Piet Fritz Pankratz, University of Vienna
Winner of Best Paper
Abstract. This paper clarifies the metaphysical relation between corporate agents and their members under Kendy Hess’s holist account of corporate agents. While Hess emphasises that corporate agents depend for their existence on the structured participation of their members, the precise nature of this dependence relation remains insufficiently articulated. I argue that corporate agents are non-reductively grounded in their members: they exist in virtue of the structured participation of individuals within enduring social organisations. Grounding thus explains the ontological dependence of corporate agents on their members. However, on Hess’s view, corporate agents possess capacities and properties that can only be attributed to the organised whole. The grounding relation leaves these distinctive capacities and properties insufficiently explained. To address this, I introduce a modified notion of emergence (“emergence+”), according to which corporate agents’ capacities and properties depend upon, yet are not reducible to, their members. I further argue that grounding and emergence+ are complementary rather than competing relations. Taken together, grounding and emergence+ offer a more complete account of the corporate agent–member relation and clarify central but underdeveloped metaphysical commitments of Hess’s holism.
Piet Fritz Pankratz is an undergraduate philosophy student at the University of Vienna. His research interests include philosophy of science, social ontology, and Logical Empiricism (especially Rudolf Carnap, who would likely have disapproved of this paper).
Enora Richard, Australian National University
Winner of Best Paper (Member of an Underrepresented Group in Philosophy)
Abstract. Do presently living populations who have benefitted from excessive historical emission bear duties towards those suffering from climate-induced-hardship? The Beneficiary Pays Principle holds that they might. It mandates that agents who benefit from injustice can incur duties towards the victims of this injustice in virtue of benefiting. This paper examines the plausibility of the Beneficiary Pays Principle as a principle of climate justice. I consider the principle’s application to the task of distributing the global cost of responding to climate change and aim to assess whether having benefitted from polluting activities bears on the responsibility one incurs to contribute to climate assistance. I do so by evaluating two prominent justifications for the Beneficiary Pays Principle. I conclude that neither justification succeeds in vindicating benefit-based duties of climate assistance. I find that the duties each principle defends prove no less applicable to affluent agents more generally. This conclusion calls into question the validity of the Beneficiary Pays Principle as a principle of climate justice. Although benefit-based duties have strong intuitive appeal, when we follow the reasoning offered by the two justifications assessed here, we can at best justify broad duties for all affluent agents to address climate harm.
Enora is a recent graduate with a Bachelor of Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Western Australia and an Honours in Philosophy from the Australian National University. She is particularly interested in questions of climate justice, having recently completed a thesis examining whether benefiting from polluting activities generates moral duties for agents to address global climate harm.
Tessa Popple, University of Queensland
Abstract. This paper offers a functionalist critique of the Extended Mind Hypothesis as advanced by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in response to the question: “where is my mind?” While accepting the core functionalist premise that cognitive status is determined by causal role rather than location, it argues that the analogical Otto/Inga case fails to establish genuine functional parity. Thus, the Extended Mind Hypothesis fails. The argument draws on contemporary accounts of memory as a reconstructive and epistemically regulative process, supplemented by Eric Schwitzgebel’s work on the unreliability of introspection, to argue that biological memory possesses functionally significant features absent from Otto’s notebook. The paper concludes that despite surface similarities in the Otto/Inga analogy, a disanalogy can be drawn when the functionalism Clark and Chalmers depend on is truly taken seriously.
Tessa Popple is a third-year undergraduate student who is undertaking an extended major in philosophy at the University of Queensland. Her interests include the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, epistemology, and philosophy of logic.
Bowen Northrop, Cardiff University
Abstract. This paper argues that aesthetic self-expression, the investigation and communication of one’s interests, tastes, beliefs and passions, can be a useful method of gaining self-knowledge. Further, I argue that when this exercise is wrongfully inhibited, this can be an instance of hermeneutical injustice, the unjust obscuration of one’s experiences from collective understanding, to follow Fricker’s analysis. Specifically, my focus is on how cognitive hermeneutical injustice, the unjust inhibition of one’s ability to make sense of their experiences, might arise from having one’s aesthetic self-expression compromised. My core case centres around how non-binary people experience barriers to self-expression and how this in turn may wrongfully affect their ability to make sense of their experiences. I argue that this hindered self-expression is the product of epistemic contamination – the conceptual load of an aesthetic product or practice limiting a person’s ability to engage freely in self-expression. This discussion concludes that Epistemically Contaminated Aesthetic Self-Expression (ECASE) is not merely an instance of hermeneutical injustice specific to non-binary people but is a form of hermeneutical injustice that poses a wider risk.
Bowen is a recent Philosophy BA graduate from Cardiff University. Their philosophical interests include aesthetic injustice, social epistemology and feminist philosophy.
Matthew DeKock, University of Toronto
Abstract. Cheryl Misak has expressed concern that Frank Ramsey’s dispositionalist theory of belief may have difficulty accommodating akrasia—the phenomenon of agents intentionally acting against their better judgement in the face of countervailing pleasures and/or pains. She also mentions that Ramsey might be able to handle akrasia with recourse to his theory of partial belief and desire. This paper develops this position, arguing that Ramsey can indeed accommodate akrasia. I demonstrate that Ramsey’s theory of partial beliefs and his treatment of humans as expected utility maximizers allows for cases where desire overwhelms our normative beliefs, hence producing acts of akrasia. The paper concludes with a sketch of how this account can be extended to account for enkrateia and virtue, as well as an analysis of how well the Ramseyian treatment I put forth captures the original meaning of akrasia.
Matthew DeKock is an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto where he is pursuing a specialist degree in philosophy. His research interests include pragmatism, ancient philosophy, epistemology, and ethics.