AAP 2026 CONFERENCE: Full Schedule

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11:00am NZST

Forgiveness and the Purpose of Rememberance

Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST

Victims of wrongdoing are frequently encouraged to forgive in order to move forward in peace. Victims who keep reminding the perpetrators of the past wrongdoing might be accused of not having forgiven at all. Arguably, real healing will be achieved by victims who let bygones be bygones, who forgive and forget. However, victims of extreme wrongdoing are also regularly encouraged to participate in memorials and collective acts of remembrance which repeatedly pull them back to condemn the past wrongdoing. We are told that remembrance is part of the vigilance required in order to protect against wrongs of this kind being perpetrated again. These victims are told that they should forgive but never forget. In this talk I will ask whether we can resolve the tension between these two claims by thinking more carefully about the conceptual relationship between forgiving and forgetting, and about the moral function of remembrance.

Speakers

Luke Russell

Professor, University of Sydney

I work on forgiveness, evil, moral emotions, virtue and vice.

Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am NZST
MSB1.01

Ethics, In Person

12:00pm NZST

Death and Lament: A Deprivationist Argument Against Lamenting Death

Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST

MSB1.01

A widely accepted view about the badness of death is the Deprivation Account (DA), according to which death is bad for the person who dies because it deprives them of future goods. A natural idea for DA proponents is that we should lament our death if and only if, and to the extent that, it is bad for us—a view called the Nothing Bad, Nothing to Lament Assumption (NBNL). However, Travis Timmerman has recently argued that DA proponents should reject NBNL. This paper has two aims. First, I argue, pace Timmerman, that DA is compatible with NBNL. Second, I explore what follows if both DA and NBNL are true. I shall tentatively defend the claim that, given both claims, we should not lament our death in most actual cases. My defense relies on the observation that we normally lack sufficiently good reasons to believe that our death is bad for us. In most actual cases, we have only a very limited amount of information about what our own circumstances would be like in the remote future had we not died.

Speakers

Ryota Ishihara

PhD Candidate, Kyoto University

I am a PhD candidate at Kyoto University, Japan. I am working mainly on the philosophy of death, the philosophy of harm, and animal ethics.

Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST
MSB1.01

Ethics, In Person

3:00pm NZST

Product Boycott: Morally Good Boycotts vs Morally Bad Boycotts

Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST

MSB1.01

Product boycotts are a common feature of our political lives. Vegans avoid animal products, and many Americans boycott Tesla for political reasons. Boycotts are a central mechanism through which consumers attempt to hold firms morally accountable within market systems. Consequentialists defend consumer boycotts on the basis of their expected effects. Non-consequentialists, by contrast, defend boycotts on grounds such as non-complacency, the expression of disapproval and public solidarity, or their role as instruments of democratic values. I reject these defences and provide a novel non-consequentialist framework to evaluate the moral goodness of consumer boycotts. I argue that the moral significance of product boycotts does not depend on their causal efficacy but on their expressive role in reflecting consumers’ moral concerns. Consumer boycotts are actions through which agents manifest what they care about and what they take to be morally important. When such actions express morally admirable concerns — for instance, concern for animal welfare or justice — they reflect well on the consumer’s moral concerns; when they express morally objectionable concerns, they reflect poorly. Consequently, even causally inefficacious boycotts can be morally meaningful, not as instruments of change, but as expressions of moral commitments that contribute to making us morally better persons.

Speakers

Ritam Chakraborty

University of Colorado, Boulder

Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm NZST
MSB1.01

Ethics, In Person

4:30pm NZST

Is there an obligation not to incentivise dishonesty?

Thursday July 9, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST

MSB1.01

People should be honest, but we know, or ought to know, that being honest is more demanding for some people, in some circumstances, than it is for others. Do we have a duty to avoid putting those people in those circumstances if we can? I argue that we do have that duty and that it is evident (even if not explicitly recognised) in some institutional arrangements (e.g., the legal privilege against self-incrimination), but that it is ignored in others (e.g., when we incentivise dishonesty about relationship status in welfare systems). At least occasionally, failure to recognise the obligation imposes heavy burdens on people and amounts to a significant wrong.

Speakers

Tim Dare

University of Auckland

Thursday July 9, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm NZST
MSB1.01

Ethics, In Person

AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

11:00am NZST

Luke Russell

12:00pm NZST

Ryota Ishihara

3:00pm NZST

Ritam Chakraborty

4:30pm NZST

Tim Dare

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