There have been several attempts to defend the Ethical Narrativity Thesis (ENT), that is, the claim that people ought to develop and live according to a self-narrative because it is essential to living well or flourishing. Existing arguments for the ENT have several weaknesses, some rely on an excessively narrow view of flourishing, one sets the threshold for self-narrative so low that the concept is rendered trivial, others only promote a limited ENT whereby self-narratives enable valuable kinds of emotional experience but don’t influence agency. I put forward a novel argument for the ENT that avoids these weaknesses. I claim that self-narratives provide a powerful and irreplicable means of diachronically stabilising intentions because they are ideally suited to anticipating, constructing, and shaping our perspectives over time. As such, self-narration is a valuable tool for achieving self-governance. My view entails that people who don’t self-narrate are relatively vulnerable to failures of self-governance due to temptation and the cognitive burden of deliberation. Self-governance is a necessary (but insufficient) condition for flourishing so people who self-narrate will, ceteris paribus, flourish more than those who do not.
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
The human condition is inherently challenging. Our lives are coloured by toil, limitation, pain, illness, impermanence, and death. Added to these obstacles is an apparent lack of moral economy in the universe. These circumstances render us susceptible to mental disturbances such as despair, nihilism, anxiety, and grief. Ancient spiritual traditions aim to provide a bulwark against these afflictions by reframing the human condition in a manner that allows us to face it with equanimity and courage. In the Western context, two traditions have been particularly influential. Christianity teaches that while the human condition is fundamentally bad in several respects (e.g., suffering, sin, death), thanks to God’s grace, the faithful can look forward to an afterlife that is free from the woes of terrestrial existence. Stoicism proceeds by challenging common assumptions about value and well-being; pain, illness, and death are not bad for us because well-being depends solely on virtue. In this paper, I argue that accepting the Stoic account of well-being, which is the core Stoic doctrine, is ultimately a matter of faith, and that we have good reasons to cultivate this faith. I also argue that Stoic faith is more attainable and stable than conventional religious faith.
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3153 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Animal ethics is increasingly arguing that moral obligations exist to intervene into ecology to reduce wild animal suffering; this requires control over animal reproduction. This raises serious population ethics concerns that have been ignored by animal ethics. Practical human population ethics has confined itself to comparing reproductive choices that involve a human agent creating one or zero individuals. Because human agents attract reproductive autonomy, obligations to create more or less individuals than would be freely chosen are not considered. However, animal ethics is not constrained by animal autonomy, or values given to biodiversity, species membership and ecological roles as animal ethics has converged to reject their import. Sustainability is also dismissed as ultimately constraining our relationship to animals and ecology; technological innovation is always possible. The interspecies population ethics avaliable suggests repugnant conclusions are avoided by a hierarchy of moral standing; no matter how big the animal population, a human population remains preferable. I show that animal ethics has harboured implicit support for such a hierarchy from Mill to Regan. I conclude that animal ethics forced to confront population ethics either degrades into a weak anti-cruelty framework or supports eugenics that phases out all non-human animal life.
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3153 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Vandana Shiva is an ecological thinker and food justice activist renowned for her incisive critiques of industrial agriculture. Shiva’s vision of the appropriate human-nature relation and the good life, I argue, is often expressed via an informal use of virtue language. Although her work makes no direct reference to virtue ethics, it is deeply suffused with essential components of virtuous appraisal. Shiva’s holistic understanding of ecology and the role of smallholder farmers valorises particular characteristics, behaviours and actions that are specific to the practice of farming. Across her body of work, Shiva provides a thick account of virtuous behaviours and dispositions to realise in the agricultural context. In this talk, I make explicit the agrarian virtue ethics that is arguably implicit in Shiva’s work. I explore particular virtues I deem to best capture her implicit ontology of engaging in a virtuous life.
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Existing conceptions of sport’s role in education have focused on the development of specific moral values or contextualising sports culture through philosophical discussion. While worthy and important goals, they retain the subservience of the physical to the mental, leading to the inherent tension between the instinctual and rational capacities of a moral agent. By treating sport similarly to artistic practice, we can bring the rational and emotional aspects of the soul together in an embodied context. Through this, not only is the moral agent free to make choices outside of the dictates of moral law or instinct, but they reach a state of contemplation of what it means to be moral through beauty.
By then linking this harmonisation with meditative practices, as espoused by Yuasa Yasuo and the idea of the unity of mind and body as something to be cultivated rather than as innate fact of human experience, I contend that a modern physical education program must centre this idea for it to offer a unique perspective on moral education in modern education systems. Finally, I will offer suggestions as to how this may look in a practical sense, and how this idea of harmonisation may look in practice.
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
