AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Transhumanism advances the view that enhancing human cognitive and physical capacities through technological means constitutes the primary route to the greatest good. On this view, the current human condition is deficient and inefficient, and should be optimised, re-engineered, or even transcended into a “posthuman” status to achieve flourishing.
I critically analyse Nick Bostrom’s transhumanist framework, focusing in particular on three key ideas: his characterisation of the human as a rational, isolated, and disembodied agent; of limits as constraints to be overcome; and of flourishing as the maximisation of capacities and subjective wellbeing alongside the minimisation of effort and suffering. I argue that this individualistic and reductionist account of the human, limits, and flourishing is inconsistent with ecological and scientific understandings of human nature.
Drawing on ecological, system, and relational approaches – including embodied cognition, complex systems theory, and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s relational ontology – I present an alternative view of humans as embodied, situated, and relational beings, constituted through dynamic interactions with ecological and evolutionary processes. From this perspective, limits are not merely constraints, but constitutive conditions of flourishing.

Will my AI partner really give me the pleasure I expect? Or am I just deceiving myself? While Kaczmarek (2024) looks at human-AI relationships through the lens of self-deception, I offer an alternative, but possibly complementary view. This draws on Plato's idea of false pleasure. This talk re-visits Plato's Philebus an often overlooked, and somewhat peculiar text, which categorises varieties of false pleasure. While there have been debates in the literature in the past about whether pleasure can be false, this seems to have fallen out of favour these days. This talk intends to revive the discussion of false pleasure in light of AI relationships and self-deception (Kaczmarek, 2024). We don’t need to commit ourselves to the idea of whether it is indeed a false pleasure, but the idea of false pleasure provides on way of explicating the concerns or unease people have. I conclude by offering a modest extension to the varieties of false pleasure. 

For many, honesty is a key tenant of friendship. We trust our friends to ‘give it to us straight’, to ‘keep it real’. We often like to believe that we can be our truest selves around our friends. But how reasonable is it to expect total candor from our friends? Might it sometimes be more acceptable to lie to preserve our friends’ feelings or interests? Are lies told to our friends, in a way, worse than lies told to non-friends?
I explore various categories of lies - lies by omission, lies by commission, and lies by misrepresentation. I present two categories of potential justification for lying to a friend - internalist justification, reasons motivated by the friend’s interest, and externalist justification, reasons extraneous to the friend’s interest.
Ultimately, I argue that all lies, regardless of content or justification, should be broadly considered unacceptable, but that our decisions about whether to lie to a friend or, alternately, our response to being lied to by a friend can and should be motivated by the features of the lie.

Some of your choices are primarily guided by the interests of others: for example, which charities to give to or which political policies to vote for. How should you evaluate the options when they involve risk—when you don’t know how the world will turn out? I argue for a tight connection between the problem of making a risky choice for another person and the problem of distributing benefits and burdens across people. This yields a schema for a principle governing risk-taking for others, both when you know a person’s attitude toward risk and when you do not. I detail several ways to fill in this schema, including my preferred view. The result is a unified framework for thinking about what we owe to others in cases of risk.

In his 2019 paper Two Visions of Welfare, Fred Feldman defends Attitudinal Hedonism about welfare by positing a conceptually pluralist account of welfare. Feldman argues that there are two concepts of welfare: Pure Welfare Narrowly Conceived and Enhanced Welfare Broadly Conceived. In this talk I appraise Feldman’s move to pluralism and his subsequent account of welfare. I proceed in four parts. First, I introduce the idea of moves (such as ‘going pluralist’), how moves might come about, and the benefits that we can get by employing them. Next, I introduce Feldman’s use of a move to conceptual pluralism. Then, I argue that Feldman’s attempt merely collapses into a case of conceptual gerrymandering, a case of artificially shifting the bounds of a concept to rule out one’s less-preferred theories of that concept on conceptual grounds. Finally, I argue that we can learn at least two things from Feldman’s unsuccessful move to pluralism. First, there is a problem that all conceptual pluralist accounts will face: the umbrella problem. Second, there is a plausible solve for the umbrella problem in the case of the concept of welfare: a move to functionalism.

In this talk, I argue that holding conflicting sets of norms does not constitute a pathological breakdown of group agency. 
Prominent accounts of group agency assume a demanding coherence condition: groups are taken to require a unified point of view, where persistent internal contradiction is treated as a breakdown of agency (List & Pettit 2011; Collins 2019). Yet in ordinary practice, groups are still regarded as agents despite incoherence and ongoing conflict causing tensions for views that emphasize coherence as central to agency attribution.
I argue that existing theories overlook a key phenomenon: internal interference. Once interference originating from within the group is taken seriously, these accounts lack the resources to explain how contradictory groups can continue to act as agents and how to distribute responsibility.
The argument proceeds in three steps. First, it examines group-level programming, including List and Pettit’s idea of “arranging things non-causally” (2011). Second, drawing on Rachar’s distinction (2024), it analyzes implicit programming as norms that guide behavior without explicit endorsement and may constitute a group’s effective program. Third, it highlights that recent responsibility-focused approaches (de Haan & Collins 2024) neglect internally generated interference. This reveals a structural gap in current accounts.