AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

This paper proposes a novel account of the conditions for moral virtue centered on an important but overlooked notion: appreciation. I begin by challenging an intellectualist tradition in the literature, which I call the Cognitive Requirement Thesis (CRT): that moral virtue requires the cognitive ability to explain why one’s action is right (Hursthouse 1999; Annas 2011; Hills 2009, 2015). Targeting Hills’s version in particular, I argue that CRT sets the cognitive bar too high, and propose instead the Moral Appreciation View: one is morally virtuous when and because one is able to appreciate the relevant moral features of a situation. By appreciation, I mean a distinctive kind of sensitivity manifested in three dimensions: (i) perceptual sensitivity: recognizing the presence of a morally relevant feature in a situation, (ii) normative sensitivity: capturing that feature’s normative significance, and (iii) affective sensitivity: being affectively moved and motivated in a way that is responsive to that feature. I further distinguish appreciation from knowledge and understanding, suggesting that it entails neither, and argue that it is necessary for virtue: an agent who appreciates the right-making features of situations is thereby disposed to perform right action in a reliable, non-lucky manner across a range of cases.

In this presentation I demonstrate how many of the problems with utilitarianism and rights-based theories of morality can be solved by a kind of consequentialism based on freedom. I show how this avoids happy torturers, resolves conflicts between rights, and applies better to all possible persons. I also demonstrate how freedom can be weighed sufficiently for consequentialist calculus to take place.

A number of philosophers analyse value in terms of fitting attitudes. On such views, very roughly, something is valuable just when it is a fitting object of certain favourable responses. However, these views face a problem about partiality. Suppose that either my friend or a stranger can be rescued from drowning, but not both, and that the two rescue outcomes are equal in intrinsic value. It still seems fitting for me to prefer my friend’s rescue. This creates a difficulty for fitting-attitude analyses: if the two outcomes are equal in value, why is it fitting for me to prefer one to the other?

The main aim of this paper is to offer a Brentanian solution to this problem. I argue that the difficulty arises because we fail to distinguish two different roles that preference can play. In one role, preference is a way of assessing which object is better. In another, it is a practical response involved in deciding what to do. Once this distinction is made, we can say that my friend’s rescue and the stranger’s rescue are equal in value, while also allowing that it is fitting for me to choose my friend’s rescue. This preserves the intuition that partiality can be fitting without implying that my friend’s rescue is intrinsically better.

Immanuel Kant’s (2002) stance on suicide as an act of “debasing of humanity in one’s person” has sparked debates. There is discussion on (1) the sense in which suicide is a violation of the universalizability principle and the humanity formula and (2) Kant’s unclear and imprecise discussion on suicide. However, literature regarding the supposed inconsistency of Kant’s stance on suicide vis-à-vis his conception of morality remains underdeveloped – specifically, with reference to his Kingdom of Ends (KoE) formula. In this paper, I forward an account of Kant’s stance on suicide vis-à-vis KoE formula, underpinning the importance of Christine Korsgaard’s (1996a) idea of relations of responsible reciprocity (RR) among human beings. By focusing on Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (2002), as well as Korsgaard’s Creating the Kingdom of Ends (1996a) and The Sources of Normativity (1996b), I investigate why and how Kant’s stance on suicide becomes an inconsistency in his very notion of morality, with reference to KoE. I argue that in problematizing Kant’s conception of morality, it is important to reexamine his notions of universalizablity, humanity, and KoE. I conclude that in discussing Kant’s stance on suicide, it is imperative to underpin KoE, a Kantian concept that recognizes RR.

In this talk, I argue that holding conflicting sets of norms does not constitute a pathological breakdown of group agency. 
Prominent accounts of group agency assume a demanding coherence condition: groups are taken to require a unified point of view, where persistent internal contradiction is treated as a breakdown of agency (List & Pettit 2011; Collins 2019). Yet in ordinary practice, groups are still regarded as agents despite incoherence and ongoing conflict causing tensions for views that emphasize coherence as central to agency attribution.
I argue that existing theories overlook a key phenomenon: internal interference. Once interference originating from within the group is taken seriously, these accounts lack the resources to explain how contradictory groups can continue to act as agents and how to distribute responsibility.
The argument proceeds in three steps. First, it examines group-level programming, including List and Pettit’s idea of “arranging things non-causally” (2011). Second, drawing on Rachar’s distinction (2024), it analyzes implicit programming as norms that guide behavior without explicit endorsement and may constitute a group’s effective program. Third, it highlights that recent responsibility-focused approaches (de Haan & Collins 2024) neglect internally generated interference. This reveals a structural gap in current accounts.