AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

There is much reasonable disagreement over how, when, and often whether professionals should be disciplined, punished, or formally held accountable for their errors. What follows? In this paper, I draw from recent public reason approaches to coercion, and punishment in particular, to answer that the rules that govern how, when, and whether professionals are (liable) to be disciplined for their errors must be publicly justified–that is, reasonably acceptable, or not reasonably rejectable, by any affected party. However, in contrast to recent consensus liberal approaches to punishment which ground its justification in a Rawlsian “overlapping consensus” of shared liberal values (see, e.g., Chad Flanders and Zachary Hoskins), I draw from the broader convergence liberalism of Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier to argue that the rules governing professional discipline need not, for public justification, be based on shared values, but on what all affected would minimally agree to with reasonable views, whether “political” (“public”) or “comprehensive” (“private”). I defend a version of this view on which reasonable rejection of a disciplinary rule (as worse than no rule) defeats that rule, unless it is dictated by a higher-order rule for resolving disagreements over disciplinary rules that could not itself be reasonably rejected.

A growing number of philosophers argue that we should treat disadvantaged offenders less harshly than their more privileged peers. I offer a new argument toward that conclusion. I suggest that certain members of the working poor in affluent countries lack the opportunity to make choices that reflect their held values. I then endorse a communicative theory of punishment, according to which punishment is justified by the importance of reaffirming the community’s values in the wake of a violation of those values. I argue that putting these ideas together shows that we should not punish the deprived offender harshly: their circumstances mean that their conduct may not reflect their held values, rendering the basic justification for punishment unsatisfied. The deprived offender should have access to a legal excuse given their circumstances; they should be punished less harshly, if at all.

This paper explores the vexed relationship between the profit motive and meaningful work; more specifically it considers the extent to which the pursuit of commercial profits at work typically undermines, diminishes or even eliminates possibilities for engaging in activity which provides genuine satisfaction in and of itself. In political philosophy, there is a long tradition of regarding profit-seeking as necessarily devoid of meaning for the profit-seeker. Think here of Aristotle who, in the Politics, suggests that the pursuit of wealth is unnatural since it does not possess what we might now call “satisfaction conditions”. Equally, if we consider the circumstances of those working in businesses where the primary organising principle is the maximisation of profit, then again there is no shortage of political philosophers (most notably in the socialist tradition) who are sceptical that such work can reliably provide opportunities for meaningful agency.

Should we regard the profit motive as necessarily (or even typically) inimical to the pursuit of meaning at work? Herein I suggest that if reject conceptions of the profit motive which regard it as involving only one kind of motivational set, then we can develop a plausible compatibilist account of the relationship between profit-seeking and meaningful work.

Contrary to the view that ideological purity and practical politics are fundamentally incompatible, this paper theorises a symbiotic, self-correcting relationship between deontological purists and pragmatic incrementalists as essential to sustainable social justice movements. Through a pop-culture thought experiment contrasting Barry Allen (The Flash)—whose “deontological narcissism” externalises catastrophic fallout onto others—with Oliver Queen (Arrow), a tragic “dirty hands” agent, I examine the morality-preserving conditions required for both forms of ethical agency. Drawing on Walzer’s dirty hands, Bernard Williams’ moral remainder, Weberian responsibility, and Kantian universalisability, I argue that deontological purists serve as uncompromised moral anchors only when motivated by radical solidarity with the most vulnerable rather than the preservation of personal moral purity. Conversely, pragmatic incrementalists retain moral legitimacy only by refusing to sanitise or universalise their compromises, instead maintaining a painful awareness of the human cost left behind in bartering away an erased minority’s immediate safety to secure survival for the majority. I conclude by applying this framework to the ethics of contemporary social activism using the lived narrative of implementing restricted sex-education curricula under state bans in India.

This paper examines the Māori stewardship framework of kaitiakitanga as a philosophical basis for climate activism. Based on current work carried out with Indigenous philosopher Krushil Watene, funded by Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga and Waipapa Taumata Rau, I explore whether kaitiakitanga generates normative obligations that extend beyond permitting climate action to requiring it.

The talk discusses how contemporary institutional frameworks in Aotearoa and beyond engage with Indigenous stewardship concepts whilst simultaneously constraining Indigenous authority in environmental governance. This tension reveals a fundamental problem: the translocation of relational obligations into administrative and consultative mechanisms often fails to protect the socioenvironmental relationships those mechanisms purport to serve.

The paper investigates three dimensions: what kaitiakitanga means as an ontological and relational framework; what forms of activism this framework demands; and how we might philosophically justify more confrontational approaches to environmental protection.

 By grounding the analysis in Indigenous thought rather than Western environmental ethics, the talk demonstrates how kaitiakitanga offers resources for rethinking the relationship between activism, obligation, and environmental protection. The framework challenges assumptions embedded in dominant approaches to climate action and reveals what is at stake when Indigenous concepts are institutionalised without substantive transformation of the power relations they critique.

This paper develops a revised account of political responsibility for structural injustice. Building on and revising Iris Marion Young’s influential theory of “political responsibility,” it argues that responsibilities regarding structural injustice are best understood as duties of superintendence: duties to monitor, evaluate, and manage the functioning of social systems in light of the demands of justice. The paper contends that this framework better explains the distinctive moral character of political responsibility than Young’s contrast between “forward-looking” political responsibility and “backward-looking” liability. Duties of superintendence are presented as second-order responsibilities borne by citizens and institutions alike, especially states and other powerful actors charged with regulating social life. On this account, failures of political responsibility can ground warranted grievance and blame even where no individual agent is culpable for directly causing unjust outcomes. The paper also addresses objections concerning demandingness, excuse, and the limits of moral culpability in cases of structural injustice.

Transitional justice is traditionally associated with democratic consolidation, yet this relationship is empirically contingent rather than guaranteed. Canada consolidated democracy without transitional justice, while Chad failed to democratize despite it. Moreover, transitional mechanisms can be double-edged, sometimes reinforcing illiberal regimes rather than dismantling them. These vulnerabilities raise a prior question: how should democracy itself be conceptualized to effectively support transitional justice?
This paper compares two interpretations of liberal democracy. The first, grounded in Isaiah Berlin's "freedom as non-interference," proves inadequate because it ignores structural power asymmetries and remains indifferent to regime type, leaving it unable to robustly reject authoritarianism. The second, grounded in Philip Pettit's "freedom as non-domination," offers a more defensible framework. Republican democracy targets arbitrary power and builds institutional safeguards for citizens. Through Pettit's model of contestatory democracy, citizens acquire meaningful capacity to challenge unjust policies and hold power accountable.
Nevertheless, overcoming entrenched domination may demand more than formal legalism alone. Institutional rules must be complemented by civic virtue and sustained social dialogue. This republican framework, attentive to both structural inequality and participatory agency, offers a normatively superior path for genuinely advancing transitional justice.

My aim in this paper is to reframe, by appeal to specificity, just what we are talking about when we talk of children as public goods: the possibility of some future option set size. This framing highlights a distinction between (a) that which parents produce via their children and (b) that which children produce, which is a distinction critical to any account of justice in which responsibility plays a role. This framing also highlights a crucial truth about liberal theories of justice (or perhaps any theory in which option sets play a role): if a theory remains indifferent about the size of future option sets, that theory has no resources to say parents produce anything of either value or disvalue. What this all entails is vital to any argument about ‘how much’ compensation parents ought to receive (or even, in reverse, non-parents ought to receive) for having and raising children: only when we know the target option set size or range of option set sizes that are permissible within a theory of justice can we derive ‘how much’ compensation is owed.

Peace is a nebulous concept in political discourse. The Global Peace Index offers a solution by providing an empirically led measurement of peace informed by Johan Galtung’s (1930-2024) typology of violence. This typology is structured around personal and structural violence. The paper presents that this expansion of the concept of violence is philosophically unwarranted and leads to conceptual inflation that undermines clarity in both normative and empirical contexts. Specifically, I argue that violence should be restricted to personal violence, where so-called structural violence does not meet the conceptual criteria for violence. This claim shall be substantiated through a critical evaluation of the Global Peace Index, exploring the philosophical concepts behind violence such as intent and moral luck. I offer the view that the structures supporting violence ought to be deinstitutionalised, while critiquing the coherence of treating such societal structures as instances of violence themselves. Narrowing the scope of the typology of violence preserves the moral urgency of addressing structural influence without distorting the concept of violence. This view accommodates empirical tools for assessing peacefulness like the Global Peace Index, while also drawing stricter epistemological boundaries around how we can measure peace.

Thinkers in the political extremism literature, most notably Steve Clarke (2019), David Coady (2024), and Morgan Luck (2025), have recently argued there is nothing wrong with extremism qua extremism. I advance two connected lines of argument against this view. First, that these arguments rely on a fundamentally flawed conceptualisation of extremism that conflates it with the concept of extremeness. The concepts of extremism and extremeness can be separated at the semantic, personal, and ideological level, and insisting on their connection generates deeply counterintuitive extremism-categorisations. Second, I put forth a necessary feature of extremism that can ground the wrongness of extremism qua extremism. I call this feature (Morally) Unjustified Political Violence (UPV): extremist ideologies and their believers- extremists- consider successful purported moral justifications for political violence which actually fail. After clarifying political violence and the nature of the justification-failure, I argue that UPV is extensionally adequate and identifies wrongs with extremism qua extremism. 

This paper develops a conception of gaslighting that is absent from popular accounts in the literature, namely, political gaslighting. This conception explains an epistemic injustice inflicted upon an audience by a politician, focusing on value assessments. I will argue that gaslighting is an apt description of the political manipulation that tactfully undermines an audience's epistemic self-trust, in the face of arguments that such manipulation could be explained through other already developed notions, like bald-faced lying or brainwashing. I suggest that a politician’s position of power hands them the capacity to disconcert the audience by repeatedly instilling doubt into the psyches of citizens that their values are expressed in policies they support, until epistemic autonomy is diminished. Political gaslighting is increasingly popular in the post-truth era, and understanding how its effective will help clarify what resistance to gaslighting could look like.

Why are we moral equals, given how different we are?
In Section I, I review what it means to reject fundamental moral equality and endorse moral hierarchy. I argue that the hierarchical challenge is more pressing than egalitarians concede, and that merited hierarchy is more attractive than egalitarians admit.
In Section II, I consider the solution of proposing a 'range property' or threshold degree of some morally relevant capacity (generally moral agency, personal autonomy, or something similar). I argue that existing accounts cannot motivate the relevance of the threshold, and are thus driven to accept scalar moral status in proportion to one's possession of the relevant capacity.
In Section III, I consider the ‘decisionistic’ defence of basic equality, which argues that moral  equality is a fundamental commitment, motivated by the evils of denying it. This approach has two flaws. First, it offers a contingent, non-ideal objection to moral hierarchy, which concedes crucial ground that egalitarians generally want to defend. Second, that it is fatally vague: it fails to sufficiently specify what we thereby commit to.
In Section IV I propose an alternative approach, locating the basis of equality in the badness of social alienation. I consider a series of objections.