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.
Adrian Walsh is Professor in Philosophy and Political Theory - at the University of New England. He is known for his expertise on political philosophy, philosophy of economics and applied ethics. Walsh is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Applied Philosophy.une.edu.au/staff-p... Read More →
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.
Recent MA Graduate (Philosophy)., Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka | University of Otago
I've recently completed my Master's in Philosophy at the University of Otago. My research interests include feminist philosophy, political philosophy, applied ethics, queer and trans, disability, mad, and fat studies. I've always been keen to bridge the gap between academia and activism... Read More →
Under one conception of philosophy, we are to seek the truth under the guidance of logical reasoning. Nothing is more fundamental to that kind of philosophy than entailment—except perhaps a handful of core concepts like being and nonbeing, sameness and difference. Here, we explore a theory that grounds entailment in the being and nonbeing of properties. In a nutshell: we understand ‘properties’ to be ways for things to be. We assume that there exist ways for things to be. We understand one thing to ‘entail’ another when there is no way to avoid it. We take these occurrences of ‘to be,’ and ‘there exist,’ and ‘there is no way,’ and other such terms, as applied to ‘properties’ and ‘ways,’ with robust ontological seriousness. The same ontological seriousness applies to the kind of necessitation that is intrinsic to the laws of nature. Things obey the laws of nature because there is no way for those things to do anything else. To tease out what that means requires the construction of a detailed theory of properties construed as ways for things to be.
I had an academic career as a Philosopher and have now retired as an Emeritus Professor at Monash University, Clayton Campus, Victoria, Australia 3800. I have a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge, England, and a PhD in English from Monash University, Australia... Read More →
Cases of coincidence, the paradigmatic example being the statue and the lump of clay, involve purported property differences that motivate the claim that there are numerically distinct coincident objects. These cases are philosophically important insofar as they put pressure on a range of interconnected questions and intuitions about material objects and their individuation, persistence conditions, location, and mereology.
The standard taxonomy of responses to these cases is relatively coarse-grained: one either accepts numerically distinct coincident objects (pluralism) or rejects them (monism), with a handful of further disagreements among variants. I argue that this picture significantly underdescribes the landscape and that disagreement over these cases involves several dimensions.
I will focus on the distinction between different ways that coincident, or merely apparently coincident, objects might be related to one another, differentiating locative coincidence from mereological coincidence. I then offer and defend methodological conceptual pluralism: a particular view about which concept(s) of coincidence we ought to employ, given the goal of clarifying what these cases consist of. This reveals multiple layers of disagreement: metaphysical, conceptual, and higher-order conceptual. The result is a far more fine-grained set of competing views of what these cases involve. It also shows that some arguments for or against the standard coarse-grained positions, in fact, target only subsets of these more fine-grained views.
Metaphysical foundationalists hold that grounding has an explanatory role and that this role can be fulfilled only if there are fundamental entities. Accordingly, anti-foundationalist views face a charge of explanatory failure: without a fundamental level, certain explanatory demands go unmet. Recently, Cameron (2022) has challenged the assumption that grounding is inherently explanatory. If this argument succeeds, it provides the anti-foundationalist a way to resist the foundationalist’s charge by severing the connection between grounding and explanation. In this talk, I defend foundationalism against this strategy in two ways. First, I show that Cameron’s objections stem from a conflation of distinct explanatory claims and, at times, from misidentification of the direction of the grounding relation. Once we correct these issues, the link between grounding and explanation is successfully preserved. Second, I show that detaching explanation from grounding carries significant theoretical costs: it weakens grounding’s ability to play its central structuring role in metaphysics and blurs its identity, rendering it indistinguishable from other dependence relations. Finally, I argue that separating grounding from explanation undermines our understanding of the nature of grounding itself and exposes it to skeptical concerns about its intelligibility.
Explanatory appeals to abstract ‘objects’ (numbers, moral values/principles, possible worlds etc…) are ubiquitous in philosophy, science, and everyday reasoning. Cicadas emerge in prime-number cycles because of number-theoretic advantages, lying is wrong because it violates the categorical imperative, Celtic FC would have won yesterday’s match had the referee been unbiased. Many philosophers take such claims’ explanatory usefulness to justify ontological commitment to the abstracta involved. Yet, by definition, abstracta are spatially and causally removed from the concrete world we seek to explain, raising a fundamental question: when, if ever, does explanatory appeal to abstracta genuinely license belief in their existence?
To answer this, I propose a methodological framework which distinguishes merely representative/heuristic explanations from metaphysically substantive ones. Two criteria structure the framework: ‘Basis’, scrutinises the reality of explanans and explanandum (independent of their inclusion in a particular explanation); and ‘Relevance’, assessing whether the explanans stands in an appropriate ontic-explanatory relation to the explanandum.
Applying this framework to case studies in mathematics, morality, and modality, I argue that explanatory appeals to abstracta systematically fail both criteria. Abstraction may be an indispensable representational tool, but abstracta themselves are never adequate explanans for why the concrete world truly is as it is.
In this paper, I address the Special Omission Question (SOQ): under what conditions does a disjunction count as an omission? If omissions are events essentially specified as non-occurrences, then their conditions of occurrence can be formulated as disjunctions of overly varied disjuncts. This suggests that omissions are disjunctive events. For example, one might say that the universe omits to contain events that violate the laws of nature (see Lewis 1986a: 190). I suggest that this kind of case still counts as an omission, and I further discuss some additional difficult cases that have largely been ignored in the literature. I consider three possible answers to the SOQ: always, never, and sometimes. Rather than decisively rejecting the first two options, I develop the ‘sometimes’ view: some disjunctions count as omissions, while others do not. This view provides a way to distinguish genuine omissions from arbitrary disjunctions. Compared with my theory, I suggest that Silver’s (2018) theory is not adequate to account for omissions.
What is time? We suggest we have failed to answer this question in the way it needs to be answered. We go on to offer an answer: time is the great enabler, it makes causation and change possible. We explain what that means, and demonstrate it by applying it to a range of cases.
In ‘Constructing Moral Equality’ (2022) I argued that we can productively think of the human as a social, rather than a natural, kind; and furthermore, that being constructed as human entails being constructed as a moral equal. In this paper I argue that I was wrong (at least in part). Armed with a more nuanced social metaphysical framework, I explore the possibility that while one of the mechanisms through which the human is constructed confers a formal equality of status on all members of the kind, other mechanisms simultaneously constitute some people as inferior.
It is generally accepted that agency requires materiality, since action must originate somewhere. In group agents, this implies that they are agential material objects rather than hovering, mind-like entities (Hess 2025). I argue that the material existence of group agents can be best explained by a Baker-style constitution relation (2000) between a group and its members, which is strictly non-mereological. First, I argue against Collins (2023) that her mereological account of group agents cannot successfully explain the relation between a group and its members because it fails to meet the non-transitivity desiderata of group agents. I subsequently show how this critique can be generalized to all mereological proposals (Hawley 2017; Hansson Wahlberg 2014). Secondly, I argue that the existing constitution accounts of group agents either fail to identify the correct material object from which the action of a group originates (Epstein 2015; Hindriks 2013; Uzquiano 2004) or account for it through mereological views of constitution (Harris 2020), which run into the same aforementioned problem. I conclude that a strictly non-mereological constitution account of the material existence of group agents is the most explanatorily successful since it is the only proposal that can meet the non-transitivity desideratum of group agents.
Beginning from Rudolf Carnap’s well known thesis that ontological commitment is internal to linguistic frameworks, I argue that this view can be considerably enriched by exploring the varied, and sometimes complex, relations between frameworks. In this paper, I set out the basic features of these relations between frameworks – a relativity of frameworks. Those features are illustrated by showing how they apply to two of the most debated issues in metaphysics and their related semantics: the status of fictional objects and the analysis of true negative existence statements.
Ontological nihilism is a philosophical position that denies the existence of anything. The central concept of this position is nothingness. The origins of ontological nihilism can be found in the Old Testament, in the book of Genesis: God created the world from nothing. I argue that ontological nihilism is contradictory and cannot be true. I will try to prove that nothingness is a fiction and that being is everywhere, because nothingness does not exist. The fictional concept of nothingness arises when existence is separated from being. Then existence is nothing because it arises and disappears. But disappearing does not mean becoming nothing, and arising does not mean arising from nothing. Being contains arising, becoming, and disappearing, which do not exist separately from it. When we say that “God created the world out of nothing,” we mean that God existed before the world and created it out of nothing, that is, out of non-being. Now, let us consider the rephrased biblical statement: “God-being creates being out of non-being.” This statement is contradictory. God, as the very equivalent of being, can only create being from being, that is, from what is, and not from what is not, that is, from non-being.
Individuals and groups frequently resist well-evidenced claims while readily accepting others that are, on more objective examination, highly dubious or false. Philosophical analyses of this phenomenon tend to focus on right-wing or conservative predispositions, invoking mechanisms such as motivated reasoning, deference to unreliable authorities, and epistemic pollution by vested interests. These analyses rarely apply equivalent scrutiny to left-wing or progressive patterns of selective receptivity to evidence.
It appears, however, that the underlying mechanisms of belief formation and resistance to unwelcome truths operate symmetrically across the political spectrum. People evaluate evidence through filters shaped by their core values, social identities, prior commitments, and off-the-shelf worldviews or ideologies. Information that coheres with these feels intuitively vindicating and is readily assimilated, while dissonant information triggers suspicion, rationalization, rejection, or moral outrage. Thus, conservatives and libertarians have often resisted well-established findings in climate science where they appeared to threaten commitments to free markets, technological optimism, and small government. But many self-identified liberals or progressives have been quick to endorse dubious claims – such as characterizations of Israel’s military operations in Gaza as “genocidal” – despite countervailing arguments and evidence.
This underscores the importance of epistemic humility, self-reflective scrutiny of one’s own priors, and efforts at detached objectivity.
Conjoint Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Newcastle
I'm a philosopher (obviously), legal scholar, and literary critic, and a widely published essayist and commentator. I've enjoyed a career in academia, public policy management, and the legal profession, and since the 1980s, I've also built an international profile as a writer and... Read More →
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm NZST MSB1.03
We extend trust to those we deem trustworthy. Trustworthiness involves both a competence component and a motivation component. Insofar as we aim to trust only those who are trustworthy, we have reason not to extend our trust when the target is either incompetent or not properly motivated. However, of these two ways that trust can be violated, the latter tends to elicit much stronger reactive attitudes: here we speak of resentment and betrayal, modulated perhaps by whether the violation of trust was out of ill will (when we think they weren't truthful) or insufficient care and attentiveness. In this paper I explore whether the desire to avoid situations that might elicit these stronger reactive attitudes -- especially those having to do with being deemed untruthful -- may have a significant effect on our epistemic lives. I venture that this desire may partly explain our tribalistic tendencies and our tendency to seek out and remain in epistemic bubbles. If this is correct, it might also explain why generating fear – in particular, fear that others do not share our values – is one of the most effective ways to sow the seeds of polarization.
The question whether truth is correspondence, coherence, pragmatic utility, or something else is a perennial philosophical question for which there has so far been no decision procedure. In this talk I propose a decision procedure for this question. The basis for this decision procedure is the consideration of what we lose and what we don’t lose when we lose truth in a “post-truth” crisis. “Post-truth crisis” can be understood, in this context, either as the actual crisis taking place today or as a thought experiment.
This paper examines why we intuitively regard truth as valuable. Philosophical theories of truth are traditionally divided into normativism (e.g., coherence theory, pragmatism), which treat truth as a normative property, and non-normativism (e.g., correspondence theory, deflationism), which do not (Wrenn, 2023). While normativism can account for truth’s value directly, non-normativist theories require additional explanation. Within non-normativism, object-given views attribute value directly to truth, whereas state-given views locate value in truth-oriented states or activities (Ferrari, 2018; Lynch, 2004; Motiva, 2021; Wrenn, 2023). Although state-given accounts avoid problems faced by object-given approaches, they struggle to explain why we intuitively see truth itself as valuable—a phenomenon termed the object-given intuition. This paper offers a game-based model to address this. Drawing on Nguyen (2019)’s notion of “striving-play” games, truth-seeking is treated as a provisional, goal-directed activity analogous to a game, where the apparent aim (i.e., truth) is pursued for a deeper purpose (i.e., understanding). The object-given intuition arises because agents overgeneralize the temporary value of truth within inquiry to the value of truth itself. This framework preserves the strengths of state-given accounts while explaining the object-given intuition, contributing to debates on truth’s value without positing truth as independently valuable.
