworthiness. Two implications follow. First, proponents of the right-making features view of moral worth cannot appeal to fetishism to support their view, since right-making-feature desires are themselves fetishistic. Second, deontic buck-passing accounts fail to explain our intuition about moral fetishism, because right-making-feature desires already respond to the genuine reason for action yet remain unworthy of praise. By refining the taxonomy of moral motivation, this analysis constrains viable accounts of moral worth.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Bereavement is part of the human condition, and so it is unsurprising to find an array of generic social scripts which operate to scaffold interactions with the bereaved. They are generic in that we will all lose parents and friends, and many of us will lose siblings, partners, or children. Each script supposes a gravity of loss that in turn translates to a ‘space’ for grieving and delimits requirements in caring for the bereaved. But human relationships are complex and exceed these generic formulations. There are more ways to ‘relate’ to others outside a bionormative schema, yet we lack widely disseminated and embedded social scripts to work through the impact of these poorly recognised losses. In this paper, I analyse my own bereavement journey since the sudden death of my ex-step-father in 2013. I explore the impact and implications of grieving without a social script to guide me (and those around me), the meaning-making journey I have embarked upon to process this loss, and the central place that ‘recognition’ has occupied therein. In addition to demonstrating a need for more nuanced social scripts to deal with varied forms of bereavement, I critique the ongoing social centring of bio- and cis-hetero-normative familial relationships in life which is a precursor to misjudging the depth of blended-family (and chosen-family) loss.
You might endorse one of the following positions regarding the number of correct logics: either there are no correct logics (logical nihilism), one correct logic (logical monism) or there are multiple correct logics (logical pluralism). While not technically wrong, this taxonomy is too coarse-grained. This tripartite split skirts a number of important distinctions that in fact lead to significantly diverging views, concerning for example the generality of logical laws and what it means for a logic to be ‘correct’. Many of these views have been defended, more or less, throughout the logical literature. However, few writers have taken it upon themselves to taxonomize the positions in a way that highlights the interesting choice points and where they lead. In this talk I attempt to do just that. Rather than argue for a certain view, my aim is to illuminate the commitments involved in endorsing any one position. I will end by considering a potential issue that arises when the logical pluralist is held to this higher demand for precision.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST Steele-3153 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Science makes progress in a way that metaphysics seems not to. From Locke, Hume, and Kant through logical positivists and deconstructionists and down to (for example) David Lewis, Amy Thomasson, Mark Balaguer, John Heil and hundreds of others, philosophers have written engagingly about "progress" in philosophy. Some have concluded that it is time to give up even trying to answer metaphysical questions. I will suggest that Balaguer is right to think that it is prudent to rely on only a very "thin" metaphysics for practical purposes; but also that Heil is right in maintaining that giving up on metaphysics is not an option. I will also try to give a more positive spin to the whole business. There is a reason why answers to metaphysical questions cannot be proved correct; and there are also reasons why this is a good thing, and why this provides a reason for doing metaphysics rather than abandoning it.
Traditional conceptual analysis aims at reaching reductive definitions of properties or relations (e.g. goodness) by investigating the conceptual meanings of natural language terms (e.g. 'good'). This project stands largely in disrepute today following the development of semantic externalism ("meaning ain't in the head") and the popular appeal of the Millian view that the meaning of a referring term is just its reference. I propose a way of reconciling traditional (non-Canberra) conceptual analysis with Millianism specifically for property-predicating terms like 'good', drawing on the ideology that the mark of the mental is intentionality (Brentano). Our concept of a thing (or its cognitive significance) just is an individuating property of that thing. In the case of entity- or substance-referring terms like 'Aristotle' and 'water', our concept must be distinct from the meaning or reference. But in the case of property-predicating terms like 'good' there is another, direct option: our concept may just be the property itself. In this case, conceptual analysis is metaphysical reduction.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Ineffability is widely regarded as one of the key features of subjective phenomenal experience by both physicalists and non-physicalists. The idea is that such experience, often conceptualized in terms of qualia, is not expressible in terms of public language, and thus scientific investigation can only target the objective, public aspects of the world and not such subjective aspects. Physicalists typically employ accounts under the umbrella term “phenomenal concept strategy” to explain this ineffability; yet, the resulting idea about the relationship between phenomenal and theoretical concepts appears incomplete, as it leads to the implausible consequence that phenomenal information is completely isolated and practically useless. Here, I propose a new account of phenomenal ineffability and phenomenal concepts that clarifies these issues while offering a deflationary reconstruction. Drawing on the Enlightenment distinction between primary, secondary, and tertiary qualities in a non-literal way, this account explains why certain phenomenal concepts remain untranslatable into theoretical concepts, and vice versa.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST Steele-262
Richard Jeffrey (1956) famously articulated an internal critique to the argument from inductive risk (AIR) and offered an alternative picture of scientific advice, which we call “the Bayesian picture of scientific advice” (BPSA) with two essential commitments: scientists should only communicate their subjective probabilities (vs. outright beliefs) in hypotheses and doing so upholds a political division of labour (i.e., scientists bring the epistemic input; policy-makers bring the evaluative judgments).
We argue that communicating credences doesn’t deliver the division of labour—the idea that such a prize is secured in the Bayesian picture is an artifact of the idealizations behind the debate around the AIR. Basically: scientists’ role in policy advice goes well beyond reporting credences (or outright beliefs for that matter) for a hypotheses previously specified by policy makers. Scientists are necessarily involved in the framing of policy (decision) problems, i.e., in the curation of the policy actions, the states-of-nature, and outcomes that are worth considering. (They are even needed to come up with utility numbers!) This is easy to see when looking at well-studied cases of scientific advice such as large-scale environmental assessments—we focus on the IPCC reports in the talk—but the point generalizes.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST Steele-3203 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
There is a longstanding debate within applied ethics about the possibility of ethical expertise. Peter Singer and Paulina Sliwa, among others, have argued that the content-knowledge of moral philosophers gives them ethical expertise and thereby moral authority. Bernard Williams, Raimond Gaita and others, in contrast, contend that moral authority is not derived from content-knowledge and that there is no such thing as an ethical expert. However, in this debate the concept of “moral authority” is often left underexamined. It is sometimes assumed as a synonymous with ethical expert or an as attribute that the expert has by virtue of being an expert. This paper examines what moral authority is and argues that maintaining a distinction between expertise and authority is not only important for understanding what ethics is but is useful for setting the parameters for what applied ethics and ethicists do.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
This paper is a philosophical examination of two narratives devised to invite social change (‘storyworks’; Archibald 2008). The first recounts key episodes of the life of Helen Vai’i Gorogo, a Doura woman from Papua New Guinea who experienced forced marriage and domestic violence before achieving community leadership. The second retraces Bhanu Bhatia and her sister-in-law’s shared exile from India to Australia. According to an interpretation derived from liberal feminism, both narratives depict how gender, kinship, and neoliberalism can conspire to reinforce patriarchal structures that exclude girls and women from the networks of social power. However, drawing on works published by Archibald (2008), Simpson (2017), Moreton-Robinson (2000, 2015), Shiva and Mies (2014), and Sreekumar (2022), we deploy autoethnographic and Indigenous epistemologies that challenge the reductionism of the liberal-feminist interpretation. The paper critiques liberal (non-Indigenous) feminism for (i) its inability to account for the moral and emotional creativity of the protagonists and (ii) its own historical complicity with colonialism. In centring philosophical examination on lived experiences, the paper highlights storywork as a transformative philosophical methodology for reimagining justice and belonging in the struggle experienced by Indigenous and non-Western women.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST GCI-273 HYBRID
A concept widely employed in legal and political contexts, ‘legitimacy’ can seem less applicable to everyday human activities. I argue this is a profound mistake. Many of the same factors that drive recourse to legitimacy in legal and political contexts also apply in—and fundamentally shape—everyday interpersonal, relational and organisational life. These factors include moral pluralism, epistemic fallibilism, policy ambiguity, collective action challenges, the significance of established expectations and social norms, and worries about moral authority. Moreover, many of the same devices that work at the political level to deliver legitimacy—procedural fairness, deliberative justice, due process, transparency, tolerance, consent, pro tem decisions—can be (and often are) used mutatis mutandis to achieve acceptance in interpersonal, relational and organisational contexts. Being blind to the significance of legitimacy in ordinary life sets the stage for serious moral mistakes, in particular, mistakes driven by a lack of reciprocal respect for others as ethical and epistemic agents.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In the second half of ``Two Dogmas", Quine argued that there could be empirical grounds to revise logic - at least in principle. Since then the most (though still not very) popular proposal for what those empirical grounds might actually be has involved quantum mechanics. Still, most logicians seem to think that quantum mechanics does not give us good enough reason for revision. This paper considers and evaluates an alternative proposal for what those grounds might look like and the logic they would support: perhaps the experiences acquired in virtual reality give us reason to adopt an assessment-sensitive logic.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST GCI-275 HYBRID
In our current digital technological age, it is said that our privacy matters more than ever. But despite no shortage of scholarly attention to the topic, we lack a comprehensive theory of what privacy is, why it matters, and when it matters. Privacy scholars are not shy about this state of affairs; in their view, our understanding of privacy is ""in disarray"", ""intractably vague"", ""a quagmire"", and so on.
In this talk, I argue that the difficulty of understanding privacy lies in how information flows --- personal or otherwise --- generate complex interactions in social settings. Using formal methods from complexity theory, I present a model of privacy in terms networked flows of normatively relevant personal information. This model brings basic questions of privacy into clearer focus. We see that privacy, understood as normatively appropriate personal information flows, matter because of how they affect people's abilities in ways that are normatively relevant. Importantly, we see that these abilities interact in ways that cannot be reduced to pairwise interactions, thus creating a problem of what I call Normative Complexity.
From this vantage point, the challenge of understanding privacy becomes tractable, though formidable. A comprehensive theory must allow us to describe how flows of personal information modulate the abilities of people interacting in a given setting. It should provide a way to normatively assess such patterns of personal information flow. And it should help guide us in arranging our social norms, technologies, and environments in terms of their privacy implications. The account I offer provides a foundation for this more comprehensive and systematic approach to understanding what privacy is, why it matters, and how it matters --- indeed, it seems, more than ever.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3153 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Various philosophers have thought that the propensity interpretation of probability faces fatal objections. They include: “Propensities are mysterious.” “We don’t know how propensities behave.” “We do know that they don’t obey the probability calculus.” “Propensities are not Humean supervenient.” And “propensities do not vindicate the Principal Principle” (Lewis’s bridge principle between chances and rational credences).
I will revive the propensity interpretation. In a slogan: chances measure graded dispositions. More carefully, conditional chances measure graded dispositions to produce given outcomes, conditional on specifications of physical situations. Comparative dispositions are entirely familiar. My wine glass is more fragile than my beer mug; salt is more soluble than plastic. And I argue that we can get from comparative dispositions to numerical propensities that obey the probability calculus, answering all of the objections above (and more). Reports of the death of the propensity interpretation have been greatly exaggerated.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-2373 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In the Sally-Anne false belief task (Wimmer & Perner 1983), autistics and three year-olds ascribe beliefs to others based on their own knowledge of the truth rather than on the other person's justified beliefs. This phenomenon is known as the "reality bias" or "curse of knowledge." I suggest that several famous philosophical puzzles arise from the same intuition, that is the theorist's knowledge of how the world really is (eg Gettier). For Donnellan (1974) the semantics of language may only be given from the "outside" by the "omniscient observer of history" and Kripke's puzzle cases of naming arise from "ignorance and error" on the part of a subect. Burge (1988) says “We take up a perspective on ourselves from the outside” and Kaplan (2012) says that the theorist “surveys another’s thought” from a point of view “independent of whether the subject’s thought corresponds to reality.” That is, philosophers make the same mistake that children grow out of by the age of four. Chomsky (1962) warns “Reliance on the reader’s intelligence is so commonplace that its significance may be easily overlooked” and Fodor suggests “The question is not what is obvious to the theorist; the question is what follows from the theory.”
Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-262
The distribution question about animal consciousness concerns which animal species are conscious. Philosophers and scientists alike have been hung up on the idea that we must first define consciousness if this question is to be answered. Examples in the history of science suggest, however, that this may put the conceptual cart before the empirical horse. Inspired by Hasok Chang's work on inventing temperature, I will argue that answering the distribution question requires the invention of better measures before a good enough theory to support a consensus definition can be developed. To this end, I will extend the ""signature approach"" to comparative animal cognition, developed by Alex Taylor, Amalia Bastos, Rachael Brown and myself. The signature approach applied to comparative studies of animal consciousness shares some affinities with ""marker"" approaches to animal consciousness offered recently by philosophers including Jonathan Birch, Kristin Andrews, and Albert Newen. But whereas marker approaches seek to build dimensional profiles of different species according to the degree to which they display various capacities thought to be related to consciousness, the signature approach is better suited to developing reliable measures that support detailed comparisons of the processes underlying these capacities, and ultimately better theories.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3203 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Few philosophers nowadays doubt the existence and significance of a persistent ‘explanatory gap’ in our understanding of the nature of conscious experiences and their relation to the material world. Contemporary concerns about the explanatory gap have their roots in Saul Kripke’s 1972 argument against the mind–brain identity theory: if a is identical with b, then there is no world at which a fails to be identical with b; as Descartes showed, however, it is conceivable for minds to exist in the absence of material bodies; so, Kripke concluded, minds cannot be identified with material bodies or their parts. In 1983 Joseph Levine argued that, although Kripke’s original argument falls short of establishing that minds are distinct from material bodies, the argument has an epistemological counterpart. The disparate character of conscious qualities and qualities of material bodies creates an impeneratrable barrier to our understanding how the mental could be identified with the physical. This, and other, expressly epistemological arguments have subsequently been deployed in the service of the metaphysical thesis originally defended by Kripke: the mental cannot be identified with the material. This paper critically examines the widely invoked practice of drawing metaphysical conclusions from epistemological premises.
Abstract from our paper published in Synthese (2025): Recently, non-realist cognitivism has been charged with failing to meet various semantic challenges. According to one such challenge, the non-realist cognitivist must provide a non-trivial account of the meaning and truth conditions of moral claims. In this paper, we discuss the various strategies proposed to overcome this challenge. Our aim is to propose a new semantics, a Meinongian referential semantics that is based on truthmaker theory. The consequences of our proposal are two-fold. First, it alleviates objections raised against previous Meinongian semantic approaches. Second, adopting the novel semantics highlights the great theoretical flexibility of non-realist cognitivism.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 9:30pm - 10:25pm AEST ONLINE ONLY
Romantic culture has long been a topic in gender studies when it comes to analysis of socialization and social construction of gender. It has been critiqued as leading to normalization of abuse and harassment of women and consequent silencing of women enduring IPV (Intimate Partner Violence) (Radway 1991). In Chinese context, romantic fictions and multi-media adaption of the stories have impacted readership in the last 50 years (or longer) (Liu 2008), among them Chiung Yao contributed 40 years of active writing. Since 1962, Chiung Yao’s stories have been made into more than 100 TV series and films. However, her impact is undertheorized compared to female writers in her era.
Feminist epistemologists theorize the inability to communicate one’s critical social experience as hermeneutical injustice and made further inquiry into the collective hermeneutical resources (Berenstain 2020; Clanchy 2023; Dular 2023; Falbo 2022; Fricker 2007; Mason 2011; Medina 2012, 2013, 2017; Mills 2013; Jenkins 2017, 2021; Simion 2019). I argue that Chiung Yao’s romances, among other stories, constitute an important part of Chinese romantic culture and serve as hermeneutical resources when people draw concepts about love. The endorsement of IPV exhibited in her plots induces hermeneutical injustice of her readers, who fail to express discomfort in a toxic relationship due to normalization of abuse in Chiung Yao’s description of love. This paper contributes to the vivid discussion of hermeneutical injustice, IPV, toxic relationships and intersectional feminism.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:30pm - Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:25am AEST ONLINE ONLY
