The advent of ChatGPT, and the subsequent rapid improvement in the performance of what has become known as Generative AI, has led to many pundits declaring that AI will revolutionize education, as well as work, in the future. In this paper, we argue that enthusiasm for the use of AI in tertiary education is misplaced. A proper understanding of the nature of the outputs of AI suggests that it would be profoundly misguided to replace human teachers with AI, while the history of automation in other settings suggests that it is naïve to think that AI can be developed to assist human teachers without replacing them. The dream that AI could teach students effectively neglects the importance of ‘learning how’ in order to ‘learn that’, that teachers are also role models, and the social nature of education. To the extent that students need to learn how to use AI, they should do so in specialized study skills units. Rather than creating a market for dodgy educational AI by lowering their ambitions about what they can offer, universities should invest in smaller class sizes and teachers who are passionate about their disciplines. To flourish in the future, just as much as they do today, societies will need people who have learned to think and not—or not just—intelligent machines.
Monday July 6, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
There has been a recent proliferation of “AI Agents”: systems or programs that can operate in an increasingly autonomous manner. These systems raise an important question: do improvements in the capabilities of autonomous systems change the requirements for how we hold such systems – or their operators or designers – responsible for their outputs? Responsibility can be fruitfully connected to explainability – having the ability to explain an outcome helps in determining who, or what, should be held responsible for that outcome.
My talk will highlight how increasingly agentic systems pose challenges for pre-existing criteria for explainability. Specifically, I will examine how the increasing agentic features of algorithmic systems complicates the explanatory picture, and how different accounts of artificial agency can help to clarify these added complexities. I will conclude by considering how we should better understand the role of explanation in relation to increasingly complex explanatory contexts involving AI agents.
Monday July 6, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Reason-Responsiveness Theories of Moral Responsibility (RRT) posits that the control necessary for moral responsibility depends on an agent's sensitivity to reasons. However, Situationist experiments present evidence that situational factors, rather than reasons, predominantly shape behavior. This paper contends that RRT cannot adequately address these challenges. After critiquing two common yet failed defenses—namely, the rarity of situational influences and the view that situational factors qualify as reasons—I discuss about RRT's usage of the Aristotelian Ethical Method (AEM), which suffers from selective application and epistemic overconfidence in attributing reason-responsiveness. Moreover, even when reason-responsiveness is capable to be captured by non-ideal cognizer, it remains irrelevant to the causal explanation of actions in situationist scenarios as a modal property. Finally, RRT falls short of meeting the Authority Demand, as it provides no authoritatively normative reason by its failure to justify a moral fact of the grounding relation between reason-responsiveness and moral responsibility.
Monday July 6, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Agricultural robots and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly promoted for their environmental virtues. In Australia, the idea that agriculture needs to be less environmentally destructive and attend to ongoing colonial harms, is increasingly expressed in terms of ‘caring for Country’. Although this concept draws on Indigenous ideas of kinship, it is being adopted by white agriculturalists seeking to be more environmentally attentive and sensitive to Indigenous justice issues. In this paper, we ask whether, and if so how, robots and AI can contribute to caring for Country. We examine issues that those who seek to be more sensitive to relationships with the environment and Indigenous justice must consider in the context of decisions about AI and robots. We argue that while not without promise in some respects, robots and AI seem likely to exacerbate the logics of settler-colonial agriculture in ways that call into question their capacity to contribute to an ethic of caring for Country.
Monday July 6, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Why wouldn’t you eat a person? One simple answer for many of us is that cannibalism is morally wrong. Another, perhaps more honest answer, is that it would be gross. In this paper, I show how this disgust response can be rationally related to moral judgements and evaluation. Although disgust and moral judgement are clearly correlated, most modern handlings of disgust treat the truth (or some nearby sense of accuracy/applicability) or falsity of ‘it’s disgusting’ (at least in the sense that applies to food) as being conceptually and essentially unrelated to the truth of any moral evaluation. Any moral judgement that springs from our disgust, then, is simply mistaking a non-moral response for something more meaningful. This paper gives an alternative account. By looking at what aspects of food ‘that’s disgusting’ evaluates, I argue that evaluations of tastes and textures can involve moral – and morally relevant – evaluations.
Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
There are multiple vectors along which one can be more or less pessimistic about the prospects for human-AI friendship. I could be optimistic about the purely technological aspects of AI friends, believing that they will soon be able to do some non-trivial percentage of the things the AI companies claim they can already do. I could be optimistic about the affordances of these AI friends for human relationships and experiences. I could be optimistic about the implementation, or the regulation, of such AI. Here, I examine and taxonomize these possibilities.
I was born and raised in Northland, New Zealand, outside of Whangārei. My undergraduate education at the University of Otago resulted in an LLB and a BA(Hons) in Political Science and Philosophy. I then moved to Melbourne, Australia, where I completed... Read More →
Monday July 6, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST Steele-206
Should university campuses be politically neutral? In this paper I focus mainly on whether professors can or should express political views in class. Its main contribution is to distinguish between absolutist arguments, often thought by proponents to apply universally to all institutions and contexts, and more nuanced context-dependent considerations. I argue that while there are lessons to be learned from each, the absolutist arguments fail. While this means that things are, and there may not be a one size fit all ideal prescription (Schliesser, 2024), the paper describes a plethora of considerations that should be considered when devising policies. The paper examines three absolutist arguments, one against neutrality and two in favor. The first is that neutrality is impossible, it is a myth that serves those in power, and therefore professors should not be neutral (Dea, n.d.; Giroux, 2020, p. 210) . The second is that when professors use their social status and role in classrooms to express their political opinions, it is an abuse of power. The third is that professors, when talking as professors, should talk only about their areas of expertise and research (Fish, 2008). When they express their political views, they are not doing so.
Monday July 6, 2026 8:30pm - 9:25pm AEST ONLINE ONLY
Kantian constructivism (KC) highlights the sociopolitical dimension of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. While there is extensive literature on KC, its educational implications remain understudied. In this paper, I posit the cultivation of responsible reciprocity (RR) among teachers and students in classrooms as the foremost educational implication of KC. By focusing on Kant’s On Education (2003) and Critique of the Power of Judgment (2000), and Christine Korsgaard’s Creating the Kingdom of Ends (1996), I clarify why the cultivation of RR is the foremost educational implication of KC and how RR can be manifest in classrooms. I underpin the sociopolitical dimension of Kant’s idea of Kingdom of Ends in the context of education by highlighting Korsgaard’s notion of RR vis-à-vis Kant’s three rules for thinking: think for oneself, think in the place of every other, and think universally. I argue that education institutions must recognize that people can think for themselves and with each other and that such institutions must provide spaces where people can realize their capacity for thinking. I conclude that settings as small – but as fundamental – as classrooms must empower teachers and students not only to think for oneself but also to think with each other, and ultimately, cultivate RR.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST GCI-273 HYBRID
Animal laboratory technicians (henceforth lab technicians) are at risk of sustaining moral injuries when complicit in unethical experiments. Prima facie, it would be puzzling to offer the perpetrator of an unethical experiment psychological support in the form of moral repair. However, we argue that lab technicians are owed moral repair as a special case of our proposed duty of special concern. The duty of special concern states that special consideration must be given to the wellbeing of those who undertake substantial risks for the benefit of others. We make sense of the substantial risk of moral concern lab technicians face by drawing on Rawls’ notion of imperfect procedures of justice. Imperfect procedures of justice are those that aim for just outcomes, but procedures do not guarantee those outcomes. Animal experimentation belongs to this category, as it aims for only ethically permissible experiments to be conducted, yet this is not guaranteed by the procedures that determine which experiments are approved. The risk of moral injury falls heavily on lab technicians as they are charged with undertaking an unethical experiment. Hence, we make sense of the otherwise puzzling intuition that lab technicians have conducted an unethical experiment, yet are owed psychological support.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Communicative-functional accounts of blame are gaining in popularity. Several of these accounts hold that blame plays a significant role in influencing moral norms (e.g. Fricker, 2016). In response, some have raised what I call the ‘might-makes-right’ worry: what if blame pushes us towards bad moral norms? Blame’s often angry, spontaneous, reactive nature might make it seem likely to push us towards accepting oppressive (or otherwise problematic) norms. In this paper I provide some reasons for optimism in the face of this worry. I provide reasons to think that blame generally guides us towards the right moral norms. First, blame’s motivational trajectory—including strong emotions like resentment and guilt—brings unique, underappreciated benefits. Second, insofar as blame empowers agents to influence moral norms, some of blame’s properties naturally distribute this power. This second set of reasons parallels some justifications for democracy in political philosophy, hence the title. Finally, I review the limits of my proposed optimism, pointing out ways that things can still go wrong that warrant vigilance going forward.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Many of us – ordinary people and moral philosophers alike – sound very much like rule-consequentialists. We are willing to revise and refine the rules that we endorse, the institutions that we embrace, the virtues that we espouse, and vices that we deplore; moreover, we believe – quite rightly – in doing so in light of the consequences that such things produce. But of course if we think that consequences are so important, shouldn’t we simply be an act-consequentialists instead? In this paper I will be pointing out the curious sense in which act-consequentialists are deeply untrustworthy; recognising the practical wisdom imbedded in various established rules, practices, institutions, virtues and attitudes; and generally trying to show how to avoid sliding down the notorious slippery slope that can lead to a collapse into act-consequentialism. While it can be tempting to think that moral philosophy is largely concerned with devising an ideal procedure for decision-making, my suggestion is that it should also be focussed – perhaps amongst other things – on articulating a shareable ethos, on the cultivation of certain feelings and emotions, on the development of virtuous and flourishing human beings, and on defending – via consequentialist reasons – the prioritisation of various agent-relative obligations over impartial obligations.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST GCI-273 HYBRID
In metaethics, it is widely held—following Smith (1994)—that only de re desires (wanting to perform a particular act which happens to be right) are praiseworthy, whereas de dicto desires (wanting to do whatever is right) are fetishistic. In this paper, I argue that moral fetishism extends equally to what I call “right-making-feature desires,” i.e. wanting to perform an act insofar as it instantiates its right-making feature. If either class were exempt, the very notion of fetishism would collapse. Drawing on two parallel thought experiments, I show that both de dicto and right-making-feature motivations sever the agent from the act qua token, thus lacking genuine praiseworthiness. Two implications follow. First, proponents of the right-making features view of moral worth cannot appeal to fetishism to support their view, since right-making-feature desires are themselves fetishistic. Second, deontic buck-passing accounts fail to explain our intuition about moral fetishism, because right-making-feature desires already respond to the genuine reason for action yet remain unworthy of praise. By refining the taxonomy of moral motivation, this analysis constrains viable accounts of moral worth.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
A concept widely employed in legal and political contexts, ‘legitimacy’ can seem less applicable to everyday human activities. I argue this is a profound mistake. Many of the same factors that drive recourse to legitimacy in legal and political contexts also apply in—and fundamentally shape—everyday interpersonal, relational and organisational life. These factors include moral pluralism, epistemic fallibilism, policy ambiguity, collective action challenges, the significance of established expectations and social norms, and worries about moral authority. Moreover, many of the same devices that work at the political level to deliver legitimacy—procedural fairness, deliberative justice, due process, transparency, tolerance, consent, pro tem decisions—can be (and often are) used mutatis mutandis to achieve acceptance in interpersonal, relational and organisational contexts. Being blind to the significance of legitimacy in ordinary life sets the stage for serious moral mistakes, in particular, mistakes driven by a lack of reciprocal respect for others as ethical and epistemic agents.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3293 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In this presentation I critically examine some of the moral implications of delaying aggressive climate mitigation in favour of future reliance on carbon dioxide removal technologies to meet internationally agreed climate goals by the end of the century. I argue that delaying emissions reductions violates basic human rights among members of the current generation, including the right to life, health, and subsistence. This adds to a growing list of reasons to favour responses to climate change that include immediate, deep, and rapid emissions reductions over responses that do not.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-206
This paper examines whether Analects 14.31 supports the view that trust ought to function as a default normative stance. Through a comparative analysis of interpretations by Du Haitao, Lv Mingxuan, and Liu Xuehan, the study identifies three competing models of Confucian trust: default obligation, virtue-conditioned posture, and cultivation-based achievement. It argues that Analects 14.31 does not prescribe unconditional trust but instead embeds trust within a virtue-ethical framework that prioritizes moral discernment (xian jue) and sustained self-cultivation (gongfu). Drawing on this structure, the paper offers a Confucian critique of contemporary trust theories, especially those advocating structural or voluntarist models. In doing so, it proposes a virtue-based alternative rooted in agent-sensitive ethical responsiveness.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-206
This paper explores whether Aristotle's concept of eudaimonia might be understood not as the highest good, but as one level within a nested hierarchy of flourishing. I consider the possibility that 'good' functions less as an indefinable property and more as a fundamental orientation—akin to 'north' on a moral compass—that emerges at three interconnected levels: biological continuity, individual flourishing, and civilizational advancement.
Drawing primarily on Aristotelian virtue ethics, I examine how each level might provide necessary conditions for the next while being transformed by what emerges from it. The paper investigates whether this framework could illuminate the relationship between biological nature and ethical life without reducing one to the other. In particular, I explore how virtues might cascade through these levels, taking different forms while serving interconnected purposes. Rather than claiming to resolve long standing metaethical puzzles, this paper offers a preliminary sketch of how individual eudaimonia might serve as a bridge between biological imperatives and societal flourishing.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-206
Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018) describes a conceptualisation of social media as clearly morally objectionable. Lanier’s call is ultimately to delete social media accounts or abstain from participation. Participation perpetuates its dangers, but to what extent are individual users morally responsible for their social media accounts? This paper explores that question through a three-fold theory of responsibility. The first two aspects of this theory apply Robin Zheng’s framework of accountability and attributability (2016) to the problem of social media as proposed by Lanier. Then the third aspect looks at the element of necessity and how it hinders the practise of moral responsibility when it comes to the use of and participation in social media. Although social media evidently has moral harms, not everyone has the capability to refrain from using it without significantly impairing other aspects of their life. In order to promote an effective change to social media and the Internet, the disparity between the levels of responsibility amongst individuals must be taken into account.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST GCI-275 HYBRID
Friendship is a central relationship in our lives, and exploring the nature of friendship has been of significant philosophical interest. In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle claims that “nobody would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other good things.” Aristotle accounts for three types of friendship. His account has since been reworked and built upon by numerous philosophers. The nature of the parent-child relationship has also been significantly explored by philosophers. However, analysis of parents and children as friends has been much less prevalent. While the ‘Friendship Model’ of filial obligations presupposes that parents and children can be friends, few philosophers have grappled with whether parents and children can become friends. In light of this deficit, our aim is to consider what constitutes a friendship, and whether parents and adult children can ever satisfy those conditions. Joseph Kupfer and Laurence Thomas both argue that parents and children cannot satisfy the conditions for friendship. We will argue that while not all parents and children can fit the conditions of friendship, some can.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 5:30pm - 6:25pm AEST Steele-2373 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
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
