AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Western virtue ethics is often presented as a timeless framework for ethical inquiry, yet its historical and cultural genealogy remains largely unexamined within mainstream philosophical discourse. This paper argues that whakapapa, as a distinctively Māori philosophical method, offers a rigorous tool for tracing such genealogies, revealing the contingent cultural foundations of concepts that have been naturalised within Western ethics.
Taking Perrett and Patterson's 1991 ""Virtue Ethics and Māori Ethics"" as a point of departure, I demonstrate how whakapapa as method reorients the comparative project entirely. Rather than asking whether Māori ethical concepts map onto Western virtue frameworks, the whakapapa approach asks what historical, ontological, and relational conditions gave rise to each tradition's understanding of virtue, excellence, and moral agency. This genealogical move exposes the settler-colonial assumptions embedded in cross-cultural philosophical comparisons, while simultaneously affirming the internal coherence and philosophical sophistication of Māori ethical thought.
The paper contributes to ongoing methodological debates within Indigenous philosophy about how to engage with Western philosophical traditions on Indigenous terms, offering whakapapa not as metaphor but as rigorous philosophical methodology with genuine analytical purchase.