Is surrogacy a form of legitimate work? Or does the nature of pregnancy and parenthood render surrogacy illegitimate? In this presentation I argue that the best strategy in defence of commercial surrogacy—which I call the “surrogacy-as-legitimate-work” strategy—relies on two implicit assumptions and that once we make them explicit, we are forced to see that commercial surrogacy inevitably leads to a conflict of core moral rights. As I hope to show, if commercial surrogacy is a type of work, it is work that cannot simultaneously protect the right of the surrogate mother to opt out and the right of the commissioning couple to exercise ultimate authority over the foetus.
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3203 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
The aim of this paper is to present and defend a pragmatist interpretation of John Stuart Mill’s arguments defending freedom of expression. By drawing a comparison between Mill’s arguments in On Liberty and the work of Charles Peirce, this paper argues that Mill’s fundamental commitment to epistemic fallibilism as a basis for supporting freedom of expression situates him more closely to the pragmatist tradition of collaborative inquiry than the liberal notion of a clash of competing perspectives. This reading of Mill provides a more precise theoretical groundwork for further re-examination of the limits of free speech without necessary reference to the Mill’s utilitarian harm principle, with the right to voice one’s opinion contingent upon said opinion’s pragmatic contribution to collaborative inquiry in the collective pursuit of truth. His arguments provide further reasons to question liberal ideas of static preferences, suggesting that freedom of opinion entails being receptive to the experience of genuinely felt doubt as a basis for remaining open to revising our personal commitments and opinions.
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3203 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In recent years, several philosophers have noted, and tried to resolve, a seemingly deep tension between Rawls’s accounts of inter- and intragenerational justice; namely, that the just savings principle seems to require the very sort of inequalities that the difference principle forbids. In this talk, I do three things. First, I reframe and strengthen the tension by showing that it is ostensibly deeper than most have conceived of it. Most fundamentally, the just savings principle seemingly violates not only the difference principle but also a condition of reciprocity that Rawls suggests the parties in the original position would require any principle of justice to satisfy. Second, I employ this reframing to expose the flaws in several of the leading solutions to the tension to date. And third, I offer a new solution that goes beyond Rawls’s view—a version of the just savings principle I call the Compensated Savings Principle. This principle both exemplifies reciprocity and, unlike its main rival, also satisfies a new adequacy condition I propose for the savings principle. According to this Imperative to Expedite Justice, the savings principle must give a certain priority to establishing the material conditions needed for just institutions sooner rather than later.
Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST Steele-3203 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
This paper seeks to relate the notions of a division of labour, division of knowledge (as in standpoint epistemology), and division of authority (as in a separation of powers) to the tasks of social philosophy. Anybody who works in ethical or political theory or similar will be conscious of these concepts and will have some use for them. But because their significance is often forgotten at crucial junctures, I think it will be worth our while to discuss just how central they are, and how an awareness of them must shape social philosophy from the very beginning and at almost every step of the way after that. This in particular has consequences for those who try to do social philosophy from ‘the point of view of the universe’ or who advocate for positive duties owed by every human to every other human.
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3203 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
