Keynotes

Summer School

Programme

Venue

Kraków

Social Ontology Conference 2026

July 21-24, 2026

Kraków Poland, Jagiellonian University, Law and Administration Faculty

Welcome to the 2026 Social Ontology Conference in Kraków!

As in previous years, we will have contributions from a wide range of methods and traditions under the umbrella of Social Ontology. This year our focus is the application of ideas from social ontology in solving problems of legal and political philosophy and we are happy to have received many legal contributions.

We are glad to host this meeting in Kraków and we invite you to join us in a pre-conference Summer School, as well as during the conference in a city known for its history, culture, and lively intellectual life. We look forward to seeing you in Kraków!

Keynotes

Robin Dembroff

Yale University

The Macho State: Fascism as Gender Politics

Fascism is a political project that centers a cult of a leader who promises national restoration in the face of supposed threat from liberals, socialists, feminists, ethnic, religious and sexual minorities, and immigrants. How does gender fit into this project? In this talk, I argue that gender is not simply a component of fascism; it is the core of fascism. The patriarchal concept of Man — the triptych identity Adult Human Male — is a fundamental glue that holds fascist politics together. It is the ontological key to explaining the playbook of that politics.

Jennifer Lackey

Northwestern University

Coerced Narrative Continuity and Legitimacy in the U.S. Criminal Legal System

I introduce and analyze what I call coerced narrative continuity, a phenomenon through which institutions compel individuals to produce and repeatedly reaffirm narratives that sustain institutional legitimacy over time. In so doing, I examine a coercive and temporally extended variant of agency in which individuals are required to function as informal spokespersons for state institutions. Focusing on false admissions of guilt in the United States criminal legal system, I show how such admissions extracted under coercive conditions are preserved in institutional memory and later demanded again as evidence of responsibility, remorse, or rehabilitation. These repeated affirmations function as authoritative speech acts, not because they reflect the subject’s beliefs, but because of the subject’s institutional role as the person upon whom state power was exercised. I suggest that coerced narrative continuity allows institutions to preserve some of the functional effects of agency relationships without meaningful assent. By requiring individuals to reaffirm narratives that justified prior state action as a condition of continued recognition or exit, institutions stabilize their authority while obscuring systemic unreliability and injustice. The analysis thus contributes to broader debates about voluntariness, loyalty, and the persistence of agency relationships across legal, moral, and political contexts.

Nurbay Irmak

Boğaziçi University

Static and Dynamic Kinds: The Case of Artifacts  

Many kinds are treated as metaphysically respectable when their members are unified by essences, or by properties that provide necessary and sufficient conditions for kind membership. But some kinds appear to remain recognizable and projectible even when the properties associated with them change over time. This paper introduces a distinction between static and dynamic kinds. Static kinds are unified by essences or stable membership conditions. Dynamic kinds are unified by historically maintained continuity through changes in the associated properties by which their members are identified, evaluated, maintained, and projected over. 

I motivate the distinction through artifact kinds, especially the case of the telephone, but the broader implications concern social ontology. Social roles, institutions, organizations, and practices may likewise persist through historically structured revisions in their associated properties. The static/dynamic distinction offers a way to understand such cases without treating instability as evidence against realism about kinds.

Krzysztof Poslajko

Jagiellonian University

The Fiction of Corporate Mentality

The idea that attributions of mental states to things like corporations are “unconcealed make-believe” used to be the dominant and almost obvious view on the nature of group mental states. Today, fictionalism is nearly universally rejected. In my view, the unpopularity of fictionalism is mainly due to the fact that this position has not been described in the right form in the current social ontological discourse. In my talk, I want to present fictionalism as an alternative to both reductive individualism and realism about group minds. There are three main building blocks of the fictionalist theory of corporate mentality: first, a metaphysical theory of corporations as immaterial abstract artifacts. Second, the idea that attributions of mentality to such objects should be seen as being made in a make-believe mode. Third, the talk about corporate responsibility should be read in instrumentalist fashion. In all these aspects, as I should argue, fictionalism comes out as a preferable view.

Kenneth Silver

Trinity College, Dublin

Implications of Corporate Privilege: Metaphysical and Moral

There is an ongoing debate about whether certain kinds of organizations can be morally responsible agents. In recent work, I have argued that if certain firms are agents, then it is appropriate to recognize them as collectively constituting a privileged and oppressive social class. In this presentation, I will trace out some of the implications of this. Metaphysically, it affects how we think about the existence and embodiment of corporations. And, morally, it impedes our practices of holding firms responsible and (potentially) respecting their rights.

Programme

For the Summer School overview, click here

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Tuesday (21.07)

Keynote: Kenneth Silver

See Keynotes

Room 1

Recent work in social ontology has placed increasing emphasis on developing non-ideal approaches, characterised by a rejection of the hallmarks of traditional social ontology, such as abstracting away from injustice and non-cooperation (Bränmark, 2025; Burman, 2023; Jenkins, 2024). This paper argues that, while the non-ideal turn in social ontology and social philosophy more broadly is valuable, its implementation risks adopting a narrow and monistic conception of acceptable methodology. Specifically, I argue that non-ideal critique, such as Mills influential work on ideal theory as ideology, must be understood as targeting tradition- or discipline-level hegemony, rather than individual theoretical assumptions.

I draw on arguments in the philosophy of science which reject the unity of science which advance the ineliminable pluralism of theoretical models (Dupre, 1993; Cartwright, 1999; Mitchell, 2003). I contend that analogous points hold for inquiry within social ontology: individual models are local and contextual, with no singular correct model across contexts. To defend this, I highlight parallel debates within critical and feminist social science. This tradition rejects positivistic approaches that seek to uncover fundamental social laws, akin to those taken to hold in physics, by prioritizing quantitative methods. Rejections of this paradigm by feminist sociologists (e.g., Merry, 2016) have highlighted the tacit value assumptions concealed within the positivist approach, the insights lost by an abstraction from the messy complexity better captured by qualitative methods, and that these tendencies risk perpetuating systems of injustice. This criticism mirrors the non-ideal critique of the ‘standard model’ within social ontology. Crucially, however, I highlight that these critics do not advocate for abandoning quantitative methods wholesale, but rather for methodological pluralism.

The parallel point holds for non-ideal social ontology: criticisms of ideal theory must be directed at the level of theoretical traditions and disciplinary norms, rather than individual idealisations or abstractions. I thus argue that to rule out theories on the basis that they deploy methods and idealisations that are characteristic of the ideal tradition makes a category error. Non-ideal social ontology must reject methodological monism, instead embracing pluralism. I conclude by sketching some limitations on the positive role idealization may play within a non-ideal social ontological project.

The recent shift from ideal to nonideal theory in the field of social ontology promises a deeper and richer picture of the social world. Nonideal theorizing eschews the idealizations of approaches that take collective intentionality to be the building blocks of the social world, in order to better explain persisting forms of inequality, oppression, and domination. Åsa Burman has argued that this requires centering the concept of power and broadening the focus on deontic powers that characterize the “standard model of social ontology.” However, I argue that like those accounts, hers cannot adequately explain how power effectively shapes what agents can do because it remains committed to an untenable conceptual separation of the material settings of human agency and normatively structured social interactions. Burman introduces the categories of spillover power and structural power, which depend only indirectly on collective intentionality. However, her conceptualization does not explain how these forms of power effectively shape what agents can do. To advance nonideal theorizing about power, we need to recognize that a collective acceptance approach is inadequate even for deontic powers because it ignores questions about their robustness and causal efficacy. Deontic powers matter only insofar as they make a reliable difference to how agents can make a living and navigate the material environment in which they are situated. While Burman’s account goes beyond a focus on deontic powers, it remains committed to an untenable division between “social power,” which is constituted by the interaction of social agents, and the causal effects of our material settings. As a result, it cannot explain how power matters to us and becomes causally efficacious. To overcome these difficulties, I suggest that we need an ecological account of power, which takes the fact that human beings are organisms who can only live in active interchange with their material environment as its starting point. How we are situated within our material environment and with respect to other agents matters to whether and how we can sustain our lives.

In political philosophy, there is a shift in analysis away from “the big stuff”—states, formal institutions, and legal rules—toward “the small stuff”—civic associations, everyday interactions, and social norms. The core motivation behind this shift is the recognition that, to make sense of abstract ideals such as respect, justice, freedom, or belonging, we must attend to the quality of our social lives (Brownlee 2020, 2024; McTernan 2023, 2024, 2025). This turn highlights the central role of social norms in defining social roles and regulating interpersonal interaction. Yet it raises a pressing normative question: do we have good reason to follow the social norms of interactions?

In this paper, I examine an influential view in the social normativity literature, which I call the normative attitude view, ultimately reject it, and propose my own alternative, which I call the narrative meaning view. According to the normative attitude view (Brennan et al. 2013; Gilbert 2014; Owens 2022), a social norm is binding on members of a group if it is the shared normative attitude, belief, or expectation of the majority under conditions of common knowledge. As I argue, this view faces two serious problems: brute conventionalism and inauthenticity. If the fact that a norm is widely shared suffices to make it binding, then how we ought to love, when to express gratitude, whether to repair relationships, or whom to trust risks being dictated by prevailing expectations that may reflect entrenched biases such as racism or sexism. Even when norms are not morally problematic, the normative attitude view leaves insufficient room for authenticity, since individuals are expected to conform to established social scripts tied to their roles rather than to show up as who they are.

After rejecting the normative attitude view, I develop the narrative meaning view. On this view, the normativity of interactional expectations emerges from the meaning that participants attribute to the trajectory of their relationship, where meaning is conferred by the story members tell about their shared history. Two features distinguish my view. First, whether an expectation is genuinely normative depends on meaning rather than on the mere existence of a social norm. For example, whether partners ought to repair a marriage depends on how they interpret their shared history—whether as irony or as an epic—rather than on whether there is a prevailing social norm of marital repair. Second, because the normativity of meaning is scalar, the weight of expectations can range from invitational to obligatory. This allows individuals to take up (or reject) invitations in a wide variety of ways—signaling different degrees and textures of trust, love, gratitude, and forgiveness. By treating the normativity of interactional expectations as emerging from narrative meaning, it avoids conventionalism and inauthenticity by relocating the authority to the interpretative agency of the relevant members.

In this talk, I argue that individuals that do not identify as members of a group may indeed have some degree of responsibility for the collective behavior of those groups. I will be interested in specific kinds of groups in a specific kind of context. The specific kind of groups are those that are loosely organized, informally constituted, and lack clear membership criteria, institutional recognition, and determinate decision-making procedures, such as Antifa, QAnon, the Manosphere, etc. The specific context involves online interaction on social media platforms that use machine learning recommendation systems. In the contemporary digital environment, collective identities are increasingly shaped by machine learning recommendation systems. These systems do not merely transmit preexisting group norms or preferences. Rather, they actively structure patterns of attention and interaction and play a constitutive role in shaping collective behavior. As large complex mathematical models that are aiming to optimize a variety of variables typically associated with human behavior, these systems have the capacity to significantly influence collective behavior. For my purposes, what is critical is that individuals can both reinforce and alter collective identities of this sort through any kind of online engagement. This ought to challenge us to recognize individuals that may not self-identify as part of such groups are nevertheless constitutive of the group’s collective behavior.

These kinds of cases are similar to cases of structural injustice. In such cases, an individual that has no intention or commitment to reinforcing an unjust structure may nevertheless do so. This is analogous to digital bystanders that may reinforce collective behavior by consuming content online without any degree of self-identification with that collective identity. Robin Zheng’s Role-Ideal Model of responsibility for structural injustice aims to ground individual responsibility in terms of role obligations. On this model, individuals can bear responsibility for unjust outcomes in virtue of the social roles they occupy and the ways those roles contribute to sustaining harmful structures. However, the pervasive influence of machine learning recommendation systems complicates this account. In many cases, individuals who do not self-identify as members of a given group nonetheless contribute to reinforcing its collective behavior simply by consuming, engaging with, or lingering on related content. These seemingly minimal interactions feed back into recommendation systems, increasing the visibility and perceived legitimacy of such content for others. By examining the interaction between individual agency, algorithmic mediation, and loosely structured online collectives, I argue that we may indeed have some degree of responsibility for the collective behavior of groups with which we do not identify. I conclude that we need a robust account of our role obligations as digital citizens.

Robert Bernasconi has recently suggested that Ottobah Cugoano’s 1787 Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery provides us with an early philosophical use of a conception of collective responsibility. (Bernasconi 2023, 2024) Cugoano attributes responsibility for the slave trade to a number of groups, including the British nation, the British people, inhabitants of the British Empire and the British legislature. It is particularly tempting to regard Cugoano’s repeated attributions of responsibility for slavery to the British people as involving attribution of responsibility to a non-agential group.
 
However on closer examination Cugoano’s claims about the British people seem not to involve a non-distributive notion of collective responsibility. For Cugoano claims explicitly not only that the British people are responsible for slavery, but that each and every inhabitant of the British Empire is. Indeed, Cugoano may even be committed to a view about the nature of responsibility that would preclude him from having a non-distributivist view in this context: namely that to be responsible for wrongdoing is to be liable to and fit for divine punishment. 
 
One might still think that the kind of responsibility that Cugoano attributes to the British people as a whole is more fundamental than the responsibility of individuals. However as Iziah Topete has argued Cugoano’s view seems to be one on which the responsibility of the British people as a whole is fixed by and derivative from the responsibility of individual Britons (Topete 2025). This suggests that Cugoano is better understood as deploying a notion of individual participatory responsibility analogous to those developed by Pasternak and Kutz (Kutz 2000, Pasternak 2021). On this view individual Britons incur participatory responsibility for evil practices to which those laws give in virtue of their passive obedience to those laws. 
 
Nevertheless, one aspect of Cugoano’s position may commit him to a non-distributive notion of collective responsibility: namely his view that the British legislature bears responsibility for slavery. For Cugoano this responsibility extends to the legislature as a whole, and not merely those who have voted in favour of laws supporting slavery. Cugoano should not regard mere participation in the legislature as grounds for incurring participatory responsibility: his views about duties to resist injustice suggest that voting against such laws can count as a kind of disassociation which undermines individual participatory responsibility. Any responsibility that attaches to the legislature must therefore be non-distributive. 

When are group beliefs epistemically justified? In this paper I engage with this debate by presenting a specific kind of a group as a challenge to the dominant (internalist) evidentialist paradigm: belief-based coalitions.

The question of what justifies group beliefs matters beyond collective epistemology. When, for instance, we evaluate the actions of a collective agent, we often need to determine the agent’s epistemic justification for the beliefs that form the backdrop behind its decisions. For example, when a government decides to make masks mandatory on public transport during a pandemic, it makes sense to ask what the government’s epistemic justification is for believing that this is an effective measure.

A tempting answer to the question what justifies group beliefs would be ‘the group’s evidence’. This move would be the natural extension of the evidentialist paradigm to include group agents. This paper presents a challenge to that view. There is a common kind of group where this approach is inappropriate. Belief-based coalitions are groups whose membership is conditional on the endorsement of certain core beliefs. For instance, the Flat Earth Association only consists of members who believe that the earth is flat. People who lack the required belief do not join, and those who once did but later change their mind are likely to leave the group. Political and religious organizations function like belief-based coalitions, and so do most other collectives centered around certain shared beliefs.

In joining and leaving belief-based coalitions, members take their evidence with them. I argue that as a result, the core beliefs of belief-based coalitions become isolated from defeating evidence. The group’s evidence gets ‘laundered’. This makes evidential justification internal to the group too easy to obtain.

The concepts of normative defeat and higher-order evidence have been devised to deal with the issue of selective exposure to evidence for individual agents. I argue that they do not, however, deal with the presented issue of laundered group evidence in a convincing way. Furthermore, attempts to modify the way we understand group evidence such that it includes all evidence possessed by the members (disclosed or not) fail to fully avoid the problem. Even with modifications, group evidentialism is implausibly permissive with respect to the justification of the core beliefs of belief-based coalitions.

The case of belief-based coalitions illustrates the bigger problem of how groups can launder their evidence through the management of their membership. The issue poses a challenge to the internalist, evidentialist approach to justified group belief. Additionally, belief-based coalitions help shed a new light on the relationship between group reason and group action. As I suggest towards the end of the paper, belief-based coalitions exhibit group agency, but are not proper epistemic agents.

Contemporary accounts of group belief place group reasons at center stage, often by analogy with reasons for action. From Raimo Tuomela’s joint acceptance theory (2012, 2020) to Jennifer Lackey’s modified summativism (2016, 2020) and Jessica Brown’s holistic account (2022, 2024), group belief is typically taken to require shared, compatible, or appropriately connected motivating reasons among members. I argue that this reason-centered focus misrepresents group belief and generates systematic difficulties.Typically, for a group G to believe that p, members are required to believe p for reasons that can be rationally integrated at the group level. This imports either a model suited to group action, which is overly permissive, or a model suited to justified belief, which is overly restrictive. Beliefs may be held without motivating or normative reasons. Treating reason-sharing as constitutive conflates belief possession with deliberative rationality.
This misplacement yields distinct problems for leading accounts. Tuomela’s action-based conception of group belief cannot adequately distinguish genuine group belief from coordinated pretense, since group-directed motivation may be desire-directed rather than truth-directed, and the considerations guiding group action may be epistemically alienated from the majority of members.
Lackey’s base-fragility cases (2020) accurately challenge simple summative accounts; however, her solution requires coherence among members’ reasons for belief even when the operative reasoning involves only a proper subset of members. This blurs genuine group belief with intra-group obedience, despite her concern to distinguish group belief from group lying. More importantly, her base-coherence requirement invites a regress: even if members’ immediate reasons are shared or compatible, the reasons for those reasons may diverge indefinitely.
Holistic responses, including Brown’s, do not resolve this entanglement. Allowing group-level epistemic facts to play a functional role in belief attribution overlooks a methodological concern about belief possession—how a belief is held at the individual level.
In response, I introduce group-based considerations (GBCs). GBCs are not reasons in the motivating or justificatory sense; rather, they are metaphysical explanations of why members hold a belief as members of a particular group. G believes that p iff a sufficient majority of its members believe p given GBCs. This is the only account that captures Zawidzki’s theory of mindshaping, rather than the traditional mindreading approach. It properly prioritizes the epistemic agency of the group and explains reason-less phenomena, such as biased group beliefs, while avoiding the shortcomings of existing accounts.
Although the paper focuses on epistemic properties of groups, I indicate how GBCs may also illuminate group action—including the proposal advanced by Keeling and Silver at ISOS 2025.

Room 2

The idea that there are multiple kinds of love is easily found in both everyday discourse and philosophical work on the nature of love. For example, the second line of the SEP entry on love (in an accurate and comprehensive account of the contemporary philosophical discussion) holds that “[p]art of the philosophical task in understanding personal love is to distinguish the various kinds of personal love” (Helm, 2021). The same commitment to multiple kinds of love has been expressed, often without argument, in countless other philosophical works. Yet, I think that the idea that there are multiple kinds of love is mistaken. In this paper, I argue that there is exactly one kind of love.

To begin, I sketch the following theoretical options:

Disunified Love: There are multiple kinds of love such as “parental love”, “friendship love”, and “romantic love” that are not unified as members of the same higher-order kind.

Unified Love: There are multiple kinds of love such as “parental love”, “friendship love”, and “romantic love” that are unified as members of the same higher-order kind.

Sui Generis Love: There is exactly one kind of love: love.

Next, drawing on Richard Boyd’s work on homeostatic property cluster kinds (Boyd, 1999), I propose two criteria for kinds of love: a Real Kind Criterion that distinguishes real kinds from mere groupings and a Real Love Criterion that distinguishes real kinds of love from other real kinds.

I deny that the criteria are jointly satisfied. In particular, I consider Berit Brogaard’s complex emotion theory of love (Brogaard, 2015) and Carrie Jenkins’ dual nature theory of romantic love (Jenkins, 2017), and I argue that neither account generates the result that the candidate kinds of love jointly satisfy the real kind criterion and real love criterion. Regarding the complex emption theory of love, I argue that the complex emotion theorized by Broggard is real yet disposes individuals to act in ways that are often odds with the distinctive kind of care characteristic of love (as theorized in Frankfurt, 2004), such that romantic love on the complex emotion theory is not real love. Regarding the dual nature theory, I argue that ‘romantic love’ can be paraphrased away with the term ‘love’ and reference to features present in the context of romantic relationships, such that romantic love on the hybrid theory is not a real kind.

I conclude with a brief discussion of the increasing number of loving relationships that call into question divisions between family, friendship, and romantic partnership.

       Does love have reasons? The rationalist answers affirmatively: love is sustained and justified by fittingness-reasons. There are instances of love or its absence that we consider inappropriate. The anti-rationalist answers negatively: love does not have reasons because it does not arise by virtue of being rationalized. This paper intervenes in this debate by examining love from a socio-ontological perspective. I argue that while love may not be directly responsive to reasons in the rationalist sense, it is nevertheless shaped by social contexts, norms and structures. Conditioned by socially mediated values and identities, love functions as a double-directional social force, capable of both reproducing and destabilizing existing social categories. 

       I begin by outlining the rationalist and the anti-rationalist views and critically engaging with each. The rationalist view maintains that love can be made fitting by its reasons, but it faces a serious difficulty: love does not appear to arise through rational deliberation. Agents often cannot control whom they love. The anti-rationalist view, by contrast, rejects the idea that love has a rational basis. On Harry Frankfurt’s influential account, love consists in a higher-order volition that endorses a first-order desire for the beloved’s wellbeing, enforcing it as the guiding principle of their behavior. 

       Although the anti-rationalist view initially aligns with our intuitions about the involuntary nature of love, it faces two significant challenges. Substantively, it struggles to account for cases of tough love, in which agents fail to act consistently in accordance with their beloved’s interests due to hardship, character limitations, or false beliefs. Normatively, it yields an undesirable implication: if love is not reason-responsive, agents seemingly cannot will themselves out of love even in the face of serious harm, as in cases of domestic abuse and violence. 

      To address these difficulties, I propose a social account of love. Love is ontically manifested in concrete social relationships – romantic partnerships, marriages, and parent-child relationships – whose intelligibility depends on socially constructed norms and categories. Whom we take ourselves to have reasons to love typically belongs to categories that “stick out” and are socially salient, e.g., gendered, racialized, or familial roles. Even when not consciously motivated by social norms, love emerges within and in doing so affirms them. 

      Crucially, however, love’s double-directional force follows from its social embeddedness: while it can reinforce existing social categories, it can also destabilize them when directed toward socially “inappropriate” objects. Understanding love as a socially constituted force allows us to account for its normative significance without reducing it to rational deliberations. Love plays an often overlooked but pivotal role in projects of social emancipation. 

Debates around the metaphysics of fictional entities have provided us with compelling ways to understand their ontological status. Abstract entities (Thomasson, 1999), nonactual concrete entities (Lewis, 1978), or what we imagine from props in authorized games of make-believe (Walton, 1990), are within the accounts we have built to make sense of the ontological status of fictional entities. Puppets, and the fictions associated with puppetry, we argue, won’t be easy to accommodate within these accounts. The embodied nature of puppets, and some issues with what these represent, will demand that we appeal to hybrid categories in order to make sense of them – or so we will be arguing.

Kendall Walton’s theory of fiction, for instance, characterizes artworks as props in authorized games of make-believe, generating fictional truths without ontological commitment to fictional entities. While this framework captures many paradigmatic cases of representation, we argue that it fails to adequately account for the ontological status of puppets in puppetry. Our arguments rely on showing contemporary practices of puppetry. Puppets, we’ll show, don’t seem to represent something else—such as a living agent—but are instead objects that represent themselves within performance. The fictional attribution of agency is directed at the puppet itself, rather than at an abstract or absent entity for which the puppet stands. In puppetry, fictional agency is not exhausted by imagining from a prop; it is materially embodied. Moreover, we will be arguing that they are causally efficacious, and are sustained by the continued presence and manipulation of a particular object. The puppet’s physical structure is what determines the range of possible actions, expressions, and interactions, thereby partially constituting the fiction rather than merely prompting it. Hence, thinking of puppets as interchangeable props within games of make-believe obscures this constitutive role of embodiment.

Puppetry thus reveals a class of fictional entities that occupy a hybrid ontological category, challenging eliminativist views—like Walton’s prop-based account—or any view that posits an external and distinct entity (abstract or concrete) as what is being represented. Any adequate metaphysics of puppetry must account for the way in which fictional agency is neither purely imagined nor merely abstract, but embodied, situated, and causally integrated into our material realm.

Site-specific Chinese calligraphy in Hong Kong is a distinctive form of public art filled with embodied images and texts pertinent to the selected place. Existed in the forms of either signs and artistic decorations of important venues in Hong Kong or live performances of large-scale calligraphic works at specific sites with audience appreciation and interaction (see Figure 1 and Figure 2), this special form of art — with important elements of public display of Chinese language, text and linguistic landscape (LL) — reflects a unique social, cultural and linguistic phenomenon that remains understudied.

This research posits site-specific Chinese calligraphy in Hong Kong as a vibrant and determinant catalyst that can generate cultural, sensory and affective connections that enhance our experience and understanding of the city in terms of our relationship with environment and sense of place and community. This paper offers a new methodology for examining the interactions of the following factors: 1) the semantic meanings in calligraphic works; 2) the conditions of site specificity; and 3) site-specific calligraphy’s capability of generating and transmitting sensory and affective experiences in a manner that, upon perception, enhances our experience and perception of our relationship with environment. This unprecedented methodology offers a more effective, multifaceted analysis and interpretation of calligraphy and its appreciation as a social phenomenon.

In sharp contrast to previous researchers’ studies of Chinese calligraphy as a high art within the literati communities in China through ages and Chinese calligraphy’s functional contexts of use, this research examines calligraphy’s capability of generating sensory and affective connections that enhance our experience and perceptions in terms of our relationship with environment and sense of place and community.

Research findings showed that site-specific calligraphy often creates new concepts, ideas or viewing experience beyond the intrinsic, verbal meaning of Chinese characters through a thoughtful consideration of how a calligraphic work, its presentation and reception on a specific site can substantiate one another. The study concludes that Chinese calligraphy has been transformed from a literati-oriented or elitist art with a restricted audience into a more accessible form of visual culture in site-specific Chinese calligraphy of Hong Kong that enhances our understanding of the city.

The paper will generate new interests among practitioners and contribute to a deeper understanding of how calligraphy as traditional art and culture transforms as contemporary art in Hong Kong, China, fostering broader scholarly discourse among various disciplines.

My proposed presentation is an interdisciplinary study of feminist issues as interpreted through Japanese philosophy and aesthetics. Specifically, I investigate the Japanese tea ceremony (Chanoyu) as an innovative site of feminist resistance. Until the late 19th century, the tea ceremony was the domain of only men, dominated from the 9th century by monks and later, around the 12th century, by samurai. Several centuries later, women were slowly encouraged to take part in various ways. Despite the newfound inclusion, gender-based oppression continued to dominate within this institution. Only recently have women begun employing the ceremony as a creative site of feminist resistance. I intend to engage with this body of literature and place it in dialogue with Western European scholarship on similar forms of feminist resistance deployed through art practice, which I believe can challenge abiding Eurocentric views of gender freedom.

The first documented participation of Japanese women in chanoyu dates back to the Edo period (1600-1868). It occurred in specific geographical areas of Japan : the pleasure quarters (mainly in Tokyo and Kyoto), and was the practice of women with a specific profession : the courtesans (Corbett, 2006). The fact that the chanoyu, when practiced by courtesans, is often dismissed in the history of tea, challenges how we understand and deploy feminist resistance. Studying more complex forms of artistic freedom through cultural and philosophical comparison is a key to uncovering new solutions to some of the core problems of feminist studies relating to Japan. This study interrogates the role that was given to women in the Japanese tea ceremony during the Edo period and investigates how it could be interpreted as a first form of emancipation from gendered oppression; moreover, it asks to what extent the blurring of distinction between women and courtesans can be viewed as a symptom further ingraining patriarchy within the tea ceremony.

Edit

As several authors have observed (Richardson 2024, Brännmark 2024) the social world is prone to indeterminacy. When it is indeterminate whether some entity x has some social property F, and some practical matter hinges on whether x is F, judgement calls must sometimes be made: a decision as to whether we are going to count x as F. Interestingly, while we cannot as a general rule render indeterminate matters determinate by fiat, we can seemingly do so in a range of cases involving social properties. In this talk, I investigate the metaphysics of such cases.

I start by entertaining some natural suggestions. A conferralist suggestion (loosely inspired by Ásta 2018) would be that, in cases where the underlying facts in a case do not settle whether some x is F, we are left at liberty to confer F-ness upon (or withhold F-ness from) x. A fictionalist suggestion would be that when there is no fact of the matter in the case, we can proceed for practical purposes as if there is. I will argue that these suggestions lead to philosophically unlovely results: in particular, these accounts fail to explain certain ‘penumbral connections’ (Fine 1975) between indeterminate social facts and the facts in which they are grounded. I propose a slightly less obvious but ultimately more satisfying solution, taking inspiration from MacFarlane’s (2016, 2020) plan-expressivist approach to indeterminacy.

I propose that in these judgement-call situation, we do something I call deeming: our (appropriately authoritative) verdict that some x is F does not in itself ground the fact that x is F (as the conferralist might suggest) but rather makes it the case that the relevant underlying facts about x, such as they are, suffice to ground the fact that x is F. By deeming x to be F, we effectively ‘sharpen’ the grounding principles whereby facts about F-ness arise from underlying facts. Put in terms of Epstein’s (2015) model of social construction, deeming is a supplementary form of anchoring. I will argue that analysing these cases as cases of deeming pays off not only in accounting for the above-mentioned penumbral connections, but also in explaining why such judgement calls tend to carry the power of precedent.

Time permitting, I will explore further cases, not involving indeterminacy, where the social-ontological mechanism of deeming might plausibly play a role.

Room 3

edit

Questions regarding the ontology of money remain contested in social theory. Simultaneously, within the legal field, the question of what money is seems rather rare, especially among doctrinal scholars or legal practitioners. This may be somewhat surprising, since in public discourse, one often hears a view that most legal proceedings (and many lawyers, for that matter) are all about money. Well, it is true that, at least in Polish civil proceedings, all claims are required to have a monetary valuation assigned from the start. Putting jokes aside, for the legal system, clarifying the ontology of money seems not merely a philosophical exercise but also a matter of practical significance.

This paper does not propose new ontological claims. Instead, it aims to show how adopting diverse ontological approaches to money (often as “common-sense” theories) impacts the understanding of other key legal institutions and concepts.

The first part of the paper provides a comparative analysis of three broad approaches to the ontology of money: money as a commodity, as a debt relationship, and as an indicator of social power. While standard legal and economic doctrines often treat money simply as a neutral medium of exchange or a finite commodity that individuals, as well as public and private organisations must acquire before spending, critics of such an approach (notably proponents of the Modern Monetary Theory) argue that this “commodity view” obscures the distinct ontological status of sovereign currency, emphasising instead the debt relationship at the essence of money. Others (such as J. Nitzan and S. Bichler, or K. Pistor), point out also the social nature money and its relation to social power, treating it as an institutional artifact, one of a set of possible media used for structuring social relationships and positions.

These approaches often manifest within legal discourse as unrefined narratives about what money is. The second part of the paper demonstrates how each approach influences the “common-sense” theories of other core legal institutions. Examples discussed in the paper include taxation and the social security system. By focusing on these public law relations, the paper concludes that one’s intuitive ontological approach to money may substantially impact legal thinking even regarding matters such as the nature of the state, the relationship between the state and the citizens, and the legitimacy of financial authority. Ultimately, the narratives about the ontology of money may shape our intuitive images of a just social order that underpin the legal frameworks of modern democracies.

Åsa Burman has recently suggested that extant analytic social ontology does not have the resources to develop a descriptive account of economic class. In this paper I demonstrate that an account of various economic classes can be developed using the ‘constraints and enablements’ framework developed by Katharine Jenkins. Contra Burman, I argue that Jenkins not merely a framework that enables the moral critique of class in terms of ontic oppression and injustice, but also a framework that enables a descriptive account of class.
Beginning with a brief account of the English peasantry, I develop a sketch of the social kind peasant in terms of constraints and enablements. After a brief account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England, I offer an account of the social kind proletarian, again in terms of constraints and enablements. This, I argue, offers us the beginnings of an analysis of the nature of feudalism and capitalism, based on an account of social positions that are spelled out in terms of constraints and enablements.
I then turn to an objection to my account of proletarian, that it fails to adequately account for what has become known as the ‘mute compulsion’ of capital. That is, the way in which proletarian workers are compelled to sell their labour in order to survive, without anyone directly forcing them to do so. This challenge can be answered, I argue, but Jenkins’s framework needs to be expanded beyond her four categories of constraints and enablements (interpersonal, bodily, environmental and psychological) in order to answer this challenge.
I introduce the notion of a systemic constraint/enablement as a fifth category to Jenkins’s taxonomy of constraints and enablements, further arguing that there is good reason to think that she would be amenable to this friendly amendment to her position. These systemic constraints are, I argue, reducible to combinations of other constraints in Jenkins’s taxonomy, and can be both structured and mere aggregates.
With the notion of a systemic constraint in hand, I argue that we can analyse mute compulsion in such terms, thus diffusing the challenge to our account of proletarian. Moreover, I further argue that this account of mute compulsion, in terms of systemic constraints, is preferable to the current leading theory of mute compulsion, as offered by Søren Mau. The systemic constraint account, I argue, is far more parsimonious and ecumenical than Mau’s account.
Not only can this framework be productively applied to peasant, and proletarian, the paper suggests that it gives us a fruitful way to think about the transition between these classes in the development of capitalism. The paper further argues that applying this framework to class provides a parsimonious and ecumenical account of the so-called ‘mute compulsion of capital’ that is superior to the current leading model.

edit

In her book Nonideal Social Ontology: The Power View, Åsa Burman argues for a nonideal social ontology that accounts for real-world power imbalances. Burman argues that traditional elements of ideal social ontology, e.g., collective intentionality, cannot be the focus of a politically-informed or politically useful social ontology. The demotion of collective intentionality has recently been challenged by Zara Anwarzai in “Shop Floor Social Ontology: On the role of collective intentionality in nonideal social ontology” (manuscript). Anwarzai argues that special attention to working class organizing reveals that collective intentionality should play a central role in nonideal social ontology, if the goal of nonideal social ontology is, in fact, the development of politically useful theories.

This paper takes a step back to examine the questions of philosophical methodology underwriting this debate. Given that we intend to “theorize with a purpose”, what should the contribution of the social ontologist be to political struggle? And to which political struggle(s) should social ontologists contribute? We think giving substantive answers to these questions requires adopting a broadly empiricist (e.g., Helen Longino, Elizabeth Anderson) and realist (e.g., Richard Boyd, Theordore Bach, Elizabeth Barnes) approach to social metaphysics. Given this framework, effective intervention depends on the nature of the social structures under consideration; what are the joints of social reality?

Different empirical approaches, including first hand accounts (i.e., lived experience), embeddedness in political struggle, and social scientific research each contribute to an understanding of the social world, its primary points of conflict, and thus, places where social ontology might find its most fruitful intervention. For example, a live empirical hypothesis among social scientists is the Marxist view that class-based exploitation is the primary causal force underlying the social world. If this is correct, then the politically-motivated social ontologist ought to contribute to the struggle against capitalism through social theories useful to workers engaged in this struggle. Given empiricism, this must be done through empirical analysis of social problems. This line of thought encourages social ontologists to take seriously empirical work on the sociology and political economy of class, production, and imperialism, both first hand accounts and social scientific research. Interestingly, this seems to amount to the claim that social ontologists should strive to become Gramscian “organic intellectuals”: social ontologists theorizing with a purpose ought to immerse themselves in class struggle and theorize from that practical position. Our paper identifies the kind of approach needed for a genuinely politically-relevant, empiricist social ontology and considers the kind of intellectuals social ontologists could be as a result of adequately adopting such an approach.

Reification is generally understood as a social pathology in which human activities and relations come to take the form of things. This ambiguous first gloss is only fitting for a contested phenomenon that has been defined in contradictory ways. Generations of critical theorists have tried to elucidate Marx’s obscure original statement about a “fantastic”, “topsy-turvy” world in which “a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things” (1867). The classic locus for the development of the concept of reification remains György Lukács’ “History and Class Consciousness” (1923). Reification, he argued, is a crucial tool to understand many distortions of our social world, from production to law and bureaucracy. However, beyond thinkers in the traditions adjacent and downstream from Lukács, the idea has failed to enter the mainstream of philosophical discourse. When compared to other critical concepts with the same pedigree, including ideology and alienation, the concept of reification has been neglected or abandoned. I believe this is a significant loss. I seek to rectify it in this paper by showing the critical leverage and explanatory purchase the lens of reification can give social and political philosophers.
Axel Honneth is in large part responsible for revitalizing discussions of reification through his lectures and subsequent volume, “Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea” (2008). Building on Adorno and Horkheimer’s notion of reification as ‘forgetting’, Honneth argues that reification is best understood as ‘forgetfulness of recognition’. His theory of reification has been influential in the literature since. But as some critics have pointed out, Honneth’s update circumscribes reification to a psychologistic and moralized phenomenon, causing it to lose some of the critical insights present in Lukács.
I start this paper by offering my own critique of Honneth’s update. I then reconsider Lukács’ controversial proposal. Why is it worth taking an ‘old look at an old idea’? I believe Lukács was right in a crucial respect, namely his diagnosis of reification as both the general cultural form under capitalism and as a central problem of modernity, with which any social and political thinkers must reckon. I reconstruct and defend the core of Lukács’ conception of reification before offering my own definition. Reification, I argue, is a social phenomenon in which pathological social structures that are beyond any individual’s control are misrecognized and mistreated as things independent of collective agency. I clarify the sense in which reification represents both a distortion of social reality and a distortion of our consciousness of social reality. This expanded notion offers us theoretical leverage that goes significantly beyond the critique of political economy. To illustrate its usefulness, I apply it two central case studies: gender as reification and the reification of nature.

Can many small benefits ever outweigh fewer, greater ones? Standard aggregation principles run into impossibility theorems in population ethics, while lexical or ‘superiority’ views—according to which any amount of some ‘superior’ goods outweighs any amount of other ‘inferior’ goods—promise an escape. Paradigmatic examples of ‘superior’ goods are social goods and bads: meaningful friendship, mutual recognition, community membership, humiliation, trauma, and despair.
A crucial problem for ‘superiority’ views is metaphysical: classic superiority theories seem to require implausibly sharp thresholds. These sharp cutoffs are not a plausible picture of how wellbeing and social phenomena are constituted. Friendship, community, and many forms of social harm develop through incremental changes—more shared moments, slightly different patterns of interaction, small shifts in standing and recognition—so it is hard to believe there is a precise point at which value abruptly “flips” in a way that makes any number of nearby lower-order goods irrelevant. Similar worries arise for suffering: classic superiority views seem ill-suited to the fact that pain and distress come in degrees, and they inherit familiar worries about inequality and discontinuous value.
This paper avoids these problems by arguing that ‘superior’ is especially plausible for social goods, and that social goods avoid the worst difficulties of classic “superiority” accounts. The solution is Multi-Order Soritical Superiority (MOSS): an account of how differences in kind can emerge soritically from differences in degree, generating a hierarchy of value without positing unrealistic sharp cutoffs. The central claim is ontological: many value-relevant items are higher-order properties whose existence depends on structured patterns rather than mere quantities. Paradigmatically ‘superior’ goods—meaningful friendship, mutual recognition, community membership—are grounded in networks of interaction, shared history, and standing relations; they are not reducible to pleasant episodes. Likewise, certain forms of extreme suffering plausibly involve higher-order bads (e.g., humiliation, trauma, despair) that arise when lower-order pains are organized in the right way over time, agency, and social context. Because these higher-order properties are vague, their emergence produces borderline cases, explaining why adjacent states can appear similar while nevertheless differing in kind.
MOSS then vindicates a multi-order lexical structure: outcomes are compared first by the highest order at which they differ, and only then by lower orders. This preserves the formal advantages of superiority approaches while defusing or softening classic objections.

Room 4

This paper construes a social-ontological critique of extreme wealth.

We live currently in an era of extreme and widening economic inequality (see, e.g., Piketty 2014). The role of the super-rich in society has become an increasingly pressing question for critical social philosophy, but at the same time the theme also has long-standing roots in the history of philosophy. Following Guido Alfani’s (2023) recent history of the rich, a common theme running from medieval thinkers to contemporary social theorists is that extremely wealthy people disrupt the workings of society. Beyond the argument from political instability, calls for “limitarianism” have also highlighted that it would be better to redistribute excessive wealth to meet urgent needs and solve even global scale collective action problems, such as climate change (Robeyns 2019). According to Matthias Kramm and Ingrid Robeyns (2020), the canonical arguments for limiting excessive wealth are situated in the domains of moral psychology, moral reasoning, virtue ethics, and political morality.

In this paper I aim to provide a further argument against excessive wealth, which draws its normative resources from the social constitution of property and wealth. Drawing from Hegelian social ontology, it is argued that wealth is dependent on interpersonal social recognition. Furthermore, as already argued by Hegel (1991), any such constellation of wealth (e.g. the existence of a “rich rabble”) that would undermine this recognition is also harmful to the social order itself – the social order that makes wealth possible in the first place. Thus, a recognition-based social ontology of ownership seems to provide norms that are internal to the practice of wealth-attribution and wealth-holding, which at the same time seem to put limits to excessive wealth.

This paper explicates a (broadly) Hegelian social ontology of wealth and discusses the nature of ownership norms that are internal to it. The paper argues that a recognition-based critical social ontology of excessive wealth makes a novel addition to contemporary “intrinsic” arguments for wealth limitarianism. The paper finishes with a critical consideration of the strength of the social-ontological argument for limitarianism: namely, how strong norms can we potentially derive from the social constitution of wealth?

This paper develops a philosophical critique of economic climate mitigation policies by focusing on unresolved responsibility issues. Climate mitigation decisions are made by a plurality of individual and collective agents operating under conditions of bounded rationality and bounded morality. Despite this complexity, economic mitigation policies rely on instruments such as emissions trading, subsidies, taxes, market restrictions, fines, and marketing incentives to promote behavioral change. Within this framework, questions of responsibility are often sidelined. Instead, researchers either assume that markets are amoral i.e. morally desirable market outcomes are a product of the market design and not of the values of the people and collectives that interact in them (Ziegler et al., 2024), or that market agents are capable to take on their fair share by adapting the mitigation policies in place e.g. buying a subsidized car (Cappelen et al., 2017). In both cases, responsibility is effectively delegated to policy mechanisms rather than people and collectives that deliberately concretize, ascribe, and take on responsibility.
The paper argues that this displacement undermines the motivational effectiveness of economic mitigation policies. Drawing on political philosophy and social ontology, it identifies three motivational problems. First, policy design often conflates distinct social roles—such as citizen and consumer—thereby obscuring role-specific responsibilities (Johnston, 2008). Second, unresolved second-order responsibility issues emerge in policy design under conditions of uncertainty, particularly regarding the selection and evaluation of policy mixes (Caney, 2014). Third, ambiguous role expectations lead to a diffusion of responsibility among policy makers and market actors. Policy makers that are also market actors and agents of a variety of collectives need somehow to be able to recognize their responsibility to develop a concrete policy. Employees that also happen to be consumers somehow need to be able to voice their values from the perspective of a non-market related social role.
For an economic mitigation policy to bring about behavioral change, policy makers and other relevant actors need to feel responsible and know what specific behavioral changes qualify as responsible action. That is only possible when the policy in question a) addresses values that can be communicated intersubjectively, if it b) addresses important motivational values like friendship, tradition, and social embeddedness (Mau et al., 2024), or important motivational feelings like the feeling of a collective experience (e.g. Page & Dilling, 2020) and if it is based on an understanding about how and why responsibility is shared. I will argue that recent socio-ontological insights into the responsibility of social roles can inform policy development processes in this meaningful way (Hormio, 2024; Müller, 2022; Witt, 2023).

This paper examines how the idea of granting legal personhood to nature can be understood in ontological terms, using the Ecuadorian constitutional model as example. The paper focuses on the kinds of institutional arrangements and social practices that allow such status to function in law. The argument develops in three steps: first, by outlining what it actually means for something to count as a legal subject; second, by looking at how this status is created and maintained; and third, by considering the limits of such institutional expansions.

Ecuador’s approach unsettles the usual assumptions of legal theory. Traditionally, legal persons are human beings, corporate bodies or, occasionally, entities treated as if they are coherent organizations. Nature does not fit neatly into any of these categories. Yet, in the Ecuadorian constitutional order, certain natural entities are treated as holders of rights. This shift becomes intelligible once we frame it not as metaphysical claim about the inner character of rivers or ecosystems, but as a product of rules, judicial interpretations and shared expectations that together give rise to a new type of institutional status.

In the first quick part, the paper identifies a few minimal conditions that must be met for non‑human entities to carry legal rights. This is a prerequisite for further consideration. These include the ability to identify the entity in a stable way, to assign responsibilities and forms of representation, and to situate it within an existing network of legal norms. None of this requires the entity to possess agency or psychological capacities; stability and rule‑governed practice are sufficient.

The second part looks at the role of representatives. Guardians or community actors do not replace the natural entity, but rather make it possible for its legal status to operate in practice. Their work also shows why debates about whether such subjects are “real” often miss the point: institutional reality depends on stable recognition and action, not physical properties.

Finally, the paper addresses the concern that legal personhood might be extended without limits. It argues that institutional coherence, resistance to opportunistic misuse and the capacity to generate predictable outcomes form reasonable boundaries for such innovations.

The question of responsibility in the context of climate change has largely been addressed through moral, political, or pragmatic paradigms, yet these often fall short of offering a fully satisfactory account. Top-down moral approaches, both consequentialist (Singer 2010; Broome 2012; Cripps 2013) and deontological (Gardiner 2004, Björnsson 2021), emphasize individual duty. More recently, a wave of bottom-up approaches has emerged. On the one hand, virtue ethics (Jamieson 2012; Thompson 2012) reframes responsibility as a matter of character rather than obligation, emphasizing the cultivation of ecological virtues such as care, humility, and stewardship. On the other hand, pragmatic models (Von Allmen 2024) emphasize action-guiding, context-sensitive, and remedial responses to harm.

This paper argues that the debate on responsibility in climate ethics neglects Strawsonian approach, which can offer crucial insights. We propose what we call a reverse strategy: instead of asking why an agent S is responsible, we consider what might exempt or excuse S from responsibility. In other words, we consider what is missing such that S is not thinking and acting responsibly. By focusing on exemptions and excuses, we clarify how emotional incapacities and structural constraints can block responsible agency. We proceed in three steps:

First, we identify the capacities whose absence exempts agents from moral responsibility and excludes them from the moral community. These essential capacities are shaped by political, emotional, and material contexts and consist of: A specialized form of knowledge that attunes empathy and grounds the agent’s capacity for care (Hamington 2024); meta-lucidity, which facilitates the ability to put one’s own mental states in perspective (Medina 2013); and perspectival agility for mental time travel, a complex cognitive process involving a narrative change of perspective and the ability to project oneself into the future (Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007).

Second, we turn to moral excuses (Erin 2012). Drawing primarily on theories of structural injustice (Young 2011; McKeown 2024), we make the following claim: even if individual contributions to climate change are morally objectionable, individuals are typically excused from blame. This argument rests on the idea that agents are significantly constrained by social structures – specifically, by the norms and infrastructures of the carbon economy – which systematically push them toward carbon-intensive practices. In this context, we argue that blame attribution would rely on unreasonably demanding expectations that ignore or underestimate the force of these structural constraints.

In the third step, we conclude that without a detailed examination of exemptions and excuses, realistic or fruitful conception of responsibility can hardly be developed. Finally, we sketch the contours of a positive account of responsibility that can be derived from our analysis

Climate change presents challenges that have prompted political philosophy to integrate diverse approaches to justice—including climate, environmental, structural, transitional, and epistemic—to redefine normative goals for political organizations (Brandstedt, 2019). Concurrently, political ecology emphasizes the need to revise the ontologies that legitimize interactions between communities and their environments (Pellizzoni, 2016).
Despite these advancements, persistent failures in global and local collective action highlight significant challenges that require non-ideal approaches. This tension between expansive justice frameworks and institutional reform is evident in eco-social policy research. While these policies aim to address social needs within planetary boundaries, divergent interpretations of environmental crises and human vulnerabilities often hinder transitional strategies, precipitating political, epistemic, and ontological conflict.
Recent developments in social ontology – specifically regarding non-ideal theory (Burman, 2023), social transformation (Haslanger, 2025), and institutional sustainability (Hindriks, 2024) – offer key insights for applied political philosophy, enabling a clearer understanding of the ontological shifts required for eco-social policies.
From this perspective, a key challenge is aligning heterogeneous preferences amid disagreements among stakeholders, policymakers, and experts. Addressing this requires clarifying how organizations, institutions, and social practices can be restructured to generate localized knowledge to manage environmental risks (Leal Filho & Pons-Giralt, 2024).
This paper outlines an account of the evolution of political institutions toward sustainability, highlighting the interaction between diverse justice paradigms and ecological transitions. It argues that eco-social transformation of public organizations depends on collaborative epistemic and learning institutions that interact with political decision-making, enhancing the equitable securing of heterogeneous values and cultivating trust for a robust transition.
The analysis compares climate and environmental justice paradigms with eco-social policy research to identify unresolved ontological questions, examines proposals for sustainable institutions within a non-ideal social ontology, and reviews specific eco-social “just transition” policies focusing on epistemic and learning practices. It is argued that intentionally facilitating these practices within decision-making structures is a precondition for establishing just and robust organizations in environments characterized by uncertainty. It concludes by outlining some implications for environmental and epistemic justice, as well as epistemic authority, in non-ideal political philosophy.

This paper examines how we should respond to interpersonal structural wrongs (ISWs), which are wrongs produced through individuals’ actions that cause interpersonal harm, yet are also structural insofar as they sustain social systems of oppression. ISWs are often treated as genuine expressions of individual agency, even though they are enacted under conditions of structural constraint. Paradigmatic cases range from sexist or racist jokes and harassment to gendered and racially motivated violence. The challenge these wrongs pose is how to assign responsibility in a way that both repairs interpersonal harm and addresses the unjust structures that make such harm possible.

Drawing on Zheng’s (2019) distinction between attributability and accountability, I argue that neither form of response, nor their combination, adequately meets the conditions for redressing ISWs. Attributability responses individualise wrongdoing, focusing on blame and punishment directed at a single agent. As a result, they leave the structural conditions that ground the wrong unaddressed. Accountability responses, by contrast, locate responsibility at the level of the moral community and generate collective duties to organise against unjust structures. While this model better captures the structural dimension of ISWs, it fails to adequately address the interpersonal harms inflicted by individual agents and offers little guidance for modifying the patterned forms of behaviour through which such harms are reproduced in everyday life. Attempts to combine attributability and accountability inherit the shortcomings of both and risk diffusing responsibility without producing effective redress.

I argue that these failures stem from a shared neglect of a third dimension of ISWs: their context-specificity. Structural constraints on agency do not operate uniformly at the abstract level of social structures but manifest through locally salient norms, practices, and social roles that regulate behaviour in particular contexts. Because unjust structures are enacted and sustained through context-specific social practices, adequate redress must target those practices directly. This requires a form of responsibility capable of bridging individualised blame and diffuse collective duties.

To develop such a framework, I turn to Community Accountability and Transformative Justice practices developed by Black, Indigenous, and queer communities of colour in the United States. These practices illuminate a third variety of responsibility, which I call context-specific accountability (CSA). CSA distributes the burden of redress across the members of a context-specific community and issues targeted demands to transform the norms and practices that enable interpersonal structural wrongs. By integrating interpersonal repair, behavioural transformation, and structural change, CSA offers a more adequate response to the full moral complexity of ISWs.

This paper argues that the family operates under a normatively binding moral expectation to forgive family members who committed wrongful acts, a demand I term the Forgiveness Imperative. The Forgiveness Imperative is the unyielding moral demand to forgive kin, irrespective of harm, apology, or change of behavior. Unlike friendships, civic ties, professional associations, or even marriage (which can be entered into and dissolved voluntarily), family membership imposes the moral duty to forgive all its members. Familial forgiveness is not incidental but acts as a normative requirement within the moral life of a family. I argue that since the Forgiveness Imperative can perpetuate cycles of harm by denying victims moral recourse, individual choice, or legitimate grievance, it suppresses dissent, obscures injustice, and can exacerbate abusive dynamics. Therefore, we should seriously revise the legitimacy of this moral norm and its binding normative force within families, and reconceptualize forgiveness as a supererogatory act rather than an obligatory one.

Room 5

Many feminist philosophers identify a trans inclusion problem in theorizing about gender. A social position account of gender, like Haslanger’s, is criticized for being exclusionary toward trans (wo)men. Some, like Jenkins, propose incorporating the notion of gender identity into our theory of gender. Yet even accounts of gender identity are criticized for being unable to generate suitably inclusive definitions of (wo)men.

To make progress, I believe two problems ought to be distinguished. First, although we want our theory of gender to be trans inclusive, it is difficult, even alleged to be impossible, to find a solution that satisfies the goal of trans inclusion. While relevant discussion often starts with this way of framing the trans inclusion problem, I reconstruct a meta-level problem: the goal of being inclusive is in tension with the goal of diagnosing structural oppression. I call this second, higher-level problem the inclusion/diagnosis problem. Reconstructing the dialectical complexities in the literature this way sheds light on my novel solution to the trans inclusion problem, which I call the optimality solution.

A recently articulated dimension of gender oppression is ontic. We want a theory of gender whose society-wide adoption would emancipate individuals from the unjust ways dominant gender categories, through the assignment of gender membership, constrain behavior. More traditionally, another dimension of gender oppression that feminist philosophers are primarily concerned with is the structural oppression of women. We want our theory of gender to carve gender categories in a way conducive to a feminist analysis of structural oppression. In essence, the inclusion/diagnosis problem is that inclusion (a goal characteristic of ameliorating ontic oppression) and diagnosis (a goal characteristic of revealing structural oppression) come into conflict. For example, defining gender identity by self-identification gains in inclusiveness, yet loses in diagnostic power when compared to a definition of gender identity that tracks one’s “internal maps” in experiences of internalized oppression.

In this paper, I argue that for a theory of gender to succeed, it should satisfy the inclusion desideratum and the diagnosis desideratum optimally. Optimization between inclusion and diagnosis is compelling once we understand inclusion and diagnosis to be sub-goals in what Jenkins calls an emancipatory methodology, which aims at ameliorating gender oppression in general. A failure to maximally satisfy the inclusion desideratum or the diagnosis desideratum is not fatal to a theory of gender. As such, a key result of my paper is a meta-level defense of an “internal map” definition of gender identity: it is permissible to define gender identities such that they are not co-extensive with gender self-identifications since it may be optimal to trade some inclusiveness for diagnostic power.

There are many of accounts of the categories “man” and “woman.” Several of these explicitly attempt to be trans-inclusive (Bettcher, 2013; Briggs and George, 2023; Dembroff 2020; Jenkins 2016). However, there are relatively few accounts of the metaphysics of the category trans itself. This is despite the fact there are well-recognized conceptual deficiencies in both of the dominant models, the “wrong body” model ad the “beyond the binary” model (Bettcher, 2014). Notably, both models insist that trans people destabilize the norms that link sex and gender; on the “wrong body” model, a trans person’s gender/sex is disordered and must be corrected and on the “beyond the binary” model, a trans person transcends the norms that link gender to sex.

In this paper, I argue that existing models fail to accommodate the diversity of ways that trans people relate to the norms that construct biological sex. My model emphasizes the role of destabilizing biological sexual norms themselves, rather than merely the set of norms that link sex to gender. In other words, I expand on the ways that trans people expand biological sex concepts to include bodies that have medical gender affirming care. I will propose a model of transness that accommodates a diversity of self-conceptions at the same time that it clearly illustrates the way that manipulating sex norms is central to being a member of the category “trans.” To do this, I begin with Dembroff’s (2020) insight, that “transgender” is a critical gender kind whose members collectively existentially destabilize the biological axis of Western Dominant Gender Ideology (WDGI). While I insist on an expanded definition of the biological axis, I also argue that existentially destabilizing the biological axis is a necessary feature of being trans. While this initially appears limiting, through a series of case studies, I show that there is a plethora of ways for trans people to situate themselves within this constraint.

However, trans people are not the only people who destabilize the biological axis. Both intersex people and people who inhabit culturally specific third gender categories (such as people who identify as “two-spirit”) may destabilize the biological axis as I have put it, but are not necessarily trans. I therefore argue for the following two-part definition of transness:

A person is trans iff
(1) They existentially destabilize at least one assumption of the biological axis.
(2) They identify as trans.

While I do not commit myself to any particular account of identity, I do illustrate several existing accounts that could fill in this definition. Ultimately, I show that this definition preserves the offered by the minimal first constraint without improperly including individuals who are not clearly trans.

This paper contributes to the discussion regarding the construction gender categories in sport. The public debate on the issue is very heated, especially when it comes to the inclusion of trans and intersex individuals in gendered sport categories. Two very recent cases: of the swimmer Lia Thomas, who is a trans woman, and of boxer Imane Khelif, who has been labelled intersex by the media illustrate this point.
In the academic debate, there are three main positions concerning the necessity of gender categorization in sport (i.e., separate categories for men and women), and membership criteria into the gender categories: Anatomists, Identitist, and Abolitionists. In a nutshell, Anatomists believe that there should be gender categories in professional sport competition, and membership in these categories ought to be based on gender ascribed at birth (i.e., ‘biological sex). Identitists also claim that sport competition ought to be divides between genders, but being included in a given category should be decided by what gender the athlete identifies with (i.e., ‘gender identity’). Abolitionists believe that there should be no gender division in professional sport, since any attempt to construct the gender categories will be arbitrary to some extent, given the variety of gender features that may be chosen for membership criteria.
In this paper we propose a fourth position in the debate: the Constructivist position. It is based on a premise that there ought to be gender categorization in professional sport, but the categories should be constructed around the socially understood concept of gender, i.e., as a member of what gender category is the athlete recognized by their community. The Constructivist position is built around a premise that fairness is a fundamental value in sport, and because we live in a sexist society, social gender of the athlete may significantly influence their chances in sport competition.

In a nutshell, the argument can be presented in the following form:
(P1) Fairness constitutes a fundamental value in sport competition.
(P2) Sport competition is not fair if a competitor has an unfair advantage over others.
(P3) In a sexist society there are psychological differences between men and women.
(P4) Psychological differences between men and women converts into advantages in sport competition.
(P5) Psychological advantages of men over women in sport competition are unfair.
(P6) Constructivist approach to gender provides the best proxy for tracking unfair psychological advantages of men over women.
(C) Constructivist approach to gender safeguards the value of fairness in sport competition to the greatest extent.

In the paper we will present the argument for the Constructivist position, and show how it manages to make sense of cases of trans and intersex athletes, i.e., cases where the Anatomists, Identitists, and Abolitionists struggle.

A central question in social ontology concerns what grounds collective agency: whether groups act primarily in virtue of aligned preferences, shared commitments or norms, or instead through shared belief structures that make mutual reliance rational. We address this question by examining how salient identity heterogeneity—introduced without any payoff relevance, incentive differences, or changes in material interests—affects the conditions under which joint action can be sustained.

In a controlled coordination setting, we hold fixed the payoff structure of a Stag Hunt while varying only the identity composition of interacting groups and an institutional parameter governing how many participants must coordinate for collective success. Even in the absence of preference divergence, norm conflict, or affective bias, increased heterogeneity destabilizes agents’ higher-order expectations about one another’s behavior. Participants become less confident that others will coordinate and correspondingly retreat from a payoff-dominant but reliance-sensitive course of action toward secure alternatives that do not presuppose collective alignment. This provides direct evidence against accounts that explain collective failure in heterogeneous groups primarily in terms of preference heterogeneity or in-group favoritism, and instead supports views on which collective agency is grounded in the availability of sufficiently shared beliefs about others’ likely contributions.


The results also bear on debates about the internal structure of collective agency. Many theories implicitly treat collective agents as epistemically symmetric: if a group is capable of acting, it is assumed to be so for all of its members. We show, by contrast, that agents occupying identity-minority positions form systematically different expectations from majority members and are disproportionately responsive to institutional features that relax coordination requirements. This indicates that collective agency is position-sensitive: the group may be capable of acting as an agent relative to some members while remaining epistemically fragile for others, even when incentives are identical.


Finally, the findings clarify the role of institutions in collective action. Rather than merely aligning incentives or enforcing compliance, institutional parameters such as coordination thresholds shape the belief conditions under which joint action is intelligible and rational. In this sense, institutions partially constitute collective agency by stabilizing higher-order expectations of mutual reliance. Taken together, the results support a belief-centered ontology of collective agency, challenge idealized symmetric models of group agency, and identify a distinct epistemic pathway—independent of disagreement or antagonism—through which social diversity can undermine, and institutional design can repair, the capacity for joint action.

Sally Haslanger (2000) defines gender as the social position one is assigned according to their perceived sex: a privileged role (man) or a subordinated role (woman). Taken to its logical conclusion, I argue, the social position theory needs to incorporate a third gender category. Haslanger’s definition specifies a social hierarchy that privileges male bodies and disadvantages female bodies (that I call the ‘sex hierarchy’). However, the account overlooks another social hierarchy, a teleological hierarchy, which orders individuals according to conformity to cultural ideals of manhood and womanhood. Both hierarchies are the product of the reproduction of patriarchal domination, hence they are gender hierarchies in the same sense, and both need to structure an account of gender as a position on a hierarchy (cf. Dembroff, forthcoming). While both stem from gender ideology, they differ in the kind of social power they distribute: the sex hierarchy distributes deontic power, while the teleological hierarchy distributes what Åsa Burman (2023) has recently identified as telic power. When we incorporate the teleological hierarchy into the social position theory, we see that gendering produces three outcomes, not two as Haslanger and Barnes (2020) envision. Those who are deemed to sufficiently conform to ideals of masculinity and are observed as having a male reproductive role are masculinized; those who are deemed to conform sufficiently to ideals of femininity and are perceived to have a female reproductive role are feminized; and those who do not sufficiently conform to ideals of either man- or womanhood (regardless of perceived sex) are genderqueered. These three gender categories differ not just nominally, but importantly also in terms of the social power they are allocated in gendering. The masculinized are endowed with deontic power, while the feminized are not (as per the Haslanger model), but both categories also receive differential amounts of telic power based on conformity to norms of man- and womanhood. However, the genderqueered are endowed with neither deontic power, on account of not being masculinized, neither telic power, on account of not being identified with an ideal for either man- or womanhood, conformity to which would grant them more or less telic power. For this reason, the genderqueered are doubly disempowered and subordinated. This implication challenges the received understanding of the gendered structure of society.

In recent work, sociologist Canton Winer has introduced the concept of gender detachment to explain the feelings reported by his participants of being distant from gender. While respondents report being detached from gender at the level of identity, most do not report feeling a need to alter gender performance to present this antipathy to others. I begin by considering how gender detachment can aid us in theorizing about the difference between gender identity and other gender kinds. Since many of the people who report being detached from gender as identity will still fall under other gender categories, someone’s gender identity cannot merely follow from their gendered social position. Having a gender identity is one response we can have to being gendered at the level of a social kind, but that social categorization does not entail having a (corresponding) gender identity.
I then consider what gender detachment can tell us about theories of gender identity. While Katherine Jenkins proposes understanding gender identity through norm relevancy, I argue that this will not work to accurately explain the lack of gender identity in the case of gender detachment. Individuals who self-report as detached from gender are not using gender norms as a reference point for their identity, but neither are they self-identifying as agender. Norm relevancy will not be enough to explain this difference. Instead, I propose an affiliative model of gender identity which can capture both cases of having and lacking gender identity. Rather than gendered social norms, I argue that it is other people whom we take to be relevant in understanding our gender identity. Someone who identifies as a woman, for example, is identifying herself as being a member of the same gender kind as certain others, recognizing those people as relevant for her gender identity. Gender detachment, then, should be understood as lacking identification with any such group of people, including not taking nonbinary or agender people to be the relevant group of people to whom one’s identity relates.

In the book Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy, Talia Mae Bettcher proposes a compelling theory of trans oppression aimed at accurately representing the trans experience. She distinguishes between understandings of gender in the mainstream, or overworld, and in trans subcultures, or underworlds. In the former, gender is determined by moral sex, or the genitals that one is born with; so, gender is determined and enforced from birth. In trans subcultures, or underworlds, gender is determined by self-identification in the form of avowals (e.g., “I am a woman”). On Bettcher’s view, avowals in the underworld can be made for either political reasons or to express an existential identity—something of considerable importance to how the speaker sees themselves and their experiences. Yet this distinction introduces a theoretical tension: if we accept the non-essential nature of gender, what explains the division of gender into two fundamentally different kinds?

While Bettcher argues that identity in the underworlds can be determined for political reasons or elucidate something deeply existential, I argue that the two purportedly distinct types of identities are, in fact, necessarily linked. To do so, I first argue that avowing a political identity typically communicates something existentially significant about one’s lived self-understanding, often due to the experience of oppression. Next, by expanding on Bettcher’s understanding of gender avowals as illocutionary acts, I demonstrate that avowals inherently function within oppressive social structures as political acts. By making a gender avowal (i.e., “I am a woman”), a speaker socially situates themselves within the oppressive gender system. As such, avowals situate a speaker either in resistance or conformity to the oppressive system. Thus, any avowal of identity within an oppressive system is therefore political, whether consciously intended or not. I extend this claim to other identities within oppressive systems, including being queer or being a feminist, showing how they often function as both political and existential identities. So the two kinds of identities Bettcher treats as separable are, in fact, importantly related through the experience of oppression.

My proposed framework preserves Bettcher’s non-essentialist commitments while revealing how the political force and existential depth of gender avowals are inextricable. When meanings cease to make sense, marginalized individuals are empowered to create their own meanings, free from the restrictions imposed by the mainstream gender system. Rather than overthrowing systems entirely, resistance can take the form of building a coalition and forming new understandings. Because my view is ultimately compatible with Bettcher’s, this clarification not only resolves the tension in her account but also strengthens the tools available for both resistance and self-understanding, allowing for solidarity amongst marginalized individuals.

Room 6

I argue that if you are the sort of feminist theorist who thinks that pernicious ideologies can construct ontologically oppressive realities, then this creates an explanatory demand to provide a normative basis for critique. But if you are the sort of feminist who thinks that ideological social construction is that metaphysically powerful, then you have reason to be suspicious of moral theorising of the sort that would provide such a normative basis for critique. My motivating concern is that the very same sort of theorists who endorse a picture of the social world where ethically and epistemically defective ideologies are capable of bringing into being oppressive social realities are also likely to reject outright, or at least be suspicious of, recourse to universal or objective moral values. The feminist metaphysician needs to be able to say: yes the world really is that way, but it ought not be. My aim is to explain why these are hard things to say at the same time.

Feminists have critiqued theories which purport to theorise moral truth on the grounds that their actual function is to legitimise oppression. Such scholars reject abstract and idealised moral theorising, contending that it (at best) illegitimately ignores or (at worst) wilfully obfuscates oppression and injustice. Many feminist critiques of androcentric moral theorising first arise as critiques of traditional philosophical moral theory, but most of these critiques reemerge in the work of Black, decolonial, and queer feminists as critiques of earlier feminist theories. Two different sets of considerations can be drawn from this rich literature. First, there are metaphysical worries that the categories of moral theory are themselves subject to ideological social construction. Feminists see difference as crucial for understanding themselves and their relationships with other people and environment, so they claim that we should be sceptical that there are any features to ground moral personhood and thus facts of the right sort just don’t exist to provide an ideology-transcendent basis for critique. Second, there are epistemic worries: given ideologies can make themselves true and, where they can’t make themselves true, ideologies present reality through distorting illusions, we lack the epistemic and methodological resources to come to know about the nature of ideology-transcendent moral reality. Accordingly, maybe moral facts of the right sort exist, but we should be pessimistic about our ability to access them.

The alternative feminist option is to theorise from lived experience, where processes of moral justification are thoroughly non-idealised. However, if oppressive ideologies can make themselves true, then I argue that such approaches must (1) make unstable assumptions about the relative moral authority of particular local contextual perspectives or (2) risk ending up with a fragmented conception of the good and thus being unable to provide an adequate basis for critique.

What does it mean to have a sexual orientation towards (say) women? Many contemporary theories assume that one’s sexual orientation is – at least partly – constituted by a disposition to sexually desire. For example, a sexual orientation towards women is a disposition to sexually desire women. But what is sexual desire? My paper argues, contra many contemporary theories, that sexual desire in the relevant sense isn’t a desire for sex. This has important upshots for theories of consent, and in turn, potential legal consequences.

I first give an independent argument for thinking that sexual desire – if it’s meant to be orientation-constituting – cannot be a simple desire for sex. Here are two examples of such desire-based views:

• “sexual desire is desire for contact with another person’s body and for the pleasure which such contact produces […]. Central to the definition is the fact that the goal of sexual desire and activity is the physical contact itself, rather than something else which this contact might express.” (Goldman, 1977)

• “A sexual desire (for men and/or women) involves the combination of a propositional attitude (of the form “S bears the relation of desiring towards proposition p”) plus a disposition to be sexually aroused by, or sexually attracted to, men and/or women.” (Díaz-León, 2022)

The main problem with desire-based views is that they falls victim to what I call the “Sex Toy Problem”.
Sex Toy Problem: Bob is a straight guy who sees a sex toy on his shelf. This visual awareness of the sex toy makes the possibility of using the sex toy salient to him, thereby making him psychologically aroused. Bob then desires to perform sexual activities with the sex toy. All this points towards the conclusion that Bob has a sexual orientation towards the sex toy. But this is absurd! He would strongly disagree with this characterization; he’s just a straight man!

Now consider also Rob, who has a genuine paraphilia towards sex toys. What’s the difference between Rob and Bob? A theory of sexual orientation must capture and explain this difference; the desire to have sex with the sex toy does neither.
The sex toy problem shows that sexual desire, in the relevant sense, isn’t desire for sex.

This insight has ramifications for theories of consent. In a study of Jordan’s Grand Assize Court, Issa et al. (2025) find that instances of rape were ruled consensual on the basis of victims having behavioral responses, such as orgasm, that don’t fit into the image of an idealized victim. The authors argue that “those sexual responses, including vaginal lubrication and erection, are involuntary physiological reactions initiated by the autonomic nerve system, and are not inherently linked to desire, pleasure, or satisfaction.” (Issa et al., 2025) I suggest their argument should be even stronger: namely, even if rape victims felt desire, it would not mean that they wanted sex, and thereby, consented to having sex.

By giving consent, we can give other people permission to act in ways that would otherwise be off limits to them. We can sometimes take back these kinds of permissions by revoking our prior consent. This paper considers whether it is always in our power to revoke prior consent, and if not, what are the limits of this power and why. Existing views of revoking tend to either assume or argue that we can always revoke prior consent. This seems true of e.g. sexual consent and consent to medical interventions. But this cannot be the whole story: releasing someone from a promissory obligation involves giving consent, but we cannot reimpose promissory obligations on others at will. What gives?
In this paper I argue that the existing views of revoking are motivated by a more general idea about normative powers: that normative powers are a means of enhancing or enabling the power-holder’s autonomy, and that their exercise is therefore entirely up to the power-holder’s discretion. It follows that moral reasons can speak against exercising a normative power, but they cannot prevent or constrain the power-holder from doing so, if they so choose.
After objecting to this view, I propose an alternative to that general idea which suggests the opposite. The alternative I propose says that normative powers are a means of enabling us to act in ways that we can justify to one another. On this view, moral reasons that count against exercising a normative power can constrain the power-holder’s ability to do so. And on this view, I argue, we can make sense of why certain kinds of consent (e.g. medical and sexual consent) are always revokable, while other kinds of consent (e.g. promissory release) are not.

In this paper, I examine how dominant social norms and cultural narratives interfere with victims’ moral judgments. I call this dynamic moral blinding: a distinct kind of moral harm in which cultural narratives and social expectations obscure moral wrongs and undermine a victim’s capacity to recognise when someone has severely wronged her. An individual is morally blinded when her ability to recognise morally salient harms is impaired through the internalisation of oppressive cultural norms, disrupting the emotional responses that typically underlie moral judgment.
Moral judgments are central to moral life because they enable the evaluation of actions involving harm, loss of autonomy, or violations of rights (Bartels et al. 2015). Emotions such as anger, sympathy, indignation, and revulsion play a fundamental role in moral judgment and often serve as the first signals that alert individuals to morally relevant situations (Haidt 2003; Pizarro & Bloom 2003).
Moral blinding occurs when morally significant emotions—such as indignation, sympathy, anger, and revulsion—are systematically suppressed or redirected by cultural norms or institutions, leaving individuals unable to register moral wrongdoing. In social environments where rape culture is pervasive—where sexual violence is normalised or expected (Crewe & Ichikawa 2021)—these norms undermine the emotional foundations of moral awareness. Moral lessons transmitted within families, media representations that blame victims, and legal frameworks that make marital rape difficult to prove collectively shape what is perceived as morally relevant and what is dismissed.
The paper distinguishes moral blinding from hermeneutical injustice (Fricker 2007). While hermeneutical injustice explains how structural gaps in interpretive resources prevent individuals from making sense of their experiences, moral blinding arises even where the relevant concepts are available. It operates at the level of moral perception, emotional responsiveness, and motivated ignorance. The two forms of harm also differ in their modes of repair: whereas hermeneutical injustice can often be addressed through conceptual reform and education, moral blinding requires deeper forms of emotional unlearning and structural transformation.
To illustrate moral blinding, the paper uses marital rape as a case study. Entrenched narratives of male sexual entitlement and wifely duty render victims especially vulnerable to this form of moral harm (Finkelhor & Yllö 1985; Stark 2007). Marital rape exhibits three interlocking features—relational embeddedness, systematicity, and coercive control—which make it especially prone to moral blinding. Embedded within norms of intimacy, commitment, and obligation, coercion can come to appear ordinary or morally required. Marriage thus emerges as a powerful institutional site of moral blinding, shaping moral perception in ways that allow serious moral wrongs to fail to appear as harms.

Sexual relations constitute a fundamental aspect of human life. Therefore, an abuse within that sphere is a serious moral wrong and often a crime. Currently, the main criterion distinguishing between such violation and legitimate sexual contact is consent. Yet, in recent years it becomes more and more reasonable to assume that a person can be wronged and their autonomy can be violated even within sexual contact they consented to. Consider the case of Neil Gaiman, famous writer, or Aziz Ansari, popular comedian. Both were accused of sexual violence, but the women who felt violated by their actions did not imply lack of consent. Instead, they pointed to power imbalance and psychological pressure stemming from celebrity status and/or significant age gap. Because of that, a new concept to refer to such violations has been coined: grey rape.
This paper explores the necessary and sufficient conditions for the concept of grey rape, the context in which this phenomenon may occur most often and possible alternative approaches to constructing and explaining it.
As this paper argues, the phenomenon of grey rape stems from two broader problems. Firstly, the operative and manifest concept of sexual consent (particularly in law) relies on the assumption that all individuals are strong, fully autonomous agents, while in reality different people have varying levels of agency. Systematic oppression, social inequalities, and existing power structures significantly affect one’s autonomy and ability to make genuinely free choices. The currently dominant approach to sexual relations seems to ignore that; thus the scope of protection against sexual violations granted by law in many so-called western countries is too narrow: limited only to the most intense forms of pressure.
Secondly, moral and legal rules concerning sexuality and sexual crimes often fail to reflect women’s standpoints and perspectives, even though sexual abuses are gendered crimes: ones that predominantly affect women and people perceived as women, e.g. non-binary people. This hermeneutical injustice is reflected in the construction of the concepts of sexual consent, sexual coercion and unequal power dynamics.
In its second part, the paper explores the possibility of constructing and employing the concept of grey rape in the context of long-term romantic relationships. Those kind of relationships are unique: partners exert significant influence over one another, and the relations of dependency between them are multidimensional and often unequal. Consequently, it seems that especially within such relationships violating sexual contacts may be consensual in the sense of operative concept of sexual consent, yet wrongful: stemming from less overt forms of psychological pressure.
Lastly, the paper will discuss potential alternative frameworks that could better approach the phenomenon of grey rape by relying not only on a person’s consent, but also aiming to protect the person’s dignity and agency.

Whether social media users validly consent to social media platforms has become a question of increasing importance in both academic and public discourse. To claim, for instance, that social media providers violate a slew of recently articulated digital rights, we must deny that users typically waive those rights when they join those platforms. In the literature, there are two main accounts of how social media consent might be invalid: the ignorance defense argues that social media users are insufficiently informed to consent, while the costliness defense argues that withholding consent to social media is too costly for meaningful consent.

In the negative section of this paper, I highlight the limitations of both of these accounts. I reject the ignorance defense by arguing that ignorance doesn’t generally impede valid consent when the consenting agent can access the required information and chooses not to. A rental contract isn’t rendered invalid simply because the renter chooses not to read it. I then reject the costliness defense by arguing that the cost of withholding consent does not, on its own, invalidate the consent offered. A patient can, for example, validly consent to life-saving surgery. It cannot be the case that consent to social media platforms is invalid simply because social media providers offer “too good” a service, such that refusing consent would be comparatively costly.

In the positive section of the paper, I offer a novel account of social media consent. I argue that the costliness of withholding consent can defeat the validity of consent when that costliness is morally attributable to the agent receiving the consent. I motivate this conclusion by pointing to cases from the third-party coercion literature. While the victim of a mugging does not provide valid consent when handing over his money to the criminal, that same victim does offer valid consent when paying a bodyguard to protect him from mugging.

In turn, if we can demonstrate that social media providers carry some moral responsibility for the costs of abstaining from social media, we have grounds for rejecting the validity of social media consent. Although their responsibility might initially strike us as obvious, I reveal that the costs of abstaining from social largely accrue due to a collective action problem: while everyone might be better off without social media, there are substantial costs to individually defecting from social media use. This raises a difficult question: Can we hold an agent responsible for merely facilitating a costly collective action problem?

Through a series of cases, I argue that we can only do so if the agent facilitated the collective problem intentionally and avoidably. I then demonstrate that, in many cases, social media providers fully or partially meet these conditions because they designed their platforms to maximize the collective action problem. Consequently, consent to social media is often invalid.

edit

Room 7

TBA

TBA

TBA

TBA

TBA

TBA

TBA

Return to Programme Overview

Wednesday (22.07)

Keynote: Jennifer Lackey

See Keynotes

10:30-11:00 | Coffee Break

Room 1

Please see uploaded file labeled

It has been argued that oppression exists on ontological level (Martin 2020; Jenkins 2023; Richardson 2023), based on the shared commitment that social group exists ontologically, and the fact that people perceive limitations of social behaviors based on such groups. The nature of such groups can be further debated and elaborated depending on whether people adopt discursive uses of concepts or not (Jenkins 2025; Bettcher 2025). However, there is a rich body of literature that acknowledges the phenomenological nature of social oppression: namely, oppression is a “lived” and “embodied” experience (Freeman 2015; Young 1980). I agree that a phenomenological turn towards social experiences seems to allow for a more ambiguous view on marginal social identities and social passings, but one may think such approach will reduce the value of social ontology as a discipline.

This paper intends to solve the seeming dilemma by a methodological challenge on feminist perspectives of social experiences. The aim is to capture a distinctive form of oppression based on experience: I theorize it as phenomenological oppression. The retelling of sexual harassment is understood to be difficult, not only because of the relevant communicative failures (Jenkins 2023; Brison 2002; Friker 2007). One struggles to speak, but couldn’t find the right word, understood to suffer from epistemic injustice/oppression (Fricker 2007; Dotson 2011; Li 2025). But the fact that one’s certain social grouping preconditions one’s relevant experience and one’s platform of speaking up reveals how oppression is deeply wedded with one’s ontic being, epistemic agency and embodied self (Jenkins 2023; Spivak 1985).

This paper will present the following arguments: 1) use of case as a feminist methodology should avoid over-simplification 2) phenomenological oppression as a term echo better with the situation in which a disadvantaged subject fails to communicate (negative) experiences 3) the oppression based on experiences and embodiment can be theorized with analytic feminist tools in a cautionary way. In the end, this paper intends to add value to the rich discussions of ontology and oppression with feminist phenomenology.

Theorists of oppression broadly agree that oppression is structural, yet what this claim amounts to remains contested. Despite this shared commitment, theorists diverge along several dimensions when theorizing oppression, including (1) whether oppression is group-based, and (2) whether the primary object of analysis should be the oppressiveness of social structures themselves or the patterns of injustice those structures produce. This paper argues that a satisfactory theory of oppression must account for both the oppressiveness of social structures and their relation to the patterns of injustice they generate. To that end, I offer a novel account of oppressiveness as a dispositional property of social structure: to be oppressive is to have the disposition to unjustly harm individuals who bear socially salient features. On this account, individuals with socially salient features, in virtue of being situated within oppressive social structures, are susceptible to these structures’ dispositions to unjust harm, and routinely trigger such dispositions and suffer unjust harm simply during ordinary social life.

The dispositional account provides a unified metaphysical explanation of both the oppressiveness of social structures and their relation to patterns of injustice. Because dispositions manifest in reliable and intelligible ways, patterns of injustice can be understood as the regular manifestation of oppressive structures’ disposition to unjustly harm individuals who bear socially salient features. At the same time, because dispositions can be masked by contingent factors, the account explains why some individuals with socially salient features may evade harm in particular contexts, even though the underlying structure remains oppressive. In the case of oppressiveness, I identify three common masking factors that can block or mitigate unjust harms suffered by individuals with socially salient features: (1) possessing a socially privileged identity along another axis, (2) having access to inclusive communities or emancipatory social contexts, and (3) luck.

Finally, I argue that the dispositional account yields three significant theoretical upshots. First, it unifies the analysis of oppressive social structures and patterns of injustice while making explicit an implicit understanding of oppression in the literature as structural susceptibility to harm at the individual level. Second, it remains neutral about the metaphysics of social groups while accommodating explananda often thought to favor group-based approaches, such as group interest and affective misdirection. Third, it captures core insights of intersectionality and provides conceptual resources for diagnosing and resisting the flawed logic of so-called “oppression Olympics.”

Edit

In Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), Sartre offers a social ontology of how groups form out of backgrounds of isolated and atomised seriality. The concept of seriality has been widely received as the most significant contribution of Sartre’s Critique, and it is arguably Sartre’s emphasis on the dialectic of materiality and praxis that is at the heart of this Marxist-phenomenological innovation. Crystallising in the idea of the ‘practico-inert’, Sartre demonstrates how seriality names a form of collectivity that consists of heterogeneous agents having their praxis similarly constrained and enabled by the humanmade socio-material structures that surround them. While great emphasis has been placed on materiality, both by Sartre and his commentators, there is an important affective dimension that has been undertheorised. In this paper I aim to rectify this, fleshing out Sartre’s (1960/2004, 266) passing remark regarding “serial feelings” and demonstrating how Sartre’s framework offers an innovative perspective on contemporary forms of affective polarisation.
Affect is a central and overlooked feature of praxis, especially if we want to make sense of the normative valences of worked materiality. In this regard, I aim to show how collective affective comportments can be both a condition upon which a series transforms into an insurgent group, and a tool by which that the same group is serialised by what I term the ‘affective exigencies’ of the practico-inert field. To illustrate this, I organise this paper around a contemporary case study that the dialectic between the series and the group is particularly well-equipped to make sense of, namely, the “struggle” of “double reciprocal praxis” (ibid., 733) between pro- and anti-Palestinian sentiments. A central feature of this struggle is the affective reconstitution of pro-Palestinian voices – whether those that gather at a protest, voice concerns to the media, or speak out within universities – as expressing hatred. We see this in the repeated characterisation of protests as “hate marches” and the depiction of banners and chants as inciting racial and anti-Semitic hatred. By appealing to a wider affective economy that pathologises hatred, the series of people who express pro-Palestinian feelings of solidarity, moral anger, and grief suddenly face affective exigencies that render their affective praxis suspect. This is achieved not only through media representations and police violence, but by a manipulation of the brute materiality of the practico-inert field: stickers are scraped off walls, flags pulled down, graffiti painted over, and items of clothing banned. This reorganisation of the practico-inert field renders certain praxes hateful and is thus intended to justify unprecedented forms of repression and censorship, thereby making it increasingly difficult for insurgent groups to emerge out of the latent solidarity of atomised seriality.

In her influential paper, “Gender and Race: What Are They? What Do We Want Them to Be?” (2000), Sally Haslanger argues for an ameliorative inquiry into the concepts of gender and race—one that does not focus on our existing concept of a phenomenon or on what it tracks, but instead asks what the purpose of the concept is. The focus is on whether it is useful for a specific, legitimate goal, and the goal of her analysis is to achieve a just society. Inspired by Haslanger’s analysis, I will argue that we should undertake an ameliorative approach to wrongful discrimination, where the goal is it to combat injustice. With this goal in mind, I will argue that we should focus on the victims and their situation when discussing why discrimination is wrong. This approach can be understood as adopting what Kate Manne refers to as the victim’s perspective. Inspired by Haslanger’s approach, Kate Manne (2017) adopts an ameliorative inquiry into the concept of misogyny. By taking the victim’s perspective on misogyny, she shifts the focus from the psychology of the perpetrator to the experiences of the victims of hostile attitudes.

Drawing inspiration from Manne’s victim-perspective approach, I propose four desiderata that an account of wrongful discrimination should satisfy in order to serve as a useful tool in combating injustice. A crucial feature of wrongful discrimination that such an account should capture is the fact that many problematic cases of discrimination are shaped by unjust social structures and are either caused by, or reinforce, existing injustices in society. I will also argue that such an account should also be able to capture Haslanger’s point about how agents and social structures are affected by material reality. As such, it is crucial to recognize the role of individual agents in engaging in wrongful discrimination, while also acknowledging how their actions are deeply shaped by broader social structures and injustices that constrain their choices. One way this can play out is that background injustices affect how we attribute social properties to people, which can cause discrimination when such properties are deemed relevant for differential treatment—even if the agent has no intention to discriminate against anyone. I will discuss three ways in which such attribution of properties can cause discrimination, which an account of wrongful discrimination should be able to capture in order to be a useful tool in fighting injustice.

Hate speech is recognized as undermining social equality, yet restricting it is often seen as a threat to political legitimacy. This tension is best captured by the debate between Ronald Dworkin and Jeremy Waldron regarding upstream laws (hate speech restrictions) and downstream laws (protections against violence and discrimination). Dworkin (2009) argues that free speech is inseparable from democracy, and that silencing individuals who oppose certain laws through upstream restrictions makes enforcing downstream laws politically illegitimate. On the other hand, Waldron (2012) argues that hate speech damages the public good of inclusiveness and the dignity of minority groups, making a well-ordered society impossible.
In this paper, I challenge Dworkin’s conclusion by re-conceptualizing political legitimacy. Drawing on Iris Marion Young (2002), I define political legitimacy not only as the will of the majority but also as the equal participation of all groups in decision-making. Based on this definition, I argue that upstream laws are necessary to politically legitimize downstream laws. The reason is that hate speech causes bias against minority groups in politics, thereby creating unequal representation and participation in decision-making, which is necessary to have political legitimacy. Moreover, by using Rae Langton’s (1993) arguments on speech acts, I argue that even if equal representation is provided, hate speech silences minority groups by dismissing their voices as insignificant or invalid.
Expanding on Waldron’s main focus on racial groups, I explore hate speech against women, arguing that politics has become a male-dominated, heteronormative space, where laws favor the majority’s interests, while failing to consider the concerns of vulnerable groups. I give the example of debates surrounding abortion rights, claiming that if not enough women MPs are present or if their voices are being silenced, abortion laws cannot be politically legitimate.
Finally, I consider possible criticisms regarding government overreach and whether hate speech can be a direct cause for the lack of political representation of minority groups. I argue that not having upstream laws results in government, which fails to include minority groups or to hear their voices, to be a tool of the majority group, posing a threat to political legitimacy even before committing an overreach. Moreover, I will consider other factors, such as social norms, as alternative causes of the lack of political representation and argue that these factors are reinforced or manifested in political life through hate speech. I will conclude that upstream laws are necessary to politically legitimize downstream laws and to protect democracy.

A popular claim in the socio-political philosophy of language is that toxic speech enacts discriminatory norms. Scholars such as Langton, Maitra or McGowan have argued for how even the words of ordinary speakers have a norm-changing power in local contexts. For example, a White man shouting “F***in’ terrorist, go home!” to an Arab woman on a subway is seen as not just attacking or offending the woman, but also as changing the local norms regulating the social interactions in the subway (Maitra, 2012). The White man utterance would enact oppressive norms that make discriminatory behaviours towards Arab people permissible. Authors supporting this claim have put forward various models for how ordinary speech can enact or change local norms in this way (Langton, 1993; 2018; Maitra, 2012; McGowan, 2019).
Here, I want to take a different route. I want to show that the norm-relevant effect of toxic speech should not be thought in terms of enacting new or different norms in local contexts, but rather in terms of eroding existing ones. Although the processes of norm-enactment and norm-erosion are often intertwined, I believe that they should be logically separated, and that ordinary instances of toxic speech have a more direct effect on the latter process.
My paper proceeds as follows. First, I will sketch Langton’s and McGowan’s proposals for how ordinary toxic speech affects social norms and outline a gap in their arguments. I’ll argue that their models only work for cases where oppressive norms are already existent and operative in the contexts where hateful utterances are performed. Therefore, they fail to properly capture speech’s power in activating local oppressive norms in a context that was not oppressive before (e.g. the subway example).
I will, then, suggest that this gap is present in all existing models and it is due to a wrong framing of the phenomenon. Instead of asking how toxic speech can bring about or introduce discriminatory norms in local contexts, we should focus on how toxic speech can erode existing and operative egalitarian norms.
Finally, I will illustrate various ways in which toxic speech can erode egalitarian norms. These all start from the assumption that egalitarian norms defaultly regulate the social interactions of interest (e.g. the subway) and that an utterance of toxic speech is a public violation of those norms. Such violation can erode the existing norms in the following ways: (i) by lack of public sanctioning, or of any reaction, to the public norm-violation (e.g. the bystanders’ silence); (ii) by lack of public labelling of the violation as an exception to the norm (e.g. labelling the hate speaker as “not in his right mind”); (iii) by a manifested indifference towards the sanctions on the hate speaker’s part (i.e. lack of reaction to the sanctions). My proposed re-framing fixes severe theoretical problems faced by existing accounts of speech-driven norm-alteration, shedding more light on the phenomenon.

See Keynotes

Room 2

Please see uploaded file labeled

A central challenge in jurisprudence is how contingent social facts, such as legislative acts, historical events, and everyday practices, give rise to a stable, hierarchical legal system with normative force. Recent work that involves metaphysical grounding has clarified aspects of this question, but still struggles with difficulties concerning legal hierarchy, the sources of legal authority, and how rules work.

I propose a Nested Anchoring Architecture that explains the determination of legal systems via the construction or “anchoring” of legal contexts. This architecture has three tiers. In the outermost tier, a general template for legal systems is anchored by facts that have pragmatic success in solving problems of social control. In the middle tier, social‑historical facts—revolutions, conventions, practices, pre-existing systems, etc.—anchor a particular legal order whose rule of recognition characterizes valid law‑making procedures. In the innermost tier, legislative and judicial acts, as well as documents and regular practices, anchor individual statutes and decisions. It is within the resulting system that particular legal facts are grounded.

This architecture resolves the primary difficulties that grounding approaches have encountered. It also has payoffs for traditional problems in jurisprudence. It provides a metaphysical basis for the distinction between statutory change and constitutional transformation, explaining why one leaves the legal order intact while the other rewires it. It also reframes the long-running debate between inclusive and exclusive positivism: not mainly as a dispute about whether morality can ground law, but about several places in the architecture where moral facts might figure as anchors and/or as grounds. And by clarifying the mechanisms of legal creation, the model recasts law itself as society’s primary technology for “metaphysical engineering,” a controlled means of manufacturing new normative kinds.

There is a longstanding intuition among jurisprudents that there exists a unique form of normativity known as ‘law’ (Dickson, 2001; Kelsen, 1961). Subsequently, generations of legal theorists have sought to uncover what, metaphysically, makes law truly and distinctly ‘law’. This inquiry into law’s ontology has typically been understood as a search for the ‘nature of law’, which is comprised of the necessary and sufficient properties which make ‘law’ into what it truly is (e.g. Crowe, 2014; Raz, 2009; Alexy, 2008). A diverse range of theories have subsequently been proposed, with a myriad of necessary features and/or functions being presented by theorists as being sufficiently constitutive of law’s essence. However, upon examining these proposals, it becomes apparent that many theorists’ views on the nature of law are irreconcilable. Thus, this area of jurisprudence has become characterised by widespread and persistent disagreement.

Drawing on insights from the philosophy of science (Longino, 1990; Kuhn, 1970), it will be argued that disagreements about the nature of law arise because opposing theorists have differing pre-theoretical intuitions and/or assumptions about which social phenomena count as ‘law’, or ‘non-law’, for the purposes of investigation. Consequently, rival scholars draw their conclusions about the nature of law from different bodies of evidence, with evidentiary-relevance being determined by one’s own theory-laden perspective. If rival theorists have clashing pre-theoretical assumptions about what counts as ‘law’, it is inevitable that opposing theorists will produce clashing theories about which necessary and sufficient properties constitute the nature of law. However, because each scholar’s theory-laden perspective classifies ‘law’ and ‘non-law’ in inherently different ways, there exists no theory-neutral way to adjudicate the resulting disagreements between rival scholars. Thus, because there is no objective way to determine which theory is the correct one, it will be argued that the line of research on the nature of law ought to be abandoned in the context of theorising about law’s ontology.

Criminal law relies routinely on concepts; concepts like ‘intention’, ‘causation’, recklessness’, etc. Despite the fact that legal theorists are inquiring into legal concepts, little attention has been paid to a meta-theoretical question about them: what kind of concepts are legal concepts? This meta-theoretical question plays a crucial role in shaping how criminal law concepts are defined. Thus, the meta-theoretical question matters for determining the conditions of criminal responsibility based on these concepts. Here, I will focus on ‘intention’. Different theories have been offered to define the concept. Based on their meta-theoretical commitment, these theories can be divided into three groups. First, there are the ‘ordinary-concept’ theories. According to this approach, the meaning of the legal concepts, in general—and thus intention in particular—is determined by the ordinary use of the term, and for this reason, it should be left to the judges and juries to apply the ordinary understanding of the term to the case at hand. Second, there are the ‘metaphysics-first’ theories. These theories focus on the nature of mental states and draw (inspiration and) support from philosophy of mind in order to distinguish between beliefs, intentions, and other mental state.Lastly, the concept of ‘intention’ can be understood as a moral concept; whether an action was intentional depends on the moral evaluation of the action.

Despite the merits of the individual approaches, they also share a significant shortcoming: they ignore a fundamental aspect of legal reality and thus legal concepts—the institutionalised and social aspect of it. Law does not merely import moral concepts or everyday concepts; it uses them for its purpose and for different functions. This means that concepts that you and I use outside of law are not necessarily identical with their legal counterparts. This further means that if the institutionalised reality of law is taken seriously, we need a different approach to legal concepts, too. This is the approach that this paper will advance: Legal concepts refer to social kinds that are constituted by legal and judicial practices.

In this paper, I will bring the meta-theoretical assumptions to the fore and argue against them by pointing to the connection between legal concepts and social kinds. Social kinds are groupings of objects that bear social properties. These groupings are not random; they depend on whether the members of the kind share an essential property (or properties). Essential properties are those properties that explain the cluster of similarities that all objects in the grouping share. This means that what counts as ‘intention’ is determined by examining the cases which have been described as ‘intentional’ by courts and finding the property that explains their similarities and differences. I will demonstrate how the proposed account works and will offer a novel way for ‘unearthing’ the legal concept of ‘intention’.

Non-positivist theories of law hold that a legal system must meet some minimal normative standard. An unjust law-like system is not a legal system. This paper is about the commitments in social ontology that follow from non-positivism. On typical positivist theories (Hart, Shapiro, Raz), a legal system is a rule-governed social practice with a certain structure and a claim to authority. However, on non-positivist theories, whether something counts as a legal system depends on its normative merits.

Non-positivists face an explanatory challenge. On their theory, unjust law-like systems are not members of the kind ‘legal system’. But ordinarily, whether something counts as an instance of a social kind does not depend on its merits. (This argument builds on Plunkett (2012)’s observation that non-positivists have a challenge giving an account of legal institutions.) I will consider a recent argument from Atiq (2025) which aims to show that, if law has a kind-relative norm, then non-positivism follows. I will argue that, even if the argument is successful, the non-positivist still has to explain why unjust law-like systems seem so similar to legal systems.

I will argue that non-positivists should adopt a disjunctivist treatment of law-like systems. Disjunctivists in the theory of perception (Soteriou 2016) argue that the good case and the bad case, veridical and non-veridical perceptions, are different kinds of mental states. ‘Perception’ is a disjunctive kind. Similarly, non-positivists should hold that just and unjust law-like systems are different kinds of social entities.

To develop this proposal, I will draw on the accounts of the metaphysics of law in Epstein (2015) and Chilovi & Pavlakos (2019). A non-positivist can hold that normative principles are among the necessary grounds or anchors of legal rules. However, the non-positivist must then explain why unjust law-like systems can have a semblance of legality – in other words, why they can seem, to those in them, like legal systems. Such an explanation may draw from the partial overlap in grounds between just and unjust law-like systems. Finally, I argue that the proposed account can also make sense of a stronger ‘natural law’ view on which there are universal principles which form part of the content of every legal system. On the proposed account, non-positivism can meet the explanatory challenge while maintaining the link between law and reasons for action which positivism struggles to maintain.

Some philosophers of law turn to contemporary metaphysics to adjudicate legal positivism and anti-positivism: the theses that legal facts are exhaustively metaphysically grounded in “social facts,” or that “moral facts” are among such metaphysical grounds, respectively. Recently, Andrei Marmor purports to show that social practices and institutions are fully grounded in the collective intentions of individual persons—providing an account which vindicates legal positivism as a byproduct.
In this presentation, I discuss a methodological principle which Marmor terms the “Internal Rationalization Constraint” (IRC) as it relates to social and legal metaphysics. According to this constraint, metaphysical accounts of social practices must defer to the self-understanding of the participants in those practices and institutions for the authoritative account of the purpose, or “functions” of those practices and institutions. Marmor not only holds that such an interpretive methodological constraint is superfluous—it should be rejected by legal positivists in particular, as legal anti-positivists like Ronald Dworkin advance the IRC as an objection to legal positivism. However, I disagree on both counts.
First, I demonstrate that the collective intentionality-based social ontology developed by Marmor actually mandates the IRC. To reject the IRC is to assert that social practices may have aims which escape the awareness of participants. But in terms of the social ontology at hand, this implies that people can fail to be aware of their own intentions, which is an unacceptable implication for two reasons. For one, it is generally assumed to be a condition on intentional action that intentions are transparent to the agent in question. This common assumption of first-person authority on the part of agents renders Marmor’s own counterexamples to the IRC counterintuitive. Moreover, Marmor’s theory of collective intentionality assumes widespread self-knowledge on the part of collectively intending agents. This commitment directly contradicts the rejection of the IRC, and it cannot be modified without drastically revising the whole social ontology on offer. Thus, if one wishes to reject the IRC, one must reject Marmor’s collective intentionality-based social ontology, or supplement it with other resources.
Second, it is unclear that the IRC has any bearing on the dispute between legal positivism and anti-positivism. It is doubtful that Ronald Dworkin advances the IRC to counter legal positivism as Marmor alleges, and the methodology implied by the IRC is arguably practiced by legal positivists like HLA Hart himself. Moreover, interpreting the dispute over legal positivism in terms of the IRC obscures the crux of the debate as it has been interpreted by legal metaphysicians. Questions about first-person authority are orthogonal to questions about metaphysical grounds of legal facts, whether they be social or moral.

We investigate the nature of arrangements, especially their role in overcoming temptation, through the lenses of social ontology and evolutionary game theory. Arrangements can be seen as an exchange of promises. For example, we can exchange the promise to meet for coffee tomorrow. Arrangements arguably help us overcome temptations. Perhaps tomorrow you no longer wish to meet me (because something more exciting has come up), but you will meet me anyway because of your promise.

Social ontological theories, such as the seminal works of Margaret Gilbert and Oliver Black, do not provide a convincing explanation of how arrangements achieve that. They do not give an ultimate cause of the behaviour, meaning how it is/was beneficial, hence why it evolved. Gilbert and Black stated that arrangements cause obligations. You will meet me, because you ought to. But that just begs for an ultimate explanation of obligations. Gilbert also stated that arrangements shift personal preferences. You will meet me because you want to. However, this just describes the proximate cause of your behaviour, i.e. the mechanism in your evolved brain that makes you act this way, but not why it evolved. Black stated that your obligation stems from the costs I would suffer if you broke our arrangement. But again, why – ultimately – would you care?

A complete account of an ultimate cause was recently provided by an evolutionary game theory model. It contained five basic principles. (1) Judgment — If you enter arrangements and honour them, you gain the trust of others. If you enter arrangements but break them, you lose their trust. What you do without an arrangement does not affect others’ trust (in that regard). (2) Selection — you only enter arrangements with people you trust. (3) Conditional Obligation — You will only be judged by your promise if I make one in return. If you offer to meet, and I refuse, you will not be judged for not showing up. (4) Cooperation — if temptation arises, you act against your own interest and keep your promise, whereas without an arrangement, you act selfishly. (5) Publicness — it becomes known to others (one way or another) whether an arrangement was made and who honoured it. The model considered a strategy “RA” that applies all principles, and several strategies that infringe them in different ways, such as unconditional cooperation, naive commitment, or lying. The RA strategy prevailed, and therefore, players mostly resisted temptations.

This model was inspired by many aspects of existing social ontological theories. For example, principle (3) — Conditional Obligation — has been championed by Oliver Black. However, so far, no theory has considered all principles together. In the model, all principles were indispensable. This suggests that previous social ontological theories of arrangements are incomplete. We discuss this and other inferences from the model, and how they might fit into various social ontological theories.

Edit

See Keynotes

Room 3

Most accounts of collective agency focus on groups of agents acting based on shared intentions. However, as argued by Chant (2007) and Ludwig (2016), it seems reasonable that there can be unintentional collective action (UCA). UCA deserves greater philosophical attention because many important phenomena are helpfully analyzed as such. In this paper I categorize UCA into three types and discuss their applications.
Our first type of UCA, Side Effect, draws from a common account of unintentional individual action. A group performs a Side Effect UCA when their collective action matches some description under which it is unintentional. This is the most tenable, but least interesting, kind of UCA.
Sometimes individual agents act without any sort of shared intention or even knowledge of the others’ actions, but their actions taken all together might reasonably be described as a single collective action. I suggest unity of effect—a looser requirement than unity of intention—is enough to unify individual agents into a collective. A UCA might occur when the actions of individual agents produce an effect that might be reasonably described as the result of a collective action. Such actions would not only be unintentional collective actions, but also unintentionally collective actions. Call this category Uncoordinated Aggregate.
Uncoordinated Aggregate UCA can be subdivided into two types. First, the UCA may be the aggregate of intentional individual actions. Since the individual agents don’t intend to act collectively, any description under which their action is collective is also one under which it’s unintentional. Call this Uncoordinated Aggregate 1. Uncoordinated Aggregate UCAs may also be the aggregate of unintentional individual actions. Call this Uncoordinated Aggregate 2.
Various phenomena can be described as cases of UCA. Climate change is a commonly cited candidate: greenhouse effects from vehicle emissions are clear cases of Uncoordinated Aggregate 2. The social construction of categories like races or genders can be analyzed as cases of Uncoordinated Aggregate 1 or 2. Some actions of political institutions can be described as cases of any of the three types.
We have good reason to conceive of these phenomena as UCA rather than disunified individual actions. Although they clearly aren’t the result of intentionally shared agency, it seems they must be performed by something, and that something couldn’t be an individual. Additionally, it will be helpful to take them to be actions in cases where we want to assign responsibility. Since these sorts of events and their consequences are of great philosophical interest, an account of UCA is necessary to analyze them and their relationships to individual actions.

Group-agent realism is commonly regarded as compatible with methodological individualism. While all social phenomena can in principle be explained in terms of individuals’ psychology, there can still be causally autonomous group agents. The view is treated as analogous with non-reductive physicalism about mental causation (List and Pettit 2006, 2011). A group forms attitudes in a collective decision-making procedure. Its attitudes supervene on individuals’ contributions to this procedure. But since any group attitude is multiply realizable, it is understood as irreducible to any particular set of individuals’ attitudes. When the group then acts, group-agent realists understand the group’s attitudes to cause the group’s actions.

Kim’s (1998) supervenience argument says that no supervenient property can be causally efficacious over and above the instantiation of its realizers. Like defenders of non-reductive physicalism about the mind, some group-agent realists have responded to this concern by essentially arguing that multiple realizability makes collective mental states causally autonomous. The most promising defence of this view rests on List and Menzies’s (2009) counterfactualist account of causation as difference making. On this view, A causes B means that whenever A is present, B is present, and whenever B is absent, A is absent. A group’s action depends on the presence a particular collective attitude, but it does not depend on any particular instance of the individual-level realizer of this attitude. The difference-making cause, then, is the group’s attitude.

In this paper, I challenge this defence of causally efficacious group mentality. I do so by showing how it fails to account for a feature particular to the individual–collective supervenience relation, namely that the realizers (the individuals) are aware of what they are, or what they might be, realizing. This awareness enables them to act on the motivation to bring about certain collective outcomes. In the decision-making procedure characteristic of groups commonly regarded as agents in their own right, they can design procedural mechanisms and vote in ways to intentionally contribute to particular collective outcomes.

I then show how an alternative counterfactualist model of causation can account for the significance of individuals’ contributions to the collective decision-making. On this view, what matters is not whether an individual actually makes a difference to the collective outcome, but rather whether there is a possible configuration of individual-level facts such that an individual’s action is a difference maker. On this view, then, an individual is understood to be causally contributing to an outcome by acting in a way that helps bring about the outcome even if their action does not actually make a difference. This leads to a novel causal-exclusion argument against group mentality.

There is a longstanding intuition among jurisprudents that there exists a unique form of normativity known as ‘law’ (Dickson, 2001; Kelsen, 1961). Subsequently, generations of legal theorists have sought to uncover what, metaphysically, makes law truly and distinctly ‘law’. This inquiry into law’s ontology has typically been understood as a search for the ‘nature of law’, which is comprised of the necessary and sufficient properties which make ‘law’ into what it truly is (e.g. Crowe, 2014; Raz, 2009; Alexy, 2008). A diverse range of theories have subsequently been proposed, with a myriad of necessary features and/or functions being presented by theorists as being sufficiently constitutive of law’s essence. However, upon examining these proposals, it becomes apparent that many theorists’ views on the nature of law are irreconcilable. Thus, this area of jurisprudence has become characterised by widespread and persistent disagreement.

Drawing on insights from the philosophy of science (Longino, 1990; Kuhn, 1970), it will be argued that disagreements about the nature of law arise because opposing theorists have differing pre-theoretical intuitions and/or assumptions about which social phenomena count as ‘law’, or ‘non-law’, for the purposes of investigation. Consequently, rival scholars draw their conclusions about the nature of law from different bodies of evidence, with evidentiary-relevance being determined by one’s own theory-laden perspective. If rival theorists have clashing pre-theoretical assumptions about what counts as ‘law’, it is inevitable that opposing theorists will produce clashing theories about which necessary and sufficient properties constitute the nature of law. However, because each scholar’s theory-laden perspective classifies ‘law’ and ‘non-law’ in inherently different ways, there exists no theory-neutral way to adjudicate the resulting disagreements between rival scholars. Thus, because there is no objective way to determine which theory is the correct one, it will be argued that the line of research on the nature of law ought to be abandoned in the context of theorising about law’s ontology.

The purported ‘problem’ of responsibility gaps arises in both philosophy of AI and discussions of the agency of large, well organizes collectives such as corporations. Responsibility gaps occur when an event occurs for which we would ordinarily blame someone, but for which our best theories of moral responsibility claim that there is no blameworthy party (Matthias 2004; Köhler, S., Roughley, N., & Saur, H. 2017; Sparrow 2007; Pettit 2007; Copp 2006; Collins 2019; List 2021).

Responsibility gaps are typically seen as, if not a major problem, at least a puzzle to be solved. Many solutions have been proposed, which, for brevity we may group into three camps. First, there are those that try and “fill” gaps in some way, whether by finding some sort of surrogate take responsibility or implimenting some liability system (Floridi 2016; Nyholm 2017; Collins 2019; Pettit 2007). Second, there are those who try to “close” the gap by postulating that either AI or group agents can themselves be held responsible, at least in some sense (Tigard 2019; List and Pettit 2011; Collins 2023; Nyholm 2017). The third either denies either that responsibility gaps exist or claims that they are too uncommon to worry about (Köhler, S., Roughley, N., & Saur, H. 2017; Himmelreich 2019; Moen 2024; Tigard 2019; Collins 2019).

In this paper I will argue that responsibility gaps certainly exist, but they are never the source of any significant moral problem. To make a case for this strong claim, I start by first pointing out that, on the definition that most theorists seem to employ, the criteria for the occurrence of a responsibility gap entails that excuses lead to responsibility gaps. As such, any plausible moral system will result in ubiquitous responsibility gaps that certainly do not create a serious moral problem. This establishes that responsibility gaps are not problematic by their very nature, but it does not yet establish the stronger claim that they are never the source of a serious moral problem. To establish this, I organize potentially problematic gap cases into three categories: non-severe harm, severe avoidable harm, and severe unavoidable harm. I argue that non-severe harm represents the largest category, but they do not provide compelling reason to think responsibility gaps are problematic because they trade on the natural human tendency to presume that blame is appropriate before evaluating whether there is any blameworthy party and this presumption is not a reliable indicator of a legitimate need to have someone to blame. In cases where the harm is severe but avoidable I claim that no such responsibility gap exists in the first place because failing to avoid foreseeable and severe harm represents blameworthy negligence, so there is someone to hold responsible. Finally, in cases where the harm is severe but unavoidable, I argue, that such cases do represent a problem, but the problem is not generated by the presence of a responsibility gap itself.

Philosophical theories of agency and normativity have traditionally taken individuals to be the primary bearers of reasons. Yet many real-world cases in complex institutional contexts are more plausibly explained by attributing reasons to groups themselves. For example, corporations launch new products in response to market pressures, governments raise taxes for political interests, and international organisations sign agreements in pursuit of common policy aims. In such cases, appeals to individual-level reasons alone are explanatorily insufficient. So, providing a compelling account of institutional group action requires a comprehensive analysis of group reasons: the practical considerations in virtue of which a group can be said to act intentionally. However, while there exist important accounts of group reasons in contemporary literature, an in-depth discussion remains pending. To fill this gap, the paper offers a structural analysis of the nature, source, and normative status of the reasons that are attributable to groups by focusing on three approaches: an agency-first approach, which treats group reasons as reasons that attach only when a group qualifies as an agent; a constitutivist approach, which analyses group reasons in terms of joint commitments, conventions, or shared intentions that generate genuine group-level normative facts; and a group-based reason approach, which understands group reasons as the reasons participants have to bring about group actions. After assessing the strengths and limitations of each approach, the paper defends a collectivist perspective on group reasons. This perspective treats group reasons as collectively formed group attitudes that cannot be fully reduced to individual reasons, yet do not require overly demanding assumptions about group agency. The collectivist view preserves key intuitions about intentional group action, while also providing a unified heuristic for determining when and how reasons and responsibility should be ascribed to groups. The paper concludes by outlining the implications of this view for debates about institutional agency and collective responsibility in social ontology and legal philosophy.

Debates over the nature of collective agency have overemphasized contentions around the role of planning in joint action. This has skewed our understanding, treating instances of joint improvisation as marginal. I challenge this treatment by arguing that joint improvisation, rather than structured joint action, should be the paradigmatic form of collective agency. This helps us recalibrate the underlying mechanisms of collective agency.

Consider the following cases where Alice and Bob move a piano through a narrow door. They might:

(A) Move the piano by executing a prior plan together, and they succeed as planned.
(B) Without a set plan, Alice pulls from the front while Bob pushes from the back just to clear his path, unaware of Alice, and they coincidentally succeed.
(C) While moving the piano, Alice accidentally slips. Bob spontaneously adjusts to a strange angle, enabling them to move it through the door even more easily.

Theories of collective intentionality typically focus on the distinction between (A) and (B). The Planning Account (Bratman 2014; 2022) argues that what binds joint action together lies in nested shared intentions and meshing sub-plans. Conversely, the Minimalist Account (Vesper et al. 2010; Butterfill 2012; 2016) argues that it relies on shared goals and behavioral representations without high-level planning. Both accounts, however, treat case (C), i.e., joint improvisation, as a marginal case: Planning Accounts explain its success via background plans, even if indeterminate, while Minimalist Accounts explain its success via emergent processes, or even dismiss it as not a core defining feature of collective agency.

Part of the problem is that paradigmatic cases in the debate—painting a house together or forming a collective agreement—are typically fixed-path, reverse-engineerable “structured joint actions”, hence derivable backwards if we have both final and initial states of the system. This obscures the nature of agency. Joint action often can be modeled as a complex system, which is non-linear and might resist any reverse-engineering.

Improvisation has a distinct structure from the structured joint actions: its path isn’t fixed, yet its pattern is traceable. Additionally, agency conceptually implies the capacity to do otherwise and the ability to learn effectively from limited data, contradicting merely following a fixed plan or adhering to a given goal. Robust collective agency should demonstrate self-governance and mistake tolerance that are unique to joint improvisation but not structured joint action.

By foregrounding improvisation as the baseline or “default mode” of understanding collective agency, it allows us to (1) regard structured joint actions as a special instances of “frozen” joint improvisation; and (2) rethink the success conditions of joint action not only in terms of intentions but also how the performance was achieved by the agents’ subjective interpretations and inter-subjective alignments.

Edit

Across sociological and economic analyses of competing interests within institutions, the primary tension presented is between individual and institutional interests (Weber 1905; Raub and Voss 1990; Coleman 2009; Aoki 2011). Within philosophy, little has been said about competing interests per se, but there is analogous analysis of individual and institutional agency which suggests a similar tension. As an academic philosopher, for instance, your individual interests (e.g., to teach at a time suitable for your schedule) sometimes compete with the university’s interest (e.g., to offer classes at times where optimal numbers of students will enroll). Similarly, what you do as an individual member of the university (e.g., call for responsible institutional investment policies) can compete with what the institution does (e.g., invest in fossil fuels).

The individual versus institutional (IvI) framing ostensibly serves to clarify the nature of intra-institutional conflict, explain the relationship between individual attitudes and institutional functioning, and support the idea that institutions have interests (and thus agency) of their own. I argue that the IvI framing misrepresents the nature of important intra-institutional conflicts, obfuscates processes of collective agency within institutions, and offers undue support to theories which suggest that institutions are agents (e.g., List and Pettit 2011).

I instead propose the group versus group (GvG) framing of intra-institutional conflict. When we think about competing interests across institutions, from factories to universities, the primary conflicts (i.e., those which fundamentally threaten institutional functioning) are those which occur between groups, e.g., shop-floor workers versus managers or faculty versus administrators. A university faculty’s interest in departmental autonomy, for example, competes with the deans’ interest in having uniform metrics with which they can make cross-departmental comparisons. These conflicts (and not those, e.g., between my personal preferences and institutional operations) are those which define intra-institutional conflict.

Using the GvG framing, I advance two claims. First, I argue that only groups within institutions have interests and aims, but institutions themselves do not. (Similarly, genuinely individual interests might have little to no relevance for understanding institutional conflict.) Instead, institutions are vehicles for the fulfillment of certain group interests. This offers a kind of functionalist analysis of institutions (Hindricks and Guala 2021). Second, I argue that depriving institutions of interests undermines the need for an account of corporate or institutional agency.

A broader upshot of this paper is that it extends and concretizes the Marxian analysis of class interests (Olin Wright 2025), offering an account on which collective interests are recognized and articulated through particular intra-institutional conflicts.

See Keynotes

Room 4

The statement that works of art are cultural or social objects or events is not uncommon. It is not clear, however, what it means, since there are several ways to make sense of it. Following Roman Ingarden (1962) and Amie Thomasson (1999, 2003), Peter Lamarque defends in Work and Object: Explorations in the Metaphysics of Art (2010) the view that works of art are social objects or events in the sense that they ontologically depend on aspects of that domain. More specifically, they are said to be dependent on shared beliefs and practices. Lamarque acknowledges the apparent significance of social ontology for understanding the nature of art. He suggests that John Searle’s notions of collective intentionality and constitutive rules would be useful in clarifying his positions on the metaphysics of art and claims that works of art “share common features with other institutional objects or facts” (p. 69). I intend to analyze the alleged ontological dependence of works of art on cultural and social aspects with the help of other concepts. The most important is the concept of the common ground of a work of art. It is inspired by Robert Stalnaker’s characterization of discursive context as a common ground of shared propositional attitudes (2014, 1999 [1978]). I claim that an artwork’s possession of essential aesthetic and artistic properties stems from an established common ground amongst qualified observers. Qualified observers have common beliefs that relate to a work either singularly or generally. The singular or general character of the relation varies with the kind of aesthetic or artistic proposition whose acceptance or belief stands at the basis of a common belief. Singular aesthetic or artistic propositions attribute or deny aesthetics or artistic properties to individual works. General aesthetic or artistic propositions relate aesthetic or artistic properties with each other or with other kinds of properties. It is important to notice that some of them present conditions for the occurrence of aesthetic or artistic properties. The collection of the common beliefs of qualified observers that are relative to a work of art constitutes the common ground of that work. To clarify the thesis that the common ground of a work amongst qualified observers determines the work’s possession of essential properties, I will have to answer two questions: Who are the qualified observers of a work of art? What makes an aesthetic or artistic proposition true? The most natural answer to the first question is that it varies with the kind of work. Regarding the second question, my view is that common beliefs amongst qualified observers make true aesthetic or artistic propositions. The last part of the talk attempts to show how both answers contribute to a very general account of the nature of works of art that does not ignore the extraordinary diversity of these objects and events.

Edit

Much of the literature in social ontology focuses on sociopolitical, ethical, and legal issues, as represented in the work of Kendy Hess, Michael Bratman, Margaret Gilbert, etc. One of the leading goals of my project, however, is to use social ontology to address problems in collective authorship. As it currently stands, the person identified as the author is the one who receives financial, legal, and moral credit. Yet, many artistic cases appear to involve a single author while in fact depending on the contributions of multiple agents. Shakespeare’s plays provide a familiar example: although Shakespeare wrote the plays; actors, directors, and stationers reworded and reshaped the texts, from the quartos to the First Folio, resulting in works that may differ from Shakespeare’s own intentions. Despite these mediating contributions, Shakespeare alone receives legal, financial, and moral credit.

This reflects a deep-rooted misconception that authorship is usually singular. As Foucault (1969) argues, the author is not merely the producer of a text but a social function that organizes traditions and interpretations. While Foucault gestures toward a broader conception of authorship, I argue more directly that contributors in such non-standard cases share authorship to varying degrees. I propose that authorship should be determined primarily by aesthetic credit rather than by legal or financial considerations. In cases like Shakespeare’s, the name on the page obscures the collective nature of production, excluding crucial contributors from recognition. Aesthetic credit should therefore concern who we ought to praise, instead of merely who we in fact praise.

This paper asks what kind of group agency model collective authorship should adopt in order to distribute aesthetic praise appropriately. I begin with simpler cases of group agency, such as co-writing a novel or singing a duet, where authorship is relatively clear. I then extend the analysis to non-standard cases involving larger and more complex collectives, examining how aesthetic praise might be distributed. Aesthetic credit includes both aesthetic praise and aesthetic blame: the author is the agent we praise when the work succeeds aesthetically, and the one we hold accountable when it fails. Only after authorship is fixed in this way can other forms of credit be assigned. To narrow the scope, I focus solely on aesthetic praise.

As there is little to no literature on aesthetic praise, I turn to theories of moral praise, especially Daniel Telech’s (2023) account, to assess whether a theory of aesthetic credit could be grounded there. I argue that Telech’s framework ultimately cannot support such an account. Finally, returning to cases of overlooked contributors, I explore how different models of group agency might accommodate a praise-based account of collective authorship. Such models include shared agency theories (Gilbert, Tollefsen) and collective agency models (Bratman, Hess, Hindriks).

Academia has its own culture and pace, but is affected by the same biases and necessities as all other human ventures. Professorship, with tenure, is great for the possibility of established researchers to continue their work without the caveats and stresses of fearing for their jobs if they make unpopular claims or find dissatifactory results. In other words, professors are granted a range of social powers, and to some extents, political powers, that are not available to other academics or others in society. While the social powers granted to professors are explicitly dependent on their experience and expertise in their particular field, their authority is often extended further than their positions have intended, e.g. as is seen in cases where professors are interviewed in media on questions beyond their expertise. In such cases it is difficult to interpret what, if anything, could have been done better, but it is clear that there is an interplay between the expectations of someone with a professor title, and those who do not have that title.

This paper examines the social powers that are given to professors, within and outside of academia, through the concept of Telic Power as introduced by Burman (2023); social power that is granted to those who are perceived to be fulfilling an abstract ideal. Professors are widely understood to embody ideals of epistemic authority, intellectual integrity, and scholarly vocation, and this understanding grants them deference, trust, and insulation from scrutiny within academia and in wider society. Telic Power so effectively captures the social position of professors that professorship itself may be understood as Telic Power personified. I will discuss the similarities to the political powers of professors and those who hold governmental political positions, and the effects that these social powers have on the current academic culture.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussions on how to further develop academic culture, and to provide insight into the social power dynamics that are influencing the possibilities to implement changes. The main conclusions are that Telic Power is a useful concept to interpret the social powers of professors, and that this interpretation provides a good foundation for further discussions on how social powers within academia can be understood and changed.

Why should you read this abstract? Perhaps you are a conference organiser or a researcher; and so perhaps you take yourself to have a reason to read it because you need to assess whether the contribution it offers is sufficient for inclusion in your conference or your own research. You might have other reasons – maybe you’re a curious sort – but these sorts of reasons seem distinct from those that are related specifically to what is required of you because you occupy some role.

Why we should do what our jobs and other roles require of us is, on reflection, quite puzzling. There are reasons around our roles: you might do what your job demands because of the incentive of pay (or the fear of penury). Our roles seem to have some independent reason-giving force. Why is this?

In this talk, I offer a new account of why we should do what our role requirements demand and what an organisation is.
My answer is that for an important class of role requirements, their normative force derives from our ‘organising’. We organise, I argue, by offering our reliability to each other in a specific way: we offer to reliably respond to a ‘decision-making structure’ – a combination of task-descriptions and decision-making procedures. I argue that offering our reliability forms a special form of ‘joint’ obligation (and show how this offers a reductivist account of Margaret Gilbert’s – e.g., 2014 – influential notion of ‘joint commitment’ and improves on existing accounts linking joint action to reliance – Alonso, 2009). When we offer to reliably respond to a decision-making structure, we become jointly bound to each other to perform this reliable responsiveness. This underlying ‘membership obligation’ grounds why we should standardly act in line with what we usually consider our ‘jobs’.

I then consider how these joint obligations can help us to understand how we become alienated from our roles and what the limits are on what they can demand of us.

Generally speaking, conceptual engineers seek to revise, create, or abandon a plethora of concepts such as gender, race (Haslanger 2000) or democracy (Cappelen 2023). Central to this methodology is the amelioration of our concepts. Yet, especially in social ontology, there has been little work done to clarify how we should understand amelioration, and how ontological commitments regarding what are concepts, values, and conceptual functions can yield different accounts of amelioration.

Building upon previous work in function-sensitive conceptual engineering (Díaz-León 2020; 2025; Haslanger 2020b; Kazankov 2025; Thomasson 2024; 2025c), this paper argues that ameliorative inquirers should broaden their conception of amelioration to include its epistemic, semantic, and functional dimensions. Even though the possibility of functional revision has been raised by some philosophers, little work has been done to understand how it works and what it entails. This paper begins this work by proposing that amelioration is best understood as an open-ended recursive process divided into three stages: (i) description, (ii) evaluation, and (iii) revision.

In the descriptive stage, the first step is to define the operative concept, i.e. the concept as used in practice. Here, epistemic amelioration can refine our understanding of the informational content of concept C, or improve our experiential access to it (Haslanger 2020a; 2020b). Then, while inquiring into what C is or denotes, we should also identify the function F served by C. How best to identify conceptual functions (Jorem 2022; Thomasson 2024; 2025a) partly depends on one’s interpretation of conceptual function. On a semantic tool conception of concepts and a motivation-based interpretation of conceptual function, identifying F is a matter of identifying the concept users’ shared central motivation for retaining it in their repertoire (Kazankov 2025).

In the evaluative stage, we can ask whether that function should be served at all. This is what Thomasson suggests is one of the key virtues of function-sensitive conceptual engineering. If the function should be served, then we can ask whether the concept serves it well enough. If it does, no action is required. But if it doesn’t, then we should resort to semantic revision, i.e. revising the meaning of a lexical term. For many, this is where conceptual engineering begins and ends. However, being attentive to conceptual function reveals that it can go much further: it can also entail functional abandonment, creation, and revision. Indeed, if the function shouldn’t be served, we can ask whether the concept should serve another function instead and engage in functional revision by identifying a new function for the concept while preserving both its lexical term and its meaning. In short, this paper develops and defends an account of conceptual amelioration attentive to its epistemic and semantic dimensions, as well as its underexplored functional dimension.

In this paper, I respond to two objections to Individualism, though most of my focus will be on the second. The first objection is that

(a) Individualism is committed the supervenience of the social on facts about individuals—specifically, that there can be no change in a social fact without a change in a psychological fact;
(b) this supervenience claim is demonstrably false (Epstein 2009, 2015; Haslanger 2022; Hindriks 2013; Elder-Vass 2017)

This objection depends on the observation that we can intentionally set up conditions which do not involve social properties of any sort for something or someone having a certain social status, e.g., membership or eligibility for membership in an institutional group, which may obtain or not without our knowing or believing or suspecting that they do. In that case, something can have a certain status which is a social fact, though we could imagine holding fixed everyone’s psychological states and varying the non-social properties or facts so that the person or thing did not meet the condition.

The second related objection relies on the distinction between anchoring and grounding introduced by Brian Epstein (2015). Anchoring introduces what Epstein calls frame principles which specify the grounds for the application of a social category. The distinction between anchoring and grounding is used to criticize individualism. Epstein characterizes ontological individualism as the view that what grounds social facts are individualistic facts. Given how the distinction between anchoring and grounding facts is drawn, it is easy to see that ontological individualism, so defined, is false. For the grounding facts cited in the frame principle need not involve psychological properties, and they can change independently of psychological properties.

I’ll grant that some defenders of Individualism have stated the thesis in a way that makes it vulnerable to the first objection (e.g., (Currie 1984)), but I will provide a formulation of what I call Explanatory Individualism which avoids the first objection, or so I’ll argue.

The response to the second objection is to reject the characterization ontological individualism in terms Epstein’s notion of grounding since it does not involve necessitation. Epstein considers an objection in the neighborhood he calls conjunctivism (the social facts have two grounds, the anchoring facts and grounding facts) and argues it is inconsistent. But conjunctivism is not the proper response by the Individualist, and I explain why, and argue that the terminology of anchoring and grounding is misleading, and that we’d do best to put the story in neutral terms, which reveals the phenomenon to be ordinary and unsurprising.

Social kinds and social roles are both central to social ontology, and would appear to be closely related. Indeed, in many cases, we might think, belonging to a certain social kind just amounts to contingently occupying an appropriate social role. To take a relatively uncontroversial example, for someone to belong to the kind judge is just for that person to contingently occupy the role of being a judge.

According to a broadly reductive approach to social ontology, many other cases can be treated similarly. For a group of people to belong to the kind court is just for them to contingently occupy the role of being a court. For a building to belong to the kind courthouse is just for it to contingently occupy the role of being a courthouse. For a piece of paper to belong to the kind writ is just for it to contingently occupy the role of being a writ. For a proposition to belong to the kind international law is just for it to contingently occupy the role of being an international law. And so on.

But what are social roles, and how exactly do they relate to social kinds? I’d say that social roles are best understood as properties, and so are social kinds; so each social role can be identified with its corresponding kind. E.g. the role of being a judge is just the property of being a judge; and this property is identical to the kind judge.

Indeed, there’s an evident analogy between social roles and their corresponding social kinds. For instance, the social role of being a judge is temporarily instantiated by each person who is a judge, and that person is assigned this role ultimately in virtue of suitable collective attitudes (of recognizing legal authority, etc.) in the relevant population. Likewise the social kind judge is temporarily instantiated by each person who is a judge, and that person is assigned to this kind ultimately in virtue of suitable collective attitudes. This analogy suggests that each social role can in fact be identified with the corresponding social kind, for greater theoretical simplicity. Besides, if both kinds and roles are generally identified with their corresponding properties, the suggested identification between each role and its corresponding kind becomes unavoidable.

Still, social philosophers have usually treated such kinds and roles as separate entities. In response, I’ll argue that the apparent differences between our talk of “social kinds” and “social roles” are superficial, and do not undermine the hypothesized identity claim. Every social role is a property and hence a kind, I’ll argue, even if not every social kind and property is a role.

I’ll also address general worries about identifying kinds with properties, argue against restrictive notions of kinds that are inimical to my proposal, and compare it with recent proposals to identify (some or all) social kinds with their corresponding groups.

See Keynotes

Room 5

Gender theories which invoke essences are viewed with suspicion. Many accounts of gender deny that properties like being a woman, or man, or genderfluid, have essences, since such essences have been used to marginalize and exclude.

Consequently, there is hardly any discussion of whether individual people have gender properties essentially. That is unfortunate, since many people report that they are essentially thus-and-so gender. Not everyone does: many report that their gender is not essential to them. But many report the opposite: gender is part of their essence. Consider the following examples, focusing largely on testimony from trans and non-binary individuals.

(1) “[Gender] is the essentialness of oneself, the psyche, the fragment of unity” (Morris, 1974/2002, p. 20).
(2) “I had no doubt at all as to [whether being a woman] was my essential self” (ibid).
(3) Green quotes Blake as reporting that “I still experience my family’s interpretation [of my gender] as a failure to grasp my essential maleness” (2004, p. 71).
(4) Green quotes his former partner, Samantha, as reporting that she has “known all along that [Green] is essentially a man” (2004, p. 139).
(5) “Academics are afraid of being called essentialists, but I am not afraid of saying that as an artist and as a human being I am motivated to express both the core and essence of my being-ness” (Green, 2006, p. 506).

Note that many of (1)-(5) make claims which are ontological rather than epistemic. In (1) and (2), for instance, Morris does not claim that being a woman is essential to their sense of self, or how they understand themselves. Morris claims that being a woman is their essential self. Similarly, in (3), Blake does not assert that their maleness is essential to how they conceive of themselves, or anything epistemic. Blake asserts their essential maleness. In (4), Samantha does not assert that Green essentially conceives of himself as a man: she has always known that Green just is essentially a man, full-stop. In (5), Green suggests that essence-talk, of the sort which academics eschew, concerns the core and essence of his being-ness. By invoking being, Green conveys that the essences in question concern his ontological self.

The accounts of gender mentioned earlier do not accommodate reports like these. At best, they are simply silent on the matter. At worst, they eschew essences altogether. And either way, a problem arises: an account of gender is inadequate if it does not accommodate widespread, coherent, sincere first-person reports about what gender is like for agents.

In this paper, I propose a view of the relationship between gender and individuals’ essences which respects reports like (1)-(5). The view: gender properties are essential to some, but not all, individuals. Then I clarify various aspects of this view, and argue for it: the argument employs a specific theory of how individuals’ deliberative activities can constitute facts about their own gender essences.

Accounts of gender terms have been pursued within what is known as ameliorative frameworks (e.g., Haslanger (2000)), where the aim is to provide meanings of the target expressions that serve political, emancipatory goals. In this paper, we propose one such account, starting from what we take to be a suitable descriptive account of terms such as “woman”, “man”, etc. The main claim we make is that a polysemy approach is suitable for both a descriptive and an ameliorative project; and although polysemy views have been proposed in the literature (e.g., Bettcher (2009), Laskowski (2020)), we offer a substantive implementation of the claim that gender terms are polysemous by appealing to theories from the field of lexical semantics.
Thus, we start by paying close attention to the various uses a term like “woman” has: it can be used in a biological sense, in a social role sense, in a self-identificatory sense and (we submit) in an evaluative sense. While this list is not exhaustive, we claim that a suitable model for this variety of uses is what is known as “rich-lexicon theories” (e.g., Jackendoff (1990), Pustejovsky (1995), del Pinal (2018), Zeman (2022)); according to such theories, the lexical entry of a word is comprised of various interrelated meaning dimensions from which one or several are selected as the term’s sense in a certain context. We provide a tentative lexical entry for “woman” and show how the various uses mentioned above can be accounted for by the mechanisms of foregrounding and backgrounding of one or more meaning dimensions.
We then show that an ameliorative proposal can be forged based on and starting from the concept just sketched. We first note, following Jenkins (2016), that amelioration need not come down to upholding a unique goal but can instead be multifaceted. The polysemy idea sits well with this plurality of purposes: if, for example, in a certain context the woman-as-class concept is the one needed for emancipatory purposes, then it is the social role dimension (perhaps suitably modified) that is foregrounded; if in a different context the woman-as-identity concept is the relevant one, then it is the self-identificatory dimension that is foregrounded; and so on. Ultimately, the aim of the various ameliorative projects pursued is to arrive at a lexical entry with less dimensions – precisely those consistent with the emancipatory goals (contextually) pursued.

This paper contributes to the discussion regarding the construction gender categories in sport. The public debate on the issue is very heated, especially when it comes to the inclusion of trans and intersex individuals in gendered sport categories. Two very recent cases: of the swimmer Lia Thomas, who is a trans woman, and of boxer Imane Khelif, who has been labelled intersex by the media illustrate this point.
In the academic debate, there are three main positions concerning the necessity of gender categorization in sport (i.e., separate categories for men and women), and membership criteria into the gender categories: Anatomists, Identitist, and Abolitionists. In a nutshell, Anatomists believe that there should be gender categories in professional sport competition, and membership in these categories ought to be based on gender ascribed at birth (i.e., ‘biological sex). Identitists also claim that sport competition ought to be divides between genders, but being included in a given category should be decided by what gender the athlete identifies with (i.e., ‘gender identity’). Abolitionists believe that there should be no gender division in professional sport, since any attempt to construct the gender categories will be arbitrary to some extent, given the variety of gender features that may be chosen for membership criteria.
In this paper we propose a fourth position in the debate: the Constructivist position. It is based on a premise that there ought to be gender categorization in professional sport, but the categories should be constructed around the socially understood concept of gender, i.e., as a member of what gender category is the athlete recognized by their community. The Constructivist position is built around a premise that fairness is a fundamental value in sport, and because we live in a sexist society, social gender of the athlete may significantly influence their chances in sport competition.

In a nutshell, the argument can be presented in the following form:
(P1) Fairness constitutes a fundamental value in sport competition.
(P2) Sport competition is not fair if a competitor has an unfair advantage over others.
(P3) In a sexist society there are psychological differences between men and women.
(P4) Psychological differences between men and women converts into advantages in sport competition.
(P5) Psychological advantages of men over women in sport competition are unfair.
(P6) Constructivist approach to gender provides the best proxy for tracking unfair psychological advantages of men over women.
(C) Constructivist approach to gender safeguards the value of fairness in sport competition to the greatest extent.

In the paper we will present the argument for the Constructivist position, and show how it manages to make sense of cases of trans and intersex athletes, i.e., cases where the Anatomists, Identitists, and Abolitionists struggle.

In recent years, the ontology of gender has garnered renewed interest in feminist metaphysics (Ásta 2018; Witt 2011; Haslanger 2000; Jenkins 2016; Cull 2019; Diaz-Leon 2024; Dembroff 2018). Within that literature, several competing accounts of gender have been offered to shed light on what it would take for one to fall under the category of “man” or “woman”. Yet, few have discussed the nature of gender archetypes (e.g., femininity or masculinity) (Andler 2023). These are nonetheless central concepts in our culture – with, for instance, the rise of “positive masculinity” in recent years (Waling 2019) – but also in feminist theory. The term “masculinity” has been central to our theories about many social facts including feminist political resistance with “female masculinity” (Halberstam 2018), the “masculine” character of political sovereignty (Mann 2014), and the manifestations of men’s domination with “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell 2005; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). The term “femininity” also continues to be central to feminist theory, namely in trans philosophy (Serano 2007; Kimoto 2024), but also elsewhere (Jaggar 1995). Despite their ubiquity, the existence, nature, and function of gender archetypes remain unclear. Researchers use these terms in conflicting ways while trying to track something which they take to be a “real” part of the social world. As one men’s studies researcher put it: “it may well be the best kept secret of the literature on masculinities that we have an extremely ill-defined idea of what we are talking about” (Clatterbaugh 1998). From that follows a series of questions; How do gender archetypes exist as parts of our world? What is their meaning and functions? Why do we have these concepts?

Using Amie Thomasson’s “easy ontology”, this presentation will give an account of the metaphysics of these types which will help answer these questions by clarifying their social function. More precisely, I will argue that gender archetypes exist as ideal gendered models whose function is to maintain or stabilize the gendered nature of our societies. In other words, gender archetypes, by positioning certain things as uniquely aspirational for a particular gender, ensure that our societies remain structured along gendered lines. I will then compare this account with Matthew Andler’s (2023) account of masculinities as homeostatic property cluster (HPC) kinds – the only competing view on the metaphysics of gender archetypes. I will show that my view presents many advantages over his relative to its ability to account for our linguistic practices and the function of those concepts. I will then consider how my argument fits within the broader debates around gender abolition – the view that feminists should aim for a society freed of gender (Mikkola 2016; Cull 2019). By using Thomasson’s framework, I also hope to demonstrate that “easy ontology” can help make progress relative to problems in social ontology and feminist metaphysics.

Gender is not one thing; gender is many things. This is true both at the level of society, but also at the level of an individual. In my presentation, I study the ontology of gender by drawing distinctions corresponding to ontologically distinct, but in practice often causally interconnected, aspects of the gender of an individual person. I argue that to understand the gender of an individual, as well as the various philosophical theories metaphysics of gender that seem to contradict each other by stating incompatible facts about gender, we need a more detailed distinction between ontologically separate aspects of an gender than the traditional feminist distinction between (biological) sex and (social) gender. I propose that at least the following aspects of an individual’s gender are ontologically distinct from one another:

a) everyday life as a being of a certain gender,
b) legal/official gender status,
c) (biological) sex,
d) (experienced) gender identity, and
e) interpersonal gender.

I argue these are ontologically and not just conceptually distinct from each other, because these are constituted by ontologically different kinds of things; in other words, their metaphysical constitution differs from one another. For example, the experienced gender identity is constituted by individual’s own mental states, whereas an individual’s interpersonal gender is constituted by how other people treat them (see Ásta 2018 and Jenkins 2023). Legal gender status depends on legislation, and sex on bodily characteristics. An individual’s everyday life as a particular gender is, in turn, most fruitfully studied as a process filled with performatives.

Moreover, these aspects behave differently over time: for instance, interpersonal gender may change radically from one situation to another over the course of just a few minutes, while gender identity changes more slowly. For an individual, these different aspects of gender may vary independently of each other, even though prevailing thought holds that they should all refer to one and the same unified gender. There are situations where a person is categorized belonging to certain gender if only one of those aspects refer to that gender, or, on the other hand, situations where all of them refer to same gender. I argue that none of those is “the real meaning” of what it is to being of a certain gender and also that in a situation where all those different aspects of an individual refer to same gender, it would create a single ontologically unified feature of “being of a certain gender” or that this would make someone being of certain gender more true or real than in someone not in same situation. Rather, in different situations different aspects of certain gender are relevant, and what is considered to be the most important aspect varies from context to another and often is a topic of ongoing political struggle.

This paper develops a functionalist account of sex and gender aimed at contributing to a trans-inclusive metaphysics grounded in embodied phenomenology. The central claim is that functionalist approaches are well suited to explaining why certain configurations of sexed and gendered embodiment are experienced as coherent and livable for a subject, while others are destabilising or dysphoria-inducing, without appeal to preference, social endorsement, or discursive stipulation. The paper proceeds in four stages. First, I identify a shared theoretical core in the work of Linda Martín Alcoff (2006) and Charlotte Witt (2011). Despite their differences, both reject a strict sex/gender distinction, resist purely discursive accounts of gender, and treat reproduction as playing a metaphysically anchoring role in grounding the significance of sex and gender. I argue that these shared commitments provide both the means and the motivation for building toward a realist and functionalist approach to sex/gender. Second, I draw out a theoretical asymmetry between their views. Alcoff offers a detailed account of the phenomenological mediation of sexed embodiment, but does not develop a corresponding account of the metaphysical role of gender. Witt, by contrast, develops a systematic functionalist account of gender as a unifying principle, but locates this role primarily at the level of social roles and normative structures, largely setting aside embodied phenomenology. I suggest that this asymmetry reveals a limitation internal to Witt’s functionalist framework: while gender is correctly identified as performing a unifying role, insufficient attention is paid to what exactly gender must unify once a strict sex/gender distinction is rejected, and to how biological, social, and subjective dimensions of sex/gender are integrated into a single mode of lived existence. Third, the paper advances an alternative account of gender’s unifying role. Drawing on Gayle Salamon (2011) I locate gender’s unificatory function at the level of embodied phenomenology. On this view, gender unifies affect, bodily orientation, agency, vulnerability, anticipation, and erotic salience into a coherent orientation toward the social world. While gender continues to structure the organisation of social roles and positions, this organisation is treated as downstream of the phenomenological orientation through which such roles are inhabited. Finally, the paper introduces pleasure as an essential affective dimension of gendered embodiment. Pleasure is characterised as the affective registration of embodied coherence and livability, functioning either as a distinct dimension of gender’s metaphysical role or as an internal success condition on its unifying function. Taken together, the framework preserves central realist and functionalist commitments in feminist theories of sex and gender while providing new conceptual resources for a trans-inclusive metaphysics grounded in embodied phenomenology.

Consider this dispute:

A: Trans women are women; they self-identify as women.
B: No, trans women aren’t women; they lack female reproductive biology.

This dispute is distinctively sticky: even once the empirical evidence is settled and differences in word usage made explicit, it may persist. Moreover, the stickiness doesn’t arise from directly incompatible normative stances, nor from straightforward unintelligibility. So where does it come from?

Some propose it arises because disputants are indirectly communicating competing normative commitments (McGrath 2021, Knoll 2022, Kukla & Lance 2023, Cosker-Rowland 2024, Richardson 2025). However, these ‘indirect normativity’ approaches get things front-to-back: they imply descriptive properties matter because of antecedent normative commitments, whereas disputants typically argue that normative conclusions follow from descriptive facts (see also Zhou 2025, p.10).

Others propose the stickiness arises because disputants inadvertently invoke incompatible not-at-issue assumptions (Richard 2024, Zhou 2025). However, these ‘indirect unintelligibility’ approaches incur empirical commitments that aren’t borne out. Presuppositions characteristically project (Karttunen 1974; Heim 1983). Consider:

(2) A. The theater will show the movie again.
B. The theater will not show the movie again.

2A presupposes the theater showed the movie before. This presupposition survives negation in 2B (Kripke 2009). Yet the `woman’ dispute doesn’t work this way. For instance, on Zhou’s story, 1A presupposes self-identification should structure social interpretation. When 1B negates 1A’s claim, this presupposition isn’t preserved; instead, 1B presupposes reproductive biology should structure interpretation.

In this talk, I offer a new approach, where ‘woman’ is multidimensional—its application depends on how an entity fares along multiple respects of T-ness (Hedden & D’Ambrosio 2024). Relevant respects may include anatomy, hormones, gender identity, and social position. Individuals occupy different positions along these dimensions, which are aggregated into an overall judgment. The appropriate aggregation function partly depends on context, but it’s also crucially dependent on speakers’ perspectives—i.e., their open-ended dispositions to produce intuitive thought structures about particular subjects (Camp 2019).

The multidimensionality approach explains the stickiness: because perspectives are shaped by deeply held moral and political commitments, they resist revision even once agreement over empirical and linguistic facts is achieved. The approach also gets the right explanatory order: because perspectives don’t determine which dimensions exist, but only their relative weights, the normative is downstream from the descriptive. And the approach is semantically adequate: because perspectives aren’t lexically encoded presuppositions, but elements of speakers’ evaluative stances, they’re correctly predicted to not project.

Edit

See Keynotes

Room 6

Negligent wrongdoing challenges legal scholars and philosophers alike. A negligent agent is ignorant of the potential harm they might cause. However, they are usually not intentionally ignorant but due to inattention or forgetfulness. Thereby, their ignorance is not obviously blameworthy, yet they seem to have done something wrong. This issue becomes even more difficult when considering the negligent misconduct of group agents such as corporations. The involvement of multiple individuals and the complexity of corporate structure complicate the attribution of ignorance and assessment of responsibility. In my presentation, I will outline the UK’s Corporate Manslaughter and Homicide Act 2007, which seeks to penalise corporations for negligent killings. I will use this example to illustrate the problem of negligent corporate wrongdoing and to highlight the legal difficulties in addressing collective epistemic shortcomings and the harm they cause. I aim to solve this problem in two steps:

First, I will present a way to categorise different types of group ignorance and identify negligence as one such category. This typology encompasses various aspects of group ignorance, including, for example, how information and ignorance are distributed among members, whether the ignorance is wilful or unwilful, and whether the cause of ignorance originates at the collective or individual level. To determine how moral and, later, legal blame should be assigned in such cases, we need to examine these aspects and their implications for responsibility.

In the second step, I will provide a list of conditions under which a corporation can be held morally responsible despite its ignorance, with a particular focus on the special case of negligence. The typology, combined with criteria for assessing the responsibility of an ignorant group agent, can serve as a tool for evaluating real-world cases. It helps identify a corporation’s epistemic shortcomings, their connection to subsequent harm, and their implications for its responsibility.

Ultimately, I will offer a recommendation on how this method could be used to provide a minimally invasive solution for legal models such as the Corporate Manslaughter Act. Moreover, my analysis presents a novel approach to responsibility for negligent wrongdoing: when holding a negligent agent accountable for harm they caused, we should not only consider the cause of their ignorance in determining their blameworthiness. We must also examine the available courses of action at the time, and despite the ignorance, to judge how they could and should have acted instead.

Edit

Edit

In this paper, we address a puzzle at the intersection of epistemic injustice and moral responsibility. We understand testimonial privilege as a condition in which some individuals, qua members of socially salient groups, are systematically granted more credibility than others due to entrenched prejudicial norms and assumptions. Whenever credibility assessments are shaped by such norms, we assume that a distinctive testimonial wrong occurs in which the victim is the agent receiving less credibility than warranted. The central question we investigate is whether those who enact testimonial privilege are fitting objects of blame.
We start by pointing out that attempts to ground blameworthiness in these cases fail. First, we show that testimonial privilege can arise without agents violating epistemic or moral norms. Given the deep embedding of prejudicial norms within ordinary epistemic practices, it is often unreasonable to demand that agents critically reassess the very background assumptions they rely on to evaluate testimony. Second, we challenge attempts to attribute responsibility purely based on quality of will. While patterns of credibility assessment associated with testimonial privilege may reasonably be interpreted as expressing disregard toward certain groups, it does not follow that the agents who employ those patterns themselves express a poor quality of will.
Despite rejecting blameworthiness, we defend a limited and novel role for the expression of blame in cases of testimonial privilege. We argue that expressing blame toward agents who are not morally responsible can nevertheless be fitting when blame is understood as a way of giving moral evidence of wrongdoing. The evidence given should not be taken by the blamed agents to entail that they are responsible for wrongdoing, but that they are agentially involved in morally significant harm. We claim that this form of blame seeks a kind of first-person reactive attitude in response that is akin to agent-regret.
This form of blame functions as a primarily communicative response that censures past behavior, protests one’s suffering of harm, and demands moral recognition, even when it does not track culpability. We emphasize that this is not a sui generis but an ordinary form of blame, familiar to anyone who has been unfairly but unwittingly mistreated, and who seeks to remedy the wrongdoer’s ignorance.
Finally, we articulate two fittingness constraints on such blame. First, since blaming is supposed to induce a negative emotion in the blamed agent, its expression must be proportionate to the gravity of the act, even if not to the gravity of their culpability. Second, blame-as-giving-evidence is justified only when there is a reasonable prospect that the target agent is susceptible to the moral evidence it provides. Together, these constraints explain how blaming those that enact testimonial privilege can be justified without presupposing their moral culpability.

Many people who have been sexually assaulted resist the label “victim”, for understandable reasons: victimhood is closely associated with passivity and powerlessness. Nonetheless, this resistance is puzzling. How else are we to call someone who has undergone abuse, violence or rape?
I develop a conceptual analysis of victimhood, with a particular focus on cases of sexual violence. Contemporary accounts of victimhood insist on the passivity of the victim, at least in the face of the harms she suffered, in order to highlight her innocence (Govier 2015, Jeong 2025). This leads to the construction of paradigmatic figures of victimhood as either the pathetic or the heroic victim (Meyers 2016). But this is often deterring for victims who do not recognize themselves as such. A victim might want to regain agency, while the concept of victimhood tends to confine her to a position of passivity (Raghavan 2024, Kogl 2025). As Govier (2015) points out, identification with victimhood might even lead her to dwell on past wrongs and regard herself as powerless and weak. These tensions surrounding victimhood motivate Meyers (2016) to highlight the burdened agency, rather than passivity, of victims. I will show that, because this account still rests on the agency/passivity dichotomy, the core issue stays unresolved. One must ask: if the concept of victimhood is off-putting, and in some cases even deleterious for people who have suffered harms and wrongs, should it be abandoned?
I argue that the concept of victimhood can be rehabilitated if redefined using conceptual engineering. Conceptual engineers have argued that attention to the function of a concept can motivate the project of transforming or abandoning it (Haslanger 2000, Cappelen 2023, Thomasson 2025). Why do we have the concept of victimhood? Victimhood designates people who have been wronged, and this is useful, I argue, because they are owed some moral goods. Thus, its function is to help us identify cases where some form of moral repair is due. Accordingly, claiming victimhood enables the victim to demand the moral repair she is due, making her an agent of her healing and recovery. To properly function as such, victimhood must not be pejorative or deterring for victims. Instead of focusing on passivity or burdened agency, victimhood should be defined as a moral status, that of people who are owed moral repair, which can take the form of various moral goods such as attention, excuses, symbolic and material compensations or even epistemic repair (Urban Walker 2006, Lackey 2025). This original account of victimhood is compatible with both agency and passivity, which answers the preoccupations aforementioned. Furthermore, it sheds new light on issues that have been raised both in scholarly and social debates – such as the debate between identifying as victim or as survivor, as well as questions surrounding the temporality of victimhood and the injunction to move on after rape or sexual assault.

In this paper, I argue that solidarity, as a relationship of cooperative struggle against an imposing problem or injustice, grounded in conflict and the material interdependence of all political subjects, is a uniquely valuable identity-constituting relationship. Solidarity provides subjects with a shared framework for developing a moral understanding of the relevant injustice (Dishaw 2024), reinforced through both inter- and intra-group conflict (DuFord 2022). Solidary subjects debate tactics and disagree on strategies, yet ‘win’ and ‘lose’ cooperative actions together, ultimately strengthening the shared moral understanding at the foundation of those disagreements. Solidarity reflects what matters most to people, as it is will-dependent (i.e., it must be chosen) and cause-mediated (i.e., it is oriented toward a specific problem/injustice) (Viehoff 2025). For instance, the solidarity within a labor union is not borne of a shared identity of ‘organizer’ or ‘co-/worker’; it arises from a personal, voluntary commitment to opposing exploitation in the specific, relevant workplace and the recognition that one cannot successfully combat workplace exploitation alone. The amalgamation of personal dedication to the cause and the recognition of the necessity of cooperation for its success fosters a trusting discursive environment in which the advantages of various direct-action tactics are vigorously debated. Ironically, this process of internal conflict enables those in solidarity to articulate a unified external voice, thereby constituting the solidary group (Pettit 2025). Moreover, this process actively shapes a shared moral understanding of the particular exploitation (or injustice), a process that affords autonomous creation of their evaluative outlooks—and thus, their selves. Solidarity does not simply illuminate interdependence among those already in solidarity but also affords a new way of evaluating—and thus, strategically addressing—chronic problems once thought ontologically immovable. As this foundation of autonomous self-creation, solidarity is an intrinsically valuable relationship independent of the goals a solidary group pursues.
This paper presents a theoretical argument regarding the nature of solidarity with normative implications, grounded in social-ontological theory and ethnographic research on direct action groups (David Graeber’s Direct Action; Shon Meckfessel’s Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used to Be), as well as autoethnographic work on my higher education union. Consequently, my account more accurately reflects the lived experiences of those actively organizing in solidarity and, furthermore, suggests that the obligations of solidarity are best understood as joint and non-transmissible (see: Mellor 2024, 2025). This approach thereby complicates longstanding assumptions concerning the interpersonal and reciprocal nature of solidarity’s obligations, offering a novel perspective in its place.

My presentation inquires into the social ontology of conflict by situating John Dewey’s political philosophy within contemporary social-ontological debates on the constitution of social groups. While Dewey does not use technical social-ontological vocabulary himself, I suggest—following recent scholarship (Särkelä 2021; Testa 2017)—that his framework offers a genuine social ontology that anticipates and extends Brian Epstein’s (2015; 2019) account of social groups by adding social conflicts to social ontology’s agenda.

I identify two distinct social-ontological perspectives on conflict in Dewey’s work. First, from the individualist perspective, conflict is understood as the friction between the individual agent and social institutions, norms, and practices, meaning that conflicts can be mitigated by harmonising individual and societal interests. Conversely, from the group-based perspective, conflict takes place between social groups that are constituted along conflicting interests. It is therefore necessary to understand the role this very friction plays in the constitution of social groups. Unlike standard “deliberative” readings of Dewey that focus on pacification through participation and communication, I argue that the group-based view conceptualises social groups in relational terms as entities competing for limited resources. In this latter view, conflict is not a residual category of social integration but a driving and irreducible force of social dynamics.

This Deweyan framework provides a necessary intervention in two areas:

(1) For social ontology, it suggests a robust account of what role social conflicts play in the formation and persistence of social groups. More precisely, its emphasis on social dynamics based on what the literature calls “habit ontology” (Gregoratto and Särkelä 2020; Testa 2017) moves beyond the mainstream models centred around collective acceptance (Searle 2006) and joint or shared action (Gilbert 1989), which often struggle to account for groups defined by systemic friction.

(2) For social theory, it offers a path beyond deliberative ideal theory (e.g. Rawls 1971; Habermas 1984) and the Heideggerian/Schmittian agonism of Laclau and Mouffe (2014). While Dewey shares the view that conflict is a basic social category, his social ontology in combination with his social philosophy avoids the ethicalisation and over-valorisation of conflict found in agonistic democratic theory.

My presentation proceeds in four steps: I begin with an outline of Dewey’s habit ontology in order to demonstrate its relevance for social ontology. This is followed, second, by a reconstruction of the individualist vs. group-based ontological notions of conflict I identify in Dewey. Third, I criticise the conflict-aversion of standard intentionalist approaches through a Deweyan lens. Ultimately, I conclude by arguing that conflict-based ontology enhances our understanding of social groups and their dynamics.

Who is worthy of distrust? Usually those who harm us by acting unjustly, betray and disappoint our trust. What if those are the actions of a whole group of people, can we generalize and just deem anyone who might be in that group untrustworthy? In this paper I evaluate the epistemic warrant needed for distrust based on generalizations. My analysis stems from Meena Krishnamurthy’s article “(White) Tyranny and the Democratic Value of Distrust” (The Monist, 2015). Here Krishnamurthy offers a normative account of distrust based on Martin Luther King’s writings, which consist in the confident belief that a subject will not act justly on their own. The target for King are White Moderates whom he distrust to act according to racial justice. Furthermore, the argument maintains that based on this confident belief the African American community is warranted social distrust, i.e. distrust toward members of another group based on the generalization that they will not act justly. The political outcomes of social distrust are claimed to be positive as they defend from abuses of power and motivate social movement for change.
While the political benefits of distrust are numerous, my goal is to analyse its epistemic grounds namely whether distrust of a person based on a generalization about the group they are members of can be epistemically justified. First, I show that distrust based on generalization poses the risk of epistemic irrationality and injustice. Yet, in many cases we would find it reasonable for a member of an oppressed group to distrust a member of the dominant group on the basis of a generalization. Second, I offer a solution to this tension by introducing an understanding of distrust that bridges the epistemic and the moral dimension. I claim that distrust is essentially a defensive attitude and it is epistemically and morally warranted only when given evidence of future harm one adopts it to protect oneself and others. I then adopt a structural understanding of generics to show that defensive distrust based on generic generalization about a group is warranted when certain social and institutional oppressive structures are in place, providing evidence of future harm. Finally, I distinguish between warranted and unwarranted defensive distrust, comparing distrust held by minorities toward dominant groups and the distrust held by conspiracy groups against institutions. By drawing these differences I aim at demarcating a distinction between defensive distrust and political paranoia. Indeed, defensive distrust being based in evidence has the potential for resolution and repair once the oppressive structure is dismantled. In turn, political paranoia cannot lead to social change because it does not track actual harmful structures in society.

See Keynotes

Room 7

Negligent wrongdoing challenges legal scholars and philosophers alike. A negligent agent is ignorant of the potential harm they might cause. However, they are usually not intentionally ignorant but due to inattention or forgetfulness. Thereby, their ignorance is not obviously blameworthy, yet they seem to have done something wrong. This issue becomes even more difficult when considering the negligent misconduct of group agents such as corporations. The involvement of multiple individuals and the complexity of corporate structure complicate the attribution of ignorance and assessment of responsibility. In my presentation, I will outline the UK’s Corporate Manslaughter and Homicide Act 2007, which seeks to penalise corporations for negligent killings. I will use this example to illustrate the problem of negligent corporate wrongdoing and to highlight the legal difficulties in addressing collective epistemic shortcomings and the harm they cause. I aim to solve this problem in two steps:

First, I will present a way to categorise different types of group ignorance and identify negligence as one such category. This typology encompasses various aspects of group ignorance, including, for example, how information and ignorance are distributed among members, whether the ignorance is wilful or unwilful, and whether the cause of ignorance originates at the collective or individual level. To determine how moral and, later, legal blame should be assigned in such cases, we need to examine these aspects and their implications for responsibility.

In the second step, I will provide a list of conditions under which a corporation can be held morally responsible despite its ignorance, with a particular focus on the special case of negligence. The typology, combined with criteria for assessing the responsibility of an ignorant group agent, can serve as a tool for evaluating real-world cases. It helps identify a corporation’s epistemic shortcomings, their connection to subsequent harm, and their implications for its responsibility.

Ultimately, I will offer a recommendation on how this method could be used to provide a minimally invasive solution for legal models such as the Corporate Manslaughter Act. Moreover, my analysis presents a novel approach to responsibility for negligent wrongdoing: when holding a negligent agent accountable for harm they caused, we should not only consider the cause of their ignorance in determining their blameworthiness. We must also examine the available courses of action at the time, and despite the ignorance, to judge how they could and should have acted instead.

Edit

Edit

In this paper, we address a puzzle at the intersection of epistemic injustice and moral responsibility. We understand testimonial privilege as a condition in which some individuals, qua members of socially salient groups, are systematically granted more credibility than others due to entrenched prejudicial norms and assumptions. Whenever credibility assessments are shaped by such norms, we assume that a distinctive testimonial wrong occurs in which the victim is the agent receiving less credibility than warranted. The central question we investigate is whether those who enact testimonial privilege are fitting objects of blame.
We start by pointing out that attempts to ground blameworthiness in these cases fail. First, we show that testimonial privilege can arise without agents violating epistemic or moral norms. Given the deep embedding of prejudicial norms within ordinary epistemic practices, it is often unreasonable to demand that agents critically reassess the very background assumptions they rely on to evaluate testimony. Second, we challenge attempts to attribute responsibility purely based on quality of will. While patterns of credibility assessment associated with testimonial privilege may reasonably be interpreted as expressing disregard toward certain groups, it does not follow that the agents who employ those patterns themselves express a poor quality of will.
Despite rejecting blameworthiness, we defend a limited and novel role for the expression of blame in cases of testimonial privilege. We argue that expressing blame toward agents who are not morally responsible can nevertheless be fitting when blame is understood as a way of giving moral evidence of wrongdoing. The evidence given should not be taken by the blamed agents to entail that they are responsible for wrongdoing, but that they are agentially involved in morally significant harm. We claim that this form of blame seeks a kind of first-person reactive attitude in response that is akin to agent-regret.
This form of blame functions as a primarily communicative response that censures past behavior, protests one’s suffering of harm, and demands moral recognition, even when it does not track culpability. We emphasize that this is not a sui generis but an ordinary form of blame, familiar to anyone who has been unfairly but unwittingly mistreated, and who seeks to remedy the wrongdoer’s ignorance.
Finally, we articulate two fittingness constraints on such blame. First, since blaming is supposed to induce a negative emotion in the blamed agent, its expression must be proportionate to the gravity of the act, even if not to the gravity of their culpability. Second, blame-as-giving-evidence is justified only when there is a reasonable prospect that the target agent is susceptible to the moral evidence it provides. Together, these constraints explain how blaming those that enact testimonial privilege can be justified without presupposing their moral culpability.

Many people who have been sexually assaulted resist the label “victim”, for understandable reasons: victimhood is closely associated with passivity and powerlessness. Nonetheless, this resistance is puzzling. How else are we to call someone who has undergone abuse, violence or rape?
I develop a conceptual analysis of victimhood, with a particular focus on cases of sexual violence. Contemporary accounts of victimhood insist on the passivity of the victim, at least in the face of the harms she suffered, in order to highlight her innocence (Govier 2015, Jeong 2025). This leads to the construction of paradigmatic figures of victimhood as either the pathetic or the heroic victim (Meyers 2016). But this is often deterring for victims who do not recognize themselves as such. A victim might want to regain agency, while the concept of victimhood tends to confine her to a position of passivity (Raghavan 2024, Kogl 2025). As Govier (2015) points out, identification with victimhood might even lead her to dwell on past wrongs and regard herself as powerless and weak. These tensions surrounding victimhood motivate Meyers (2016) to highlight the burdened agency, rather than passivity, of victims. I will show that, because this account still rests on the agency/passivity dichotomy, the core issue stays unresolved. One must ask: if the concept of victimhood is off-putting, and in some cases even deleterious for people who have suffered harms and wrongs, should it be abandoned?
I argue that the concept of victimhood can be rehabilitated if redefined using conceptual engineering. Conceptual engineers have argued that attention to the function of a concept can motivate the project of transforming or abandoning it (Haslanger 2000, Cappelen 2023, Thomasson 2025). Why do we have the concept of victimhood? Victimhood designates people who have been wronged, and this is useful, I argue, because they are owed some moral goods. Thus, its function is to help us identify cases where some form of moral repair is due. Accordingly, claiming victimhood enables the victim to demand the moral repair she is due, making her an agent of her healing and recovery. To properly function as such, victimhood must not be pejorative or deterring for victims. Instead of focusing on passivity or burdened agency, victimhood should be defined as a moral status, that of people who are owed moral repair, which can take the form of various moral goods such as attention, excuses, symbolic and material compensations or even epistemic repair (Urban Walker 2006, Lackey 2025). This original account of victimhood is compatible with both agency and passivity, which answers the preoccupations aforementioned. Furthermore, it sheds new light on issues that have been raised both in scholarly and social debates – such as the debate between identifying as victim or as survivor, as well as questions surrounding the temporality of victimhood and the injunction to move on after rape or sexual assault.

In this paper, I argue that solidarity, as a relationship of cooperative struggle against an imposing problem or injustice, grounded in conflict and the material interdependence of all political subjects, is a uniquely valuable identity-constituting relationship. Solidarity provides subjects with a shared framework for developing a moral understanding of the relevant injustice (Dishaw 2024), reinforced through both inter- and intra-group conflict (DuFord 2022). Solidary subjects debate tactics and disagree on strategies, yet ‘win’ and ‘lose’ cooperative actions together, ultimately strengthening the shared moral understanding at the foundation of those disagreements. Solidarity reflects what matters most to people, as it is will-dependent (i.e., it must be chosen) and cause-mediated (i.e., it is oriented toward a specific problem/injustice) (Viehoff 2025). For instance, the solidarity within a labor union is not borne of a shared identity of ‘organizer’ or ‘co-/worker’; it arises from a personal, voluntary commitment to opposing exploitation in the specific, relevant workplace and the recognition that one cannot successfully combat workplace exploitation alone. The amalgamation of personal dedication to the cause and the recognition of the necessity of cooperation for its success fosters a trusting discursive environment in which the advantages of various direct-action tactics are vigorously debated. Ironically, this process of internal conflict enables those in solidarity to articulate a unified external voice, thereby constituting the solidary group (Pettit 2025). Moreover, this process actively shapes a shared moral understanding of the particular exploitation (or injustice), a process that affords autonomous creation of their evaluative outlooks—and thus, their selves. Solidarity does not simply illuminate interdependence among those already in solidarity but also affords a new way of evaluating—and thus, strategically addressing—chronic problems once thought ontologically immovable. As this foundation of autonomous self-creation, solidarity is an intrinsically valuable relationship independent of the goals a solidary group pursues.
This paper presents a theoretical argument regarding the nature of solidarity with normative implications, grounded in social-ontological theory and ethnographic research on direct action groups (David Graeber’s Direct Action; Shon Meckfessel’s Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used to Be), as well as autoethnographic work on my higher education union. Consequently, my account more accurately reflects the lived experiences of those actively organizing in solidarity and, furthermore, suggests that the obligations of solidarity are best understood as joint and non-transmissible (see: Mellor 2024, 2025). This approach thereby complicates longstanding assumptions concerning the interpersonal and reciprocal nature of solidarity’s obligations, offering a novel perspective in its place.

My presentation inquires into the social ontology of conflict by situating John Dewey’s political philosophy within contemporary social-ontological debates on the constitution of social groups. While Dewey does not use technical social-ontological vocabulary himself, I suggest—following recent scholarship (Särkelä 2021; Testa 2017)—that his framework offers a genuine social ontology that anticipates and extends Brian Epstein’s (2015; 2019) account of social groups by adding social conflicts to social ontology’s agenda.

I identify two distinct social-ontological perspectives on conflict in Dewey’s work. First, from the individualist perspective, conflict is understood as the friction between the individual agent and social institutions, norms, and practices, meaning that conflicts can be mitigated by harmonising individual and societal interests. Conversely, from the group-based perspective, conflict takes place between social groups that are constituted along conflicting interests. It is therefore necessary to understand the role this very friction plays in the constitution of social groups. Unlike standard “deliberative” readings of Dewey that focus on pacification through participation and communication, I argue that the group-based view conceptualises social groups in relational terms as entities competing for limited resources. In this latter view, conflict is not a residual category of social integration but a driving and irreducible force of social dynamics.

This Deweyan framework provides a necessary intervention in two areas:

(1) For social ontology, it suggests a robust account of what role social conflicts play in the formation and persistence of social groups. More precisely, its emphasis on social dynamics based on what the literature calls “habit ontology” (Gregoratto and Särkelä 2020; Testa 2017) moves beyond the mainstream models centred around collective acceptance (Searle 2006) and joint or shared action (Gilbert 1989), which often struggle to account for groups defined by systemic friction.

(2) For social theory, it offers a path beyond deliberative ideal theory (e.g. Rawls 1971; Habermas 1984) and the Heideggerian/Schmittian agonism of Laclau and Mouffe (2014). While Dewey shares the view that conflict is a basic social category, his social ontology in combination with his social philosophy avoids the ethicalisation and over-valorisation of conflict found in agonistic democratic theory.

My presentation proceeds in four steps: I begin with an outline of Dewey’s habit ontology in order to demonstrate its relevance for social ontology. This is followed, second, by a reconstruction of the individualist vs. group-based ontological notions of conflict I identify in Dewey. Third, I criticise the conflict-aversion of standard intentionalist approaches through a Deweyan lens. Ultimately, I conclude by arguing that conflict-based ontology enhances our understanding of social groups and their dynamics.

Who is worthy of distrust? Usually those who harm us by acting unjustly, betray and disappoint our trust. What if those are the actions of a whole group of people, can we generalize and just deem anyone who might be in that group untrustworthy? In this paper I evaluate the epistemic warrant needed for distrust based on generalizations. My analysis stems from Meena Krishnamurthy’s article “(White) Tyranny and the Democratic Value of Distrust” (The Monist, 2015). Here Krishnamurthy offers a normative account of distrust based on Martin Luther King’s writings, which consist in the confident belief that a subject will not act justly on their own. The target for King are White Moderates whom he distrust to act according to racial justice. Furthermore, the argument maintains that based on this confident belief the African American community is warranted social distrust, i.e. distrust toward members of another group based on the generalization that they will not act justly. The political outcomes of social distrust are claimed to be positive as they defend from abuses of power and motivate social movement for change.
While the political benefits of distrust are numerous, my goal is to analyse its epistemic grounds namely whether distrust of a person based on a generalization about the group they are members of can be epistemically justified. First, I show that distrust based on generalization poses the risk of epistemic irrationality and injustice. Yet, in many cases we would find it reasonable for a member of an oppressed group to distrust a member of the dominant group on the basis of a generalization. Second, I offer a solution to this tension by introducing an understanding of distrust that bridges the epistemic and the moral dimension. I claim that distrust is essentially a defensive attitude and it is epistemically and morally warranted only when given evidence of future harm one adopts it to protect oneself and others. I then adopt a structural understanding of generics to show that defensive distrust based on generic generalization about a group is warranted when certain social and institutional oppressive structures are in place, providing evidence of future harm. Finally, I distinguish between warranted and unwarranted defensive distrust, comparing distrust held by minorities toward dominant groups and the distrust held by conspiracy groups against institutions. By drawing these differences I aim at demarcating a distinction between defensive distrust and political paranoia. Indeed, defensive distrust being based in evidence has the potential for resolution and repair once the oppressive structure is dismantled. In turn, political paranoia cannot lead to social change because it does not track actual harmful structures in society.

See Keynotes

Return to Programme Overview

Thursday (23.07)

Keynote: Robin Dembroff

See Keynotes

10:30-11:00 | Coffee Break

Room 1

Please see uploaded file labeled

It has been argued that oppression exists on ontological level (Martin 2020; Jenkins 2023; Richardson 2023), based on the shared commitment that social group exists ontologically, and the fact that people perceive limitations of social behaviors based on such groups. The nature of such groups can be further debated and elaborated depending on whether people adopt discursive uses of concepts or not (Jenkins 2025; Bettcher 2025). However, there is a rich body of literature that acknowledges the phenomenological nature of social oppression: namely, oppression is a “lived” and “embodied” experience (Freeman 2015; Young 1980). I agree that a phenomenological turn towards social experiences seems to allow for a more ambiguous view on marginal social identities and social passings, but one may think such approach will reduce the value of social ontology as a discipline.

This paper intends to solve the seeming dilemma by a methodological challenge on feminist perspectives of social experiences. The aim is to capture a distinctive form of oppression based on experience: I theorize it as phenomenological oppression. The retelling of sexual harassment is understood to be difficult, not only because of the relevant communicative failures (Jenkins 2023; Brison 2002; Friker 2007). One struggles to speak, but couldn’t find the right word, understood to suffer from epistemic injustice/oppression (Fricker 2007; Dotson 2011; Li 2025). But the fact that one’s certain social grouping preconditions one’s relevant experience and one’s platform of speaking up reveals how oppression is deeply wedded with one’s ontic being, epistemic agency and embodied self (Jenkins 2023; Spivak 1985).

This paper will present the following arguments: 1) use of case as a feminist methodology should avoid over-simplification 2) phenomenological oppression as a term echo better with the situation in which a disadvantaged subject fails to communicate (negative) experiences 3) the oppression based on experiences and embodiment can be theorized with analytic feminist tools in a cautionary way. In the end, this paper intends to add value to the rich discussions of ontology and oppression with feminist phenomenology.

Theorists of oppression broadly agree that oppression is structural, yet what this claim amounts to remains contested. Despite this shared commitment, theorists diverge along several dimensions when theorizing oppression, including (1) whether oppression is group-based, and (2) whether the primary object of analysis should be the oppressiveness of social structures themselves or the patterns of injustice those structures produce. This paper argues that a satisfactory theory of oppression must account for both the oppressiveness of social structures and their relation to the patterns of injustice they generate. To that end, I offer a novel account of oppressiveness as a dispositional property of social structure: to be oppressive is to have the disposition to unjustly harm individuals who bear socially salient features. On this account, individuals with socially salient features, in virtue of being situated within oppressive social structures, are susceptible to these structures’ dispositions to unjust harm, and routinely trigger such dispositions and suffer unjust harm simply during ordinary social life.

The dispositional account provides a unified metaphysical explanation of both the oppressiveness of social structures and their relation to patterns of injustice. Because dispositions manifest in reliable and intelligible ways, patterns of injustice can be understood as the regular manifestation of oppressive structures’ disposition to unjustly harm individuals who bear socially salient features. At the same time, because dispositions can be masked by contingent factors, the account explains why some individuals with socially salient features may evade harm in particular contexts, even though the underlying structure remains oppressive. In the case of oppressiveness, I identify three common masking factors that can block or mitigate unjust harms suffered by individuals with socially salient features: (1) possessing a socially privileged identity along another axis, (2) having access to inclusive communities or emancipatory social contexts, and (3) luck.

Finally, I argue that the dispositional account yields three significant theoretical upshots. First, it unifies the analysis of oppressive social structures and patterns of injustice while making explicit an implicit understanding of oppression in the literature as structural susceptibility to harm at the individual level. Second, it remains neutral about the metaphysics of social groups while accommodating explananda often thought to favor group-based approaches, such as group interest and affective misdirection. Third, it captures core insights of intersectionality and provides conceptual resources for diagnosing and resisting the flawed logic of so-called “oppression Olympics.”

Edit

In Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), Sartre offers a social ontology of how groups form out of backgrounds of isolated and atomised seriality. The concept of seriality has been widely received as the most significant contribution of Sartre’s Critique, and it is arguably Sartre’s emphasis on the dialectic of materiality and praxis that is at the heart of this Marxist-phenomenological innovation. Crystallising in the idea of the ‘practico-inert’, Sartre demonstrates how seriality names a form of collectivity that consists of heterogeneous agents having their praxis similarly constrained and enabled by the humanmade socio-material structures that surround them. While great emphasis has been placed on materiality, both by Sartre and his commentators, there is an important affective dimension that has been undertheorised. In this paper I aim to rectify this, fleshing out Sartre’s (1960/2004, 266) passing remark regarding “serial feelings” and demonstrating how Sartre’s framework offers an innovative perspective on contemporary forms of affective polarisation.
Affect is a central and overlooked feature of praxis, especially if we want to make sense of the normative valences of worked materiality. In this regard, I aim to show how collective affective comportments can be both a condition upon which a series transforms into an insurgent group, and a tool by which that the same group is serialised by what I term the ‘affective exigencies’ of the practico-inert field. To illustrate this, I organise this paper around a contemporary case study that the dialectic between the series and the group is particularly well-equipped to make sense of, namely, the “struggle” of “double reciprocal praxis” (ibid., 733) between pro- and anti-Palestinian sentiments. A central feature of this struggle is the affective reconstitution of pro-Palestinian voices – whether those that gather at a protest, voice concerns to the media, or speak out within universities – as expressing hatred. We see this in the repeated characterisation of protests as “hate marches” and the depiction of banners and chants as inciting racial and anti-Semitic hatred. By appealing to a wider affective economy that pathologises hatred, the series of people who express pro-Palestinian feelings of solidarity, moral anger, and grief suddenly face affective exigencies that render their affective praxis suspect. This is achieved not only through media representations and police violence, but by a manipulation of the brute materiality of the practico-inert field: stickers are scraped off walls, flags pulled down, graffiti painted over, and items of clothing banned. This reorganisation of the practico-inert field renders certain praxes hateful and is thus intended to justify unprecedented forms of repression and censorship, thereby making it increasingly difficult for insurgent groups to emerge out of the latent solidarity of atomised seriality.

In her influential paper, “Gender and Race: What Are They? What Do We Want Them to Be?” (2000), Sally Haslanger argues for an ameliorative inquiry into the concepts of gender and race—one that does not focus on our existing concept of a phenomenon or on what it tracks, but instead asks what the purpose of the concept is. The focus is on whether it is useful for a specific, legitimate goal, and the goal of her analysis is to achieve a just society. Inspired by Haslanger’s analysis, I will argue that we should undertake an ameliorative approach to wrongful discrimination, where the goal is it to combat injustice. With this goal in mind, I will argue that we should focus on the victims and their situation when discussing why discrimination is wrong. This approach can be understood as adopting what Kate Manne refers to as the victim’s perspective. Inspired by Haslanger’s approach, Kate Manne (2017) adopts an ameliorative inquiry into the concept of misogyny. By taking the victim’s perspective on misogyny, she shifts the focus from the psychology of the perpetrator to the experiences of the victims of hostile attitudes.

Drawing inspiration from Manne’s victim-perspective approach, I propose four desiderata that an account of wrongful discrimination should satisfy in order to serve as a useful tool in combating injustice. A crucial feature of wrongful discrimination that such an account should capture is the fact that many problematic cases of discrimination are shaped by unjust social structures and are either caused by, or reinforce, existing injustices in society. I will also argue that such an account should also be able to capture Haslanger’s point about how agents and social structures are affected by material reality. As such, it is crucial to recognize the role of individual agents in engaging in wrongful discrimination, while also acknowledging how their actions are deeply shaped by broader social structures and injustices that constrain their choices. One way this can play out is that background injustices affect how we attribute social properties to people, which can cause discrimination when such properties are deemed relevant for differential treatment—even if the agent has no intention to discriminate against anyone. I will discuss three ways in which such attribution of properties can cause discrimination, which an account of wrongful discrimination should be able to capture in order to be a useful tool in fighting injustice.

The chief goal of corporate criminal law is to prevent corporate crime. According to the consensus among authorities and scholars, compliance protocols are the best preventive. Prosecution and sentencing guidelines incentivize corporations to implement effective compliance proactively and authorize compliance mandates for corporations that fail to do so. “Effective compliance” usually involves systems and processes—employee training, quality audits, reporting channels, etc.—targeted directly to the violation of concern. Despite its name, effective compliance it is spectacularly ineffective. The list of successfully rehabilitated criminal corporations is slim. Corporate recidivism is the order of the day.

This paper proposes and empirically tests a different approach: side-channel compliance. To begin, it draws on the nascent literature about corporate virtue to offer a general framework for theorizing what corporate virtues are. It then discusses Aristotle’s concept of the Unity of Virtues within the corporate context. Philosophers are generally skeptical that the Unity of Virtues holds for human beings. For example, it is all too easy to imagine someone who is both honest and tyrannical. However, this paper theorizes multiple mechanisms—deriving both from marketing studies and organizational psychology—that exert pressure on corporate virtues to be more unified than human virtues.

Side-channel compliance is a special application of the Unity of Corporate Virtues. The basic idea behind side-channel compliance is that corporations could improve compliance (one virtue) indirectly through institutional commitments to seemingly unrelated philanthropic endeavors (another virtue). For example, a corporation with exposure to bribery risk might reduce violations by becoming a leader in gender equality. As proof of concept, the paper reports a novel study that correlates the incidence of corporate crime with poor performance on metrics that measure corporations’ commitment to environmental and social undertakings. For proponents of corporate DEI and ESG, it offers a business justification for pro-social initiatives at a time of increasing legal and political scrutiny.

The Zhuangzi is one of the foundational texts of Daoism. The second chapter of the Zhuangzi, “On Equalizing All Things”, has usually been understood as conveying themes of conventionalism. Since a lot of passages contain themes of mind-dependence, most interpreters take the Zhuangzi as occupying an anti-realist position. This presentation challenges that dominant reading of the Zhuangzi. By applying conceptual tools from social ontology, I argue that the Zhuangzi should instead be understood as advocating for a kind of socially constructed, yet metaphysically indeterminate realism.
The plan is as follows. In the second section, I demonstrate that the Zhuangzi adopts a realist attitude towards social entities. I will point to passages which claim that various things, and even the Dao, can be constructed through human actions. Since it is known that the Daoists, and the Zhuangzi specifically, are realists about the Dao, this provides evidence that the Zhuangzi does not treat linguistic conventions as opposed to reality but something that can constitute the world.
In the third section, I will contrast Zhuangzi’s realism from mainstream theories in social ontology which typically assumes the world to be determinate. While the Zhuangzi recognizes that the world can be constructed through human judgements, it also recognizes that the social world is full of conflicts and contestations. Therefore, against its contemporaries, the Zhuangzi often insists that there is no unique way of carving up the social world that is privileged.
In the fourth section, I propose to understand Zhuangzi’s position as a novel position which treats social entities as real yet metaphysically indeterminate. More specifically, I will introduce the Barnes-Williams’ ersatz worlds interpretation of metaphysical indeterminacy which treats multiple, incompatible precisifications of an entity to as unsettled candidates for actuality. Similarly, I argue that the Zhuangzi treats possible constructions of the same entity as candidates for actuality but does not settle on a single one as the actual fact of the matter.
Finally, I will illustrate this through the Zhuangzi’s characterization of an ideal sage which “walks two roads”. Such a person embodies an awareness of other possible ways that the social entity can be constructed and is able to adapt to each situation with practical agility.

Room 2

Institutions have an inherent tendency to resist amelioration, even when the majority of people desire it. Call this phenomenon institutional inertia. Accounting for institutional inertia is surprisingly difficult for the predominant views in social ontology. This is because these views ground the existence of institutions in collective acceptance: the conscious recognition of a system of constitutive rules by a sufficient portion of the population.

In this presentation, I mobilize institutional inertia as an objection to “ideal social ontology,” as conceptualized by Burman (2023), with a focus on collective acceptance as the mechanism by which institutions come into being and persist. Any institutional ontology that relies on collective acceptance cannot, I claim, adequately account for the persistence of institutions that most people wish to ameliorate—paradigmatically, institutions that perpetuate sexism and racism. This consideration should motivate social ontologists oriented toward overcoming injustice to develop new models of institutional ontology that do not require collective acceptance to explain institutional existence and maintenance.

My argument has three parts. First, I briefly examine patriarchy as an example of institutional inertia, drawing on two sources: a recent social-ontological account by Brännmark (2021) and the debate between Juliet Mitchell (2016, 2000) and Judith Butler (2016, 2012). Second, I use this example to raise the more general problem of institutional inertia for ideal social ontology. Finally, I argue that the two most common strategies for reconciling collective acceptance with institutional inertia—collective action problems and ideology—do not succeed, and that a third explanation of institutional inertia in social science—path dependence—conflicts with it. Insofar as we take institutional inertia to be an important phenomenon, we ought to develop less “cognitivist” models of institutional ontology.

Edit

Why should we think states are responsible for unjust acts such as war crimes or genocide, over and above the individuals who directly carry them out? One common answer in the literature is because states are group agents: they possess the capacity to perform actions (Erskine 2001, List and Pettit 2011, Stilz 2011, Lawford-Smith 2019, McKeown 2021). As a result, we are often justified in attributing the unjust acts of individual soldiers who participate in war crimes to the state as a whole. Most philosophical work on this topic focuses on questions of group agency: exploring whether we are justified in viewing the state as an agent to whom actions may be attributed. Much less attention has been given to the question of attribution – that is, the question of when we are justified in attributing the acts of individuals to states. 
 
The aim of this paper is to develop a novel theory of attribution: an account of when the actions of individuals can be attributed to states. More specifically, it defends what we might call the authorization-representation account of attribution. The authorization-representation account can be defined in the following way: 
 
Authorization-Representation Account: an individual act is attributable to a state if it (a) exercises authority granted to the acting individual by the state and (b) is performed by an individual representing the state.
 
Sections 1 and 2 of the paper offer an in-depth exploration of the authorization-representations account: exploring in detail how we ought to understand and apply both of these conditions. Section 1 focuses on the authorization condition, (a), outlining how it enables the authorization-representation account to attribute ultra vires actions to states. Section 2 explores the representation condition, (b), and develops the notion of representation in more depth: arguing that it allows us to distinguish authority-exercising actions which can be attributed to states from those which cannot. Section 3 outlines how the authorization-representation account satisfies three important desiderata that a theory of attribution ought to meet: it provides a satisfactory distinction between ultra vires and private acts, separates the question of attribution from state legitimacy, and avoids taking on a strong form of internalism about attribution. Section 4 then spells out some of the implications of the authorization-representation account for group agency more broadly. 

Edit

The literature on social ontology has focused on the conditions under which social objects exist, persist, and acquire normative or practical force. While much attention has been paid to the significance of collectivity, such as the collective acceptance, in understanding social objects, less systematic analysis has been devoted to the types of social objects themselves. As a result, opportunities to apply social ontology to the social sciences have remained limited. In response, this paper develops a minimalist ontological framework for comparatively less objective social objects by introducing the distinction between thin and thick ontological status. Whereas thin ontology comprehensively encompasses abstract social objects that represent societal concepts and social norms, thick ontology supports more objective and institutionally explicit facts.

From this perspective, the central aim of the paper is to delineate what distinguishes thin ontology from thick ontology. The paper then argues that documentality, in the sense developed by Maurizio Ferraris (2013), provides the missing ontological grounding. On this view, social objects are constituted by inscribed social acts. Once documented—through reports, databases, metrics, or rankings—social objects acquire durability, portability, and third-person authority. Documentation stabilizes their ontological foundation, enabling them to circulate across contexts and exert causal and normative effects independently of individual intentions. This account allows social objects to be grounded without relying on strong forms of collective intentionality. Within this framework, both thin and thick social objects are documented and their ontology are understood not as a rigid dichotomy but as points on a spectrum of social ontology. A thin social object may gradually acquire a thicker ontological status through processes such as propagation, institutionalization, and legalization.

The paper applies this framework to contemporary social phenomena, focusing on social impact as a paradigmatic application. Although social impact has become central in policymaking, higher education, and corporate activities, its ontological status remains unclear. Is social impact a real social change, a normative judgement, a causal outcome, or merely an evaluative label? This paper argues that such confusion stems from a failure to distinguish between different ontological layers at which impact is said to exist. If the proposed ontology can account for social impact—an entity that is identified and documented—its ontological status had been thin. However, the recent development of impact investing illustrates a case in which social impact becomes thick social object through quantification, one of the most powerful forms of documentality.

Externalism about content-determination is a widely accepted view in philosophy of language and mind, according to which the content of a term as used by an individual is determined by factors outside the individual, so it cannot be determined solely by the individual’s mental states. While this view has been extensively discussed for natural kind terms by many philosophers, a natural question arises: can externalism also be applied to social kind terms? Although several proposals on this question have been made, some philosophers point out potential problems in applying externalism to social kind terms.

One problem concerns the alleged tension between externalism and Searle (1995)’s account of social kinds, as noted by Lohr (2021). The problem seems particularly pressing given that Searle’s account is often regarded as a standard model in social ontology. In a nutshell, the problem is as follows. Suppose that each member of the community must be in a certain mental state concerning money for the community to collectively accept the constitutive rule of money. Each individual’s mental state relevant to the collective acceptance of the constitutive rule of money seems to involve the very concept of money. But such mental states cannot contain the respective social kind concept as a constituent, as this would be circular. Thus, entertaining the attitude required for the collective acceptance of the constitutive rule for money seems to presuppose that `money’ refers to the kind money which should be constructed by the very same attitude.

The purpose of this presentation is to address this concern and sketch an overall picture of how externalism works for social kind terms while keeping in mind the perspective of social ontology. The main contribution consists of (i) proposing an alternative interpretation of Searle’s account of social kinds, thereby (ii) resolving the alleged tension between externalism and Searle’s account of social kinds.

The alternative interpretation of Seale’s account is given by decomposing it into its metaphysical aspect, which explains how a social kind is constructed, and its metasemantic aspect, which explains how the content of the social kind terms is determined. These two aspects are not clearly distinguished and are instead assimilated in Searle’s original account. I show how this interpretation can be naturally developed by drawing on insights from Hindriks and Guala (2015), who attempt to unify their account of social kinds as equilibria in game theory with Searle’s account. I construct a version of metasemantic externalism for social kind terms based on Searle’s account without falling into circularity. In addition, the proposed interpretation provides an account of social kinds as networks of causal and conventional relations by employing structural equation modelling, which also suggests a unified perspective to understand both natural and social kinds.

In everyday social contexts, people often remember past events together: couples recall holidays, friends reconstruct shared experiences, families reminisce about significant moments. Empirical research on transactive memory (e.g., Harris et al. 2010) shows that collaborative remembering is frequently more successful than individual recall, involving cue-based interaction, distributed mnemonic roles, and ongoing negotiation. Yet these cases also exhibit divergence of perspective, asymmetries of access, and incomplete or conflicting recollections. This raises the fundamental question: what makes remembering together genuinely joint rather than merely parallel individual remembering. I argue that joint remembering does not necessarily require convergence of representational content. This is in contrast to other collective phenomena, such as joint intentions, collective belief, or joint perception, where convergence of representational content is often assumed to be a minimal requirement. Instead, I argue that joint remembering is joint in virtue of a distinctive phenomenology with specific functional properties.
In the first part, I will turn to Michaelian & Sutton‘s approach (2017), in which they discuss whether joint remembering can be modelled on either collective belief or joint action. They argue that both strategies are flawed: episodic recall is not exhausted by propositional content, and joint remembering does not typically involve shared intentions. While I agree that neither model provides an adequate general account, I suggest that these debates nevertheless help to clarify what is distinctive about paradigm cases of joint remembering.
In the next part, I will examine belief formation as a social process guided by norms, focusing particularly on Gilbert’s (1989; 2014) account. This framework provides a useful analytical tool as it highlights the structural similarities between belief formation and collaborative remembering, such as proposal, negotiation and public uptake, while also making the limits of this analogy visible. I identify two central respects in which belief formation fails as a general model of joint remembering: the norms governing the practice, and its phenomenology.
In the last part, I will suggest a positive account. I argue that paradigm cases of joint remembering are structured by what I call ‘shared past-oriented attunement’: a distinctive experiential orientation toward a lived past as ours, involving affective alignment, perspectival coordination, and reciprocal openness to being shaped by the other’s recall. This phenomenological structure helps explain how remembering can be genuinely joint even in the absence of convergence of content or settled agreement. The upshot is that joint remembering is best understood not as a form of collective belief or joint action, but as a distinctive social practice characterized by a specific phenomenology.

Edit

Room 3

The business literature is vast. Cursory Google searches in January 2026 suggest that there are more than 6800 “business journals” and at least fifty “business ethics journals”; it’s not clear whether those numbers include subfields like management, organization studies, marketing, and the like. We have business schools, business departments, and business majors. What we do not have, however, is an account of “business.” More surprisingly, there isn’t even a significant debate. Put slightly differently, there is no literature that takes business per se as a research phenomenon

I propose to fill this gap in the literature with an account of business as a major social institution, placing it in the company of the family, the economy, health care, and the media. More specifically, I offer a social, empirical, and ameliorative concept of BUSINESS as a research phenomenon – one that moves away from the highly idealized, individualistic, rationalistic, and quantification-oriented theoretical frameworks common to the discipline of economics and toward a more realistic, empirically grounded conception that recognizes business as the deeply human, deeply social matter that it is.

States routinely bind individuals prior to their consent, enact regulations inherited from predecessors, and legislate for successors. Legal and political philosophy typically frames these features as problems of legitimacy, justice, or moral motivation; less often are they treated as ontological questions. This paper instead asks what defines states as collective entities that extend diachronically and bind generations over time. I argue that temporal reach is not an external complication but a constitutive feature of what states are.
Part 1 defines states as emergent institutional groups whose unity depends largely on objectified, top-down norms rather than on shared intentions or joint commitments among members. Even if affective and psychological dispositions significantly affect group belonging and sense of “us,” formal membership in the whole holds foundational power. Individuals are constituted parts of it, thus integrating into a vertically stratified system of rights, obligations, and deontic powers. At the same time, members are also constituent parts, since the state’s constitution is not exhausted at its founding but unfolds across successive generations.
Part 2 argues that this diachronic feature is far from contingent. States are groups structurally dependent on the ongoing replacement of members. They exist as diachronic wholes not despite generational change but by virtue of it, and their metaphysical identity is maintained precisely insofar as generational succession is preserved. This mode of persistence enables states to sustain long-term obligations, rights, and responsibilities, while also exposing them to a structural tension between stability and renewal. Norms must be transmitted if the state is to endure, yet each incoming generation reopens their renegotiation from within.
Part 3 examines law as a mechanism for managing this tension. Law can stabilize sedimented norms, securing their validity across time and allowing the state to bind members consistently. But law can also function to renegotiate and renew the state’s orientation toward transgenerational objectives or values, as in pension systems and environmental legislation. In neither case is legal authority self-grounding. While top-down, it depends on the group’s diachronic constitution, which in turn rests on the participation of members as constituent parts. Hence, legal authority cannot run counter to the fundamental alternation of generations within the state without also undermining its transgenerational continuity and agency.
The upshot of this account is twofold. First, the state emerges not as a temporally neutral framework of political action but as a transgenerational achievement, sustained by institutional stability yet permanently exposed to contestation. Second, future generations emerge not as external moral constraints on state authority but as internal to its ontology, shifting debates about intergenerational justice to the core of social ontology.

Edit

Transcendental arguments are ubiquitous in philosophy: from ancient, through early modern, to contemporary thought; from metaphysics, through epistemology and the philosophy of mind and language, to the philosophy of mathematics and physics; and across traditions, from the analytical to the continental paradigm. What makes these arguments distinctive is the transcendental premise, which states that a fact q is a necessary condition for the possibility of a given state of affairs p. What is common to all transcendental arguments is their ‘trajectory of thought’ – from the possible to the actual (a posse ad esse). Here, the notion of possibility may be understood in two ways: ontologically, as the metaphysical possibility of a state of affairs; or linguistically, as the semantic or pragmatic consistency of a statement and an utterance, respectively. Three models of transcendental arguments are to be distinguished: (1) the Implication Theory, which holds that the transcendental conditional should be interpreted as a material implication or as a strict conditional; (2) the Presupposition Theory, in which this formula is interpreted as a semantic or pragmatic presupposition; and (3) the Abduction Theory, in which it is an explanatory hypothesis of a distinctive nature.

A sophisticated application of transcendental arguments in social ontology can be found in Roy Bhaskar’s The Possibility of Naturalism. In this seminal work, centred on social sciences, the philosopher advocates for what he termed ‘critical naturalism’, which maintains that scientific knowledge of social structures is possible, although they are not reducible to the structures described by natural sciences. Critical realism has significantly impacted contemporary philosophy of science. In the presentation, I intend to outline Bhaskar’s response to the transcendental question posed at the beginning of the book: how are the social sciences possible as sciences worthy of the name? The scientificity of the social sciences is sometimes called into question. Therefore, Bhaskar attempts to carry out a ‘transcendental deduction’ to justify their claim to being scientific. This is a two-staged argument: first, he argues for the existence of social structures, and second, he explains how their properties make them possible objects of scientific knowledge, although interpreted beyond the framework of logical positivism.

In the presentation, I aim to: (1) briefly outline three models of transcendental arguments; (2) demonstrate that Bhaskar’s argument exemplifies the Abduction Theory; (3) introduce the notion of the dialectical error as a typical fallacy to which transcendental arguments are prone; (4) show that Bhaskar’s argument is compromised by this fallacy; and finally, (5) consider how it may be modified to ensure both its validity and soundness.

Edit

We often want to do things that we cannot do without being helped by another. For many people, this is something that occurs in relation to particular actions on particular occasions – perhaps your car has broken down, and you need help to move it to the side of the road. However, for some agents, this can be a more systemic feature of their agency — in particular, for many disabled agents. In virtue of the interaction of their impairment and the nature of the society in which they live, for many disabled people there are act-types that are not available to them acting alone. In this paper, I will discuss a way of acting-with-help that enhances the agency of the agent that is so helped. This kind of action, which I call dependent intentional action, is present in all human lives but its importance is especially clear in contexts where the need for help is systemic. I begin with examples of dependent intentional action, such as someone with a mobility impairment dressing themselves with the support of another, to show that these are commonplace and familiar kinds of action. If an action has this form, we should understand it as an action of A (the supported agent), carried out with the help of B (the supporting agent). The role that A plays in this action is sufficiently that it does not count as an action of B, and the intentions with which each agent is acting means that it is not a joint action. It is an agent acting intentionally, with help.

In keeping with the social model of disability, I will argue that a more systemic need for this kind of support is not something that inheres in a disabled individual in virtue of their impairment, but rather is something that arises in virtue of the inaccessibility of the society in which they live. The value of support over which the agent has control and choice is, moreover, something acknowledge in disability activism, particularly in the independent living movement. Recognising dependent intentional actions as actions of the agent that is being supported allows us to resist the idea that agency and autonomy require total independence – non-disabled agents often depend on others in realising their intentions – and to see the importance of providing this kind of support in cases where its need is systemic.

Homosexuality was officially depathologized in the US in 1973, when the American Psychiatric Association (APA) approved a new definition of ‘mental disorder’ that ostensibly excluded homosexuality. In this way, the depathologization of homosexuality is of particular interest, for it occurred not by fiat nor by reference to some existing theory, but rather, by the proposal of an entirely new definition. But despite homosexuality’s outsized role in the history of psychiatry, homosexuality is rarely discussed in projects proposing taxonomies of psychopathology. This is concerning because while these taxonomies frequently purport to exclude homosexuality from their definition of mental disorder, it is often unclear how they actually do so.

Indeed, it is surprisingly difficult to develop a theory of mental disorder that captures standardly-accepted mental disorders while excluding homosexuality. In light of this, I ultimately argue that reclassifying homosexuality as a mental disorder is a possibility worth taking seriously. For many, this claim may seem incompatible with our preexisting commitments. I hope to show that there are genuine (albeit defeasible) theoretical and ethical considerations in favor of reclassifying homosexuality as a mental disorder, especially for those of us committed to the destigmatization and social acceptance of homosexuality.

My talk proceeds in three parts. In Section I, I show that many prominent accounts of mental disorder fail to exclude homosexuality, despite this often being an express goal of these accounts.

In Section II, I introduce a choice point between three options: (i) we can continue making an ad hoc exception for homosexuality, (ii) we can develop a new theory that definitively excludes homosexuality, or (iii) we can reclassify homosexuality as a mental disorder. One of the former two options is often taken to be the obvious choice, especially considering that the pathologization of homosexuality was historically used to justify harms against queer people. However, I argue that we have genuine theoretical and ethical considerations in favor of pursuing option (iii).

I conclude in Section III by responding to an important objection to my argument. According to this objection, destigmatizing homosexuality requires that we declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder. If we confine ourselves to only addressing issues caused by the stigmatization of homosexuality, then this likely seems to be the case, and we ought to choose options (i) or (ii). But if we instead broaden our focus to include issues arising when we stigmatize the mental differences we label ‘disorders,’ then the stigmatization of homosexuality appears symptomatic of a larger problem with how we generally treat mental disorders. Taking the problem in this way serves to reduce stigma and harm towards homosexuals while doing the same for individuals with standardly accepted mental disorders. This inspires option (iii).

One of the central topics in social ontology is the tension between biological kinds and social kinds, seen for example in debates about what gender or race is. The aim of this talk is metatheoretical. First, I will show that a similar tension can be found in the philosophy of psychiatry. Given this, I then explore what the methodology of social ontology can offer to the philosophy of psychiatry, and vice versa.
When we ask what it is to be a woman, some in social ontology argue that there is no single objective answer. Being a woman seems to be two very different things, and which answer we choose depends on the explanatory aim (see Díaz-León 2021; 2024, ch. 6, for an overview of the debate on the role of explanatory aims). That is, if the goal is to oppose discrimination, the type of explanation that is useful is the one provided by woman-social kind (gender). But if we want to explain the diseases of the human reproductive system, it makes more sense to choose woman-biological kind (sex).
Something similar happens when we ask what a mental disorder is. Here too, we seem to be moving along a biological–social spectrum. On the one hand, mental disorder clearly has a neurobiological–physiological aspect, reflected in the established view of psychiatry as a branch of medicine. On the other hand, psychological symptoms are also taken to be a core part of mental disorder (Bolton 2012, p. 10; Rashed & Bingham 2014, p. 245; Wilkinson 2022, pp. 16–17).
The ‘social’ aspect is that it is hard to describe these psychological symptoms without using “believes that” or “desires that” – folk psychology categories. Folk psychology is sometimes understood as social invention, independent of neuroscience, with different explanatory aims: neuroscience captures fine-grained neurobiological details; folk-psychological categories are used to explain the behaviour of whole persons (Francken & Slors 2014, 2018; Dewhurst 2021). This situation – where, in trying to answer an ontological question, we find ourselves facing two different explanatory aims – seems to me strikingly similar to debates in social ontology.
However, there is an interesting difference. In social ontology, different explanatory aims can reveal that something that initially looks like a single phenomenon should be split, because it is described by two independent concepts. In the philosophy of psychiatry, though, there is a commitment to treating mental disorder as a unified, multi-faceted whole (see the biopsychosocial model: Engel 1977; Bolton & Gillett 2019; multi-level approach to explanation: Kendler 2008; Kendler, Zachar & Craver 2011) and it is unclear how it could even be divided into two concepts.
I think the question of why encountering fundamentally different explanatory aims sometimes leads to splitting a concept, and sometimes does not, should be of interest to anyone interested in the methodology of social ontology, even if they are not directly concerned with philosophy of psychiatry.

Room 4

For ordinary folk and philosophers alike, the question of how we understand other people is paramount. A very popular answer is ’empathy’. But just what empathy is and how it contributes to intersubjective understanding demand careful argument.

If you asked someone on the street what empathy involved, they would likely reply that it involved some kind of perspective-taking. For phenomenologists, there is a long pedigree of empathy being the apprehension of the Other and/or some of their mental contents. Dominant interpretations of the phenomenological tradition have removed the phenomenon of perspective-taking from the heart of empathy. But a close reading of Edith Stein’s empathy (Einfühlung) reveals that this is unwarranted. For Stein, though empathy can be the basic apprehension of the Other or their mental state, the empathic activity can also involve perspective-taking as one of its constituent parts. For Stein, Empathy in the fullest or richest sense, the sense which promises the greatest epistemic yield with respect to the Other, the Self, and their shared world, essentially involves perspective-taking.

If you asked someone on the street what perspective-taking involved, they would probably say that you imagine yourself in the Other’s shoes, perhaps momentarily identifying yourself with them. Intriguingly, the shape of Stein’s perspective-taking looks very different. For Stein, empathic perspective-taking involves adopting the Other’s perspective while retaining our own. The intersubjective experience undergone is what constituted by two irreconcilable perspectives experienced simultaneously. What motivates Stein to make such a claim? And can such a claim be made intelligible? In answer to the first question, I examine Stein’s inspiration and disagreement with aspects of Theodor Lipps’ influential account of empathy and Husserl’s musings on it (mostly in Ideas II). I defend the intelligibility of Stein’s dual perspectives by suggesting that the empathic perspective is a tertium quid, a third perspective that emerges from the perspectives of the Self and the Other but is not reducible to them. I consider and dismiss an objection found in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.

This paper compares Edith Stein’s concept of pure law (reines Recht) found in her book Eine Untersuchung über den Staat (1925) to Hans Kelsen’s pure theory of law to be found, for instance, in his books Das Problem der Souveränität und die Theorie des Völkerrechts (1920) and Reine Rechtslehre (1934). While this investigation will close a curious gap in the history of legal theory and social phenomenology, comparing Kelsen’s theory with Stein’s also helps to understand the problems in Kelsen’s method inspired by Edmund Husserl’s work (the evidence about their relation can be found in his letters to Husserl).
As I will show, Stein’s and Kelsen’s legal theories have many common nominators, such as the influence of Husserl, critique of Jellinek’s account, and the interest in the essence of law and state. I will argue that they share a similar methodology inspired by the Husserlian phenomenology (in Stein’s case, also the Reinachian realist phenomenology); the idea of law having an essence that we can investigate logically (eidetically); and the idea that there is a constitutive foundational basis for making law. For Kelsen, this is the Grundnorm, and for Stein, this is “the right to make law” (das Recht, Recht zu setzen). Thus, Stein and Kelsen come to similar ideas from opposite backgrounds: Stein was a phenomenological philosopher who did an excursion to the theory of the state, and Kelsen was a legal theorist who had acquainted with Husserl’s phenomenology. At the same time, their theories differ in setting the area of investigation and regarding the point of purity: while Stein uses the Husserlian method of epoché to reduce the area of investigation to the world as it appears, Kelsen uses a similar idea to remain within the limits of the subject matter (here: law). What is pure for Stein here, is a kind of law itself (an object to be found by investigation), while for Kelsen, it is the theory itself (the method).
In this paper, there is a twofold research question: Can we understand Kelsen better by reading Stein, or is there an unknown legal genius in Edith Stein as a theoretician of the state whose work we should read for its own sake? A more grounding, motivational question is whether there is something that constitutes law precisely as law and not as a mere social norm, moral conviction or collective (or individual) will, i.e., makes law different from these other social situations. That is, is there a universal essence of law?

Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law is often distinguished from other positivist theories by its methodological separation of the domains of Is and Ought, a move frequently interpreted as ontological dualism. This assumption has been widely criticized, most notably from the perspective of John Searle’s unified social ontology, which rejects the “two-worlds” view as a philosophical fallacy and insists on a single reality of social facts.
From this perspective, Kelsen’s theory appears vulnerable, particularly because he deliberately refrained from providing an ontological account of the Is–Ought distinction. This restraint, however, does not indicate theoretical incompleteness. It follows from Kelsen’s claim that Ought constitutes a fundamental, a priori category, irreducible to facts and not in need of ontological grounding. Whether normativity is understood as ontologically fundamental or as an a priori category of legal cognition, the separation of Is and Ought functions as a necessary methodological device for grasping law in its normative dimension.
In contrast, legal positivism grounded in a unified social ontology appears immune to the charge of dualism. Yet this immunity is only apparent. A unified ontology shifts rather than resolves the core difficulty: it must explain how normativity arises from social facts without remainder. The task of accounting for the normative force of law thus becomes a central theoretical burden within ontological monism.
This paper argues that the disagreement between Kelsen and unified social ontology is best understood not as a clash between ontological dualism and monism, but as a conflict between two methodological strategies for coping with normativity. While unified social ontology rejects ontological dualism, it inherits a problem of normative determination—namely, how normative force can be derived from non-normative facts. Kelsen, by contrast, avoids this problem by treating normativity as foundational within legal cognition.
Drawing on General Theory of Norms, the paper proposes a fictionalist interpretation of the Is–Ought separation. On this view, the separation is not a metaphysical claim about two realms of reality, but an artificial methodological procedure that allows law to be grasped as law. Fictionalism enables legal theory to proceed as if law were separated from other social facts, thereby illuminating normativity otherwise obscured within social reality. Even if a unified social ontology is ontologically correct, the paper concludes, methodological assumptions that posit more than one realm may remain epistemically indispensable for understanding legal normativity.

I shall survey the development of Searle’s views from The Construction of Social Reality (1995, henceforth CSR) to Making the Social World (2010). The new books omits a few topics that were shown mistaken or unclear in the old one, and adds a few new clarifications and emphases, some of questionable value.

The main trouble in the CSR was its Chapter 3, dealing with the role of language. I shall present a revision of Searle’s position that solves the trouble (largely following Moural 2008). Further worries had to do with unclear division of labour between function-assignments and constitutive rules – the best solution may be to introduce a neutral concept that covers both (e.g. the acceptance-unit). The mistake regarding the anihilation of institutional power (CSR 106, 108–109) has been corrected already in Moural (2002).

The remaining worry has to do with the tension between the intentionalistic apparatus of Chapters 1–5 of the CSR and the claims about the role of the Background in Chapter 6. This tension has not been resolved so far, and I shall discuss briefly the problem field in its current shape.

Some novelties in the MSW react to the critical discussion of the CSR: constitutive rules ceased to play any important role in the theory, the mistaken view of the anihilation of an institutional fact is left out, the view of language is modified accordingly. It is questionable how far the new treatment of the Background helped to resolve the tension mentioned above. And the two new emphases in the MSW seem to me unhelpful: (1) the new, prominent role of declarations and (2) the strict restriction of the concept of institution to the area where there are deontic powers generated. While these both topics are important, they unhelpfully limit the scope of the theory (or make it unnecessarily vague). It is not clear what it is to have „the same logical form as Declarations“ (MSW 13), and why e.g calendars are not institutions (Searle repeatedly argued they are not because they do not generate deontic powers).

Social phenomena change. Trends come and go, the boundaries of countries shift over time, and new jobs are created while others disappear. Social change is also the goal of social and political intervention. None of this is, or should be, controversial. However, the prospect of social change generates significant challenges for attempts to develop a systematic and regimented metaphysics of the social.

In this paper I present “the challenge of social change”, and press it against three different regimentations of claims about social phenomena: in terms of essence, in terms of ground, and in terms of properties. I show that in each case accommodating social change imposes significant restrictions on the background metaphysics, and argue that this illustrates the reflexivity of the relationship between general and social metaphysics.

Here is a sketch of the challenge as faced by essence. Consider the case, discussed in Jenkins (2023), of the change in the classification “wife” in England and Wales brought about by the legal prohibition on marital rape. Arguably, what it is to be a wife changed with that legal change. It is natural, from an essentialist perspective, to think of this change as a change in the essence of “wife.” (Or, perhaps, “wife in England and Wales.”) But essences, on most views, do not change. Standard theoretical roles for essence, including forming a basis for modality, prohibit this. So instead we have to think of this change as a switch from one essence to another, such that a social classification associated with one essence became associated with another. This entails a view on which there is a plenitude of essences, and social change involves making some salient over others. (Indeed, this is defended by Passinsky, in Passinsky 2025.)

This is not an insurmountable problem – as we can see, there is a neat solution in this instance. But this case illustrates that merely recognizing and accommodating social change forces significant constraints on the background metaphysics. I argue that this is true of all attempts to accommodate social change in a realist metaphysical framework.

I finish by suggesting that the challenge of social change is more effectively answered by non-realist approaches to metaphysics, and considering this as a case study of the reflexive interaction between social and general metaphysics. Rather than merely functioning as “applied” metaphysics, in which general theories of essence, properties, ground etc are applied to social phenomena, social metaphysics shows us what an adequate theory of essence, properties, or ground must be.

Although convenient in our everyday contact with ‘mezzo-level’ physical reality, the traditional object (substance) ontology seems to fail when studying ‘micro-level’ universe of quantum mechanics or ‘macro-level’ world of relativity theory. The same can be said about studying living organisms. That is why authors like McHenry (2015), Nicholson and Dupré (2018) and Dupré (2025) propose to approach these domains from the process ontology point of view, to see life as a process and the physical universe, too. Neither social reality seems to be constituted of objects similar to ones in our ‘mezzo-level’ physical environment. Perhaps process ontology might be appropriate for social ontology, too?

Having a long pedigree — from Heraclitus, (arguably) Aristotle, through Locke, Leibniz, Hegel, Peirce, to Bergson, Whitehead, Hartshorne and Teilhard — process philosophy has experienced a strong revival in recent decades in the works of Rescher, Seibt, Weber and others.

At least since the rise of agency-and-structure type of approaches in 1970’s, in the works of Bhaskar, Giddens, Bourdieu and others, social ontology has explicitly acknowledged a role for certain processes in the social domain. This development, however, happened before and independently of the latest renewed interest in process philosophy. It is therefore natural to ask how is present social ontology compatible with contemporary process philosophy.

We shall be examining the compatibility of present social ontology with contemporary process philosophy on the example of the Cambridge approach of Tony Lawson and the Cambridge Social Ontology Group. While belonging among agency-and-structure approaches, Cambridge social ontology is characteristic for its stressing of the more processual aspects: real world is ‘a process’ (Lawson, 1983), ‘a process of interactions’ (Lawson, 1997b), ‘an interrelated network of internally related processes’ (Lawson, 2003), ‘a highly structured and interactive process’ (Lawson, 2003), ‘in process’ Lawson (2012). Lawson (2012) even agrees with the core of process philosophy: that ‘things’ are but ‘relatively stable actualisation of underlying processes’.

On the other hand, having been influenced by Bhaskar with his strict ontological separation between between ‘events’ (in the domain of the actual) and the domain of the real (containing e.g. structures), at places Lawson might seem to be in direct contradiction to Whitehead and his followers, for whom only ‘events’ are real.

In recent publications, Lawson tries to integrate the concepts of structure and process through a framework of interrelated dynamic systems called ‘totalities’. To what degree is this synthesis successful and how compatible it is with process philosophy? In the contribution, a processual interpretation of Lawson’s social ontology, partially motivated by Bergsonian and Whiteheadian approaches, will be provided, together with a recognition of some of its limits.

Edit

What makes a confession “voluntary”? Even under torture, a confession cannot be forced out of a person like a ventriloquist dummy. Yet, clearly, a confession under torture would not be free in the way of a child penitently admitting to eating the last cookie. The U.S. legal system has established a complex network of rules and standards for adjudicating when a confession is “voluntary” for legal purposes. We may ask: how, if at all, does this legal category of a “voluntary confession” map onto philosophical theories of free will (e.g., libertarian or compatibilist)? Using voluntary confessions as a case study, I draw broader conclusions concerning what determines the contents of the law and nature of legal normatively more generally.

In this talk, I begin by investigating the history of U.S. state and federal jurisprudence of confessions to discover the rationale behind the standards for determining whether a confession was voluntary. I argue that voluntary confession cases, beginning with Bram v. United States (1897), are rooted in a common law tradition that articulates a rigorous conception of freedom beyond the legal context. Over time, however, the law has delineated a more context-specific concept of freedom. Specifically, the Miranda rule attempts to do double-duty as a prophylactic against abusive police behavior, while shifting the voluntariness inquiry onto the waiver of Miranda rights—with seemingly contradictory results.

After this historical analysis, I ask whether the confession-law-specific category of “voluntariness” or freedom is doing anything more than rhetorical work in legal decisions. I conclude, contra legal realist critiques, that this category is doing some work, and I extract the implicit necessary and sufficient conditions for a category of voluntariness suited to the aims and methods of law: namely, sourcehood and primary intention. Given the difficulty of capturing these conditions in practice, however, the balancing of pragmatic considerations is inevitably at play in ruling whether a confession was voluntary.

Zooming out, the legal category of voluntariness in the context of confessions, like other legal categories, may strongly inform our more general socially-constructed category of “freedom”—that is, a category related to but distinct from a more metaphysically robust one as traditionally conceived in free will debates. Understanding the nature of a legal category of “freedom” in its practical social context can help us to understand—and possibly critique and correct—the role of positive law in shaping broader normative social categories.

Room 5

This contribution showcases an application of graded and relational ontology concepts and methods from social ontology into legal theory, in order to help answer emerging questions about the currently indeterminate legal status of AI agents. In legal theory, the person-thing binary has been the legal status paradigm for the better part of two millennia. The world of law has thus sharply been divided, no bridge over the troubled water dividing the subject with the object, none threatening the dominion of first over the latter. Grey areas did exist, but they were mostly ignored for fear of exposing the incoherence of the status quo. This is changing, not least because AI agents do not fall neatly into either the category of things, or of persons. They are stuck in a legal status purgatory, having only a degree of autonomy, learning, adaptability, goal-directedness etc. Consequently, rather than forcing them into one of the preexisting two boxes and struggling to justify that, I argue for degrees of agency and responsibility, which could be recognized in AI agents based on relationality. AI agents are social entities increasingly occupying social roles previously reserved for humans, such as contractors or fiduciaries. I therefore propose an understanding AI agents as social entities constructed through networks of relationships and mutual recognition, embedded in human practices and institutional structures. They could thus be attributed various legal positions, associated with various legal consequences, all calibrated according to a multispectral, gradient legal status theory. Legal status is itself a socially constructed concept collectively recognized through institutional facts, which means it can be intentionally tailored to AI agents’ capabilities and roles. It can be further tailored to collective attitudes to, or practical, and normative purposes of AI agents that support workable local legal frameworks. The many spectra should be based among others on the degree of autonomy and relational independence of the AI agent, to distinguish between AI agents as variables between I-mode extensions (tools fully subordinated to human goals) and AI agents as we-mode entities with quasi-independent goal-directedness. To these, hypothetical superior tiers could be added to correspond to highly autonomous AI agents, which might hold limited legal personhood with restricted capacity for rights-holding and liabilities-bearing, subject to human oversight. Even corporate personhood arrangements could be a future possibility, provided appropriate governance structures were put in place. Advantages of a gradient legal status framework include dynamic status adjustments and contextual status attribution for an AI system, which could for example be treated as an agent for contracting purposes, while being just a tool for criminal law purposes. Disadvantages regard the costs of granularity, not least in terms of predictability, clarity, and legal certainty.

The rise of generative AI and the widespread use of AI systems have sparked controversial debates about how to characterize these new entities. It is unclear which properties and abilities we are justified in ascribing to them, and what social consequences this technological revolution will have. In light of LLM-based chatbots that offer to serve as collaborators, companions, friends, or even therapists, it is necessary to rethink what constitutes social interaction.
Undoubtedly, humans are social beings who can act jointly with others, thereby being social group agents. Furthermore, research in social ontology has shown that cooperation, institutions, and companies can also be described as social group agents. By asking whether AI systems can also serve as group agents and social counterparts, we are confronted with irreconcilable views. There are positions claiming that these novel systems can serve only as tools and that any attribution of social abilities is merely misleading anthropomorphism. This is countered by observations that these systems are significantly infiltrating our social spheres.
I argue that we should not treat the question of whether an entity qualifies as a social interaction partner as an either/or question. Instead, I propose that there is a multidimensional spectrum of social interactions, all standing in a relationship of family resemblance. With reference to established gradualist approaches characterizing social interactions among humans and non-human animals, and between adults and children, I show that some conditions we tend to require from adult humans can be questioned. I label such interactions as asymmetric, as the participants involved fulfill different conditions.
Assuming that it is at least highly questionable whether we have reasons to ascribe consciousness, including desires, preferences, and emotions to current AI systems, I will discuss examples in which humans and machines work together to achieve a joint goal and elaborate on how AI systems can take on the role of an interaction partner without being conscious. My interim result will be that artificial interaction partners can qualify as collaborators in joint actions if they possess a minimal form of agency and a set of minimal socio-cognitive abilities that enable them to coordinate with their interaction partner. In short, I argue that it is sufficient to require instrumental rationality from the artificial counterparts, while human participants need reflective rationality. Then I will address the question of whether there are also instances in the multidimensional spectrum of social interaction that may exclude the involvement of current AI systems, because we have reasons to argue that, in such cases, entertaining emotional states is necessary. To this end, I will critically discuss whether existing AI systems are equipped to act as therapists or even as partners in the sphere of living together.

As AI systems are increasingly used in high-stakes public decision-making, a basic question arises: can AI occupy genuinely normative social roles, such as that of a judge? Can it exercise authority in a way that grounds responsibility, obligation, or sanction? I argue that it cannot. The problem is not merely practical—bias, opacity, or error—but conceptual. Adjudication is an inherently normative and intersubjective practice that depends on a distinctive form of human agency. Judicial authority in constitutional democracies is not merely a matter of producing correct outputs, but of exercising state power in a way that is owned and answerable to the community by a responsible agent who can participate in its normative point of view.

I argue that legitimate adjudication presupposes what I call mental accountability and a phenomenology of agency: the capacity to experience oneself as making decisions, to appreciate their normative stakes, to take ownership of them, and to stand behind them as one’s own. These capacities underwrite our practices of responsibility and answerability. AI systems, however sophisticated, lack this first-personal normative standpoint. A legal variation on Searle’s Chinese Room helps isolate the point: treating the person in the room as issuing actionable legal judgments (especially criminal sentences) would be objectionable because no responsible subject stands behind them. Likewise, even an AI that produces excellent opinions indistinguishable from those of human judges—a jurisprudential Turing test—would still fail to satisfy essential features of the judicial role.

From this starting point, I advance a broader claim in social ontology. Contemporary theories often explain institutions in terms of status functions, collective acceptance, and structural or functional roles. But what breathes the normative fire into those structures? I argue that many central institutions—paradigmatically legal ones—are not sustained by structure alone but by ongoing exercises of normative agency. They operate within a field of normativity and persist through socially organized practices of giving reasons, allocating responsibility, and standing behind decisions. Normative decision-making functions as a process-level layer that helps constitute and stabilize institutions by continually instantiating the rules and values that define them.

AI is a vivid test case, but the thesis is general: where normatively accountable agency is absent, certain institutional roles may be simulated but not fully instantiated. Moreover, even partial reliance on AI in adjudication risks what I call normative erosion: the gradual offloading of responsibility by formal decision makers. This supports a broader conception of law as not merely a system of rules (Hart) or principles (Dworkin), but as an intersubjective activity through which a community addresses itself to its members and members relate to each other, within a shared normative framework.

Edit

We will discuss phenomena of virtual culture from the point of view of research on social ontology. Our aim is to locate virtual phenomena on ontological map drawn on the basis of the assumption that there is only one world. As we go we ask basically two questions: How does virtual reality exist? How is virtual reality related to unqualified or natural reality?
We will also explore the opportunities of stretching the “magic formula” of social ontology, X counts as Y in C, to be employed in explanatory use outside institutional reality (Searle, 1995). This formula expresses something relatively deep about us humans and about the (social) reality of our own making, one could say it concisely tells us the way from make-believe to an ontological fact.
As to the virtual reality David Chalmers (2018) distinguishes between two positions:
According to Virtual realism, virtual objects really exist, events in virtual reality really take place, experiences in virtual reality are non-illusory, and virtual experiences are as valuable as non-virtual experiences. Virtual irrealism subscribes to the opposite claims. According to Chalmers, virtual irrealism is the majority position, in particular, a form he calls virtual fictionalism, according to which virtual objects are fictional objects.
Chalmers defends virtual realism. According to him, virtual objects can be considered real because they meet specific criteria of reality, such as causal power, independence from the mind, and the ability to generate authentic user experiences. In particular, he argues for a form of virtual realism he calls virtual digitalism, according to which virtual objects really exist and are digital objects. Chalmers regards virtual objects as data structures that are causally active on real computers in the real world.
Mariusz Mazurek (2025) criticises the position of Chalmers. He accepts the reality of virtual objects but not the idea of them being grounded in data structures on computers. Philip Brey (2003) argues that virtual entities come in two varieties: some only simulate real-world entities, whereas others are ontological reproductions equivalent to their real-world counterparts and have significance that extends beyond the domain of the virtual environment. These correspond quite nicely with Searlean ontology: Physical reality (e.g., rocks and trees) and ordinary social reality (e.g., screwdrivers and chairs) can only be simulated, whereas institutional reality (e.g., money, marriage, and private property) can, at least to a large extent, be ontologically reproduced in virtual reality by the collective assignment of status functions.
We will end up defending a realist position about virtual reality, which differs somewhat from the positions of Chalmers and Mazurek and is closer to Brey’s social ontology friendly position. I addition, we will discuss a variety of normative implications of different possible relations between virtual and non-virtual parts of reality.

Whilst there appears to be general acceptance that technology, however defined, can be understood as some combination of social and non-social (physical, material or natural) elements, there is little agreement concerning the precise mixture of such elements or how they might be combined. Indeed, this ontological problem, of elaborating technology’s social and non-social constitution, underlies a range of different technology debates in various disciplines including philosophy, sociology, economics, anthropology and engineering (see AUTHOR 2017). These issues have resurfaced in interesting ways in recent discussions of technology fetishism. At the very least, these discussions tend to share the idea that Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism can usefully be transposed to the domain of technology. In particular, various authors draw upon Marx’s suggestion that ‘things’ appear to possess self-contained qualities that are in reality the result of relations between people, and it is the fetishism of material objects or artefacts that blinds us to this fact. Understood in this way, technology might be seen as a straightforward subset of such fetishism, in particular, fetishising technological artefacts and devices. However, I shall argue, the manner in which these ideas are transposed to a conception of technology tend to end up obscuring what technology is, as well as the role played by social relations in technology’s constitution. As such, accounts of technology fetishism raise a host of issues in need of attention. The argument of this paper is that the central point made by ‘fetish theorists’, that much conceptualisation of technology fails to consider its inherently relational constitution, is better formulated by drawing upon the social ontology of social positioning theory. More specifically, the tendency to ignore technology’s relational constitution, I will argue, can be understood both as a failure to 1) distinguish between the occupants of positions and positioned occupants, that is, the things positioned and the components of systems created when such positioning takes place; and 2) to distinguish between technical and social systems. This paper first reviews some of the more prominent conceptions of technology fetishism before setting out an account of technology (in relation to social positioning theory) in which the criticisms made by ‘fetish theorists’ are more clearly and consistently made. Implications are then drawn out.

It is commonplace to make claims about social phenomena that suggest, when combined in pairs, that social explanations can be loopy. For instance, consider the following three pairs of claims.

The American society is racist because it systematically disadvantages black people. The American society systematically disadvantages black people because it is racist.

I’m constrained thus-and-so because I’m a woman.
I’m a woman because I’m constrained thus-and-so.

The word ‘duck’ has a meaning because it has a pattern of correct use. The word ‘duck’ has a pattern of correct use because it has a meaning.

Each pair, however, seems to violate the canonical view that explanation is asymmetric: if x explains y, y can’t explain x. It would be highly implausible to give up the principle that explanation is asymmetric. So, is it simply confused to think that there is nothing wrong about these pairs of statements that are routinely made about social phenomena?

In this talk, we vindicate such explanatory loops without giving up the asymmtery of explanation. Our argument makes two key moves. First, we show that the asymmetry of explanation does not hold for all instances of mixed explanations, in particular in cases where x explains causally y and y explains ground-theoretically x. Second, we argue that explanations of social phenomena embody these mixed explanatory loops, when the appropriate level of explanation involves coarse-grained social facts about a practice or an institution. Along the way, we sharpen our argument by discussing how to determine the appropriate level of explanation for social phenomena and by clarifying why our argument is consistent with the principle against bootstrapping.

Debates in the philosophy of the social sciences turn on how and to what extent social entities contribute to explanation. Realists maintain that such entities are indispensable because their existence helps explain people’s actions, though they disagree on the nature of these entities. Anti-realists divide into eliminativists, who deny that these entities play any explanatory role, and non-eliminativists, such as fictionalists, who argue that while the entities themselves are dispensable, our discourse about them remains useful for explanation.
This article develops a disjunctivist alternative: depending on which aspect of an explanation we consider, we may adopt ontological fictionalism, methodological fictionalism, or realism. Ontological fictionalism asserts that certain social kinds do not exist, but that talk of them is explanatorily useful. Methodological fictionalism commits only to the explanatory utility of discourse without taking an ontological stance. Realism, here, holds that the existence of social kinds contributes to explanation and that they are not reducible to representations.
Applying these positions to Muhammad Ali Khalidi’s taxonomy, I defend ontological fictionalism for the first two categories of social kinds—those whose types alone, or whose types and tokens, depend on people’s attitudes such as presidency, conferred roles, etc. I retain realism for the third category: kinds whose types and tokens exist independently of human attitudes, including oppression, racism, class, and economic exploitation. The former kinds are dispensable in social scientific explanation since the representation of them suffices. By contrast, one person can exploit another even if neither considers whether a kind such as “exploitation” exists. In another domain, cultural anthropology can appeal to Zeus and other gods to explain why ancient Greeks worshipped Zeus, while adopting a methodological fictionalism for interpretive purposes.
Social-scientific explanation requires sensitivity to the heterogeneous sources of social life. Some elements of our explanations do not call for commitment to the reality of the entities involved, whereas others make such non-commitment impossible. A disjunctivist approach enables us to navigate these differences without enforcing a single ontological or methodological stance across all cases. Together, these stances allow for thicker explanations of action—ones that neither reduce social reality to mere representation nor collapse mere representation into reality. In this way, the disjunctivist view offers a more accurate and nuanced account of how interpretive, material, and social elements operate, and of their distinct contributions—whether purely representational or factive—to explanation. It also maintains a clear realist/anti-realist distinction regarding mind-dependence in ontology: even in the social domain, nothing exists merely because we represent it as existing.

Room 6

In this paper I explore the complex relationship between being constructed as human and being constructed as an equal. The starting point for this analysis is the idea that we can fruitfully think of the human as a social, rather than a natural, kind. Once we think of the human as socially constructed, it raises the question of whether members in the kind are thereby constructed as equals. In this paper I argue that, while membership in the human confers a formal equality of status, this is compatible with being constructed as inferior.
In the first section of the paper I sketch three key mechanisms through which individuals are constructed as human: the conferral of a deontic status; the application of a set of norms; and figuring as human in the social imaginary. While conceptually distinct, these mechanisms are also mutually reinforcing, such that – for example – those whose humanity is most salient within the social imaginary will have a more secure deontic status. Taken together, these three mechanisms make us human.
With this metaphysical framework in place, I turn to exploring its relationship to equality. Of the three mechanisms sketched above, I argue that only the first necessarily constructs members of the human as equals, in virtue of all having the same formal status. Both of the other two mechanisms, by contrast, are compatible with members being constructed as inferiors. For norms of treatment, this can occur because the norms of treating as human are thinner than the norms for treating as an equal. This opens a space for treating some people as human while simultaneously refusing to treat them as an equal, thereby constructing them as inferior kinds of human. For the social imaginary, certain kinds of people are constructed as inferior insofar as they figure in the social imaginary in subordinate roles.
Taken together, this analysis suggests that the mechanisms through which the human is constructed as a social kind can – and all too often do – function to simultaneously construct some classes of people as inferior.

Following Ian Hacking, I contend that what is required for any theory of social construction is to make sense of the contingency of social facts and properties. However, Brian Epstein’s influential analysis of social construction by the means of grounding-anchoring relations complicates this picture with the introduction of framing principles as universal tools to be employed regardless of the modal context. For example, Epstein takes “war criminality” and “being a first-degree murderer” as social kinds that can be applied to possible worlds wherein they are not even anchored. The tension here is that while the theorist of social construction wants to assert that such kinds are contingent products of history that we can do without (and sometimes want to do without), we nevertheless set them up to be used as tools that can be applied to worlds and contexts other than our own, especially in those possible worlds that do not possess the certain history and processes that gave rise to those kinds in the first place. Epstein follows the intuition for such modal exportations to back up his claim that grounding and anchoring are two different metaphysical relationships. But the question of import here is what warrants such exportation in the first place. What makes us in the right when we assert that “Genghis Khan was a war criminal” and “The Roman Empire was a colonial state”? I propose to begin by observing that not all social kinds can be exported in this manner. If we were to talk about whether there could have been baristas in Ancient Egypt or whether there was homosexuality in Ancient Greece, we are usually met with the response that it is much more complicated than that, that those social kinds are set up in ways that are highly context sensitive, they do not export easily unless the anchoring conditions are met in the context of interest, which means that the kind in question is only applicable to possible worlds where the social historical processes that set up the kind is already present. I explain this difference in the possibility of exportation with Bernard Williams’ notion of normatively thick concepts which are concepts that are not only guided by the features of the world but also are effective in guiding our own conduct. I deem “war criminality” and “being a first-degree murderer” to be amongst such concepts, as opposed “being a barista” or “homosexuality”. I take this action guiding facet of such normatively thick social kind concepts to be the driving factor behind our intuitions for exportation. In a sense, we want “war criminality” and “being a first-degree murderer” to apply to contexts beyond its conception so that we judge whether the case at hand is described by the kind and to determine our actions when presented with such judgments. One upshot of this is that if exportation is a matter of moral outlook and not of a bifurcation in metaphysical processes at play, Epstein’s analysis of social construction becomes complicated.

There appear to be—or else, it falls out of many accounts of social reality that there are—politically and morally objectionable but true claims about, e.g., which social kinds exist, the meanings or extensions of our terms for them, or the information conveyed by our concepts of them. Plausibly, there are cases—even if only a minority—in which there simply isn’t an interpretation of some claim that would render it true and apt in a particular context, and this is unjust. Call these claims unethical truths.

One could conceive of many recent debates in feminist metaphysics as responding to the threat or reality of unethical truths, with some of the most prominent responses being: locating the problem in (our analysis of) the language, metaphysics, or concepts; locating the problem in our beliefs; and locating the problem in the world. The first solution “asks” us to change our words, theories, or concepts. The second asks us to change our beliefs (e.g., Basu, 2019). The third asks us to change the world.

Historically, option three hasn’t been popular with philosophers sympathetic to the aims of social movements. One reason for this may be a worry that there is a practical tension between recognizing the world as it is and allowing a new world to emerge, and that avoiding this tension would require something like a noble lie. This worry is understandable, but—as I’ll argue—not insurmountable.

I propose an underexplored intervention: construction work. In this paper, I build a constructive defense for planned construction as a viable tactic on a par with, e.g., conceptual or semantic engineering, or semantic self-determination (Nguyen and Sundell, forthcoming). This will involve addressing two questions, one descriptive and one normative: Is intentional construction metaphysically and psychologically possible, and can we conduct planned construction in an epistemically kosher way?

Within our various subcommunities, we can decide to make new social kinds operative or change the membership conditions of already operative kinds. Arguably, we already do this, e.g., when dominant communities “import” Queer gender kinds. And plausibly, we ought to do more of this, in light of Dembroff’s (2018) persuasive argument that there are unjustly (non-)existent social kinds. However, the possibility and practicality of intentionally creating new social kinds has been undertheorized.

I argue that there is an epistemically permissible way to do so, one that does not require us to posit non-epistemic reasons for believing: We can collectively construct new kinds by agreeing to recognize them, and that this is permissible because we can take a willful—contra predictive or observational—attitude towards the prospect. Ontological injustice is a collective action problem, and while we may not be able to will ourselves to believe audaciously, we can decide to recognize the significance of unappreciated properties and confer social meaning to them.

In this paper, following suggestions in the recent literature, I offer an account of how human kinds (understood as a subset of social kinds) might sometimes be a “negative,” or in some sense unintended product of social construction. In so doing, I adopt a view of social construction as the widespread uptake of an attitude or set of attitudes about individuals with a certain cluster of properties. The kinds that I focus on here are a “negative” product in the sense of resulting from the failure of certain individuals to meet the positively stated conditions that are taken to be required for being considered paradigm instances of some other human kind.
I argue that such kinds are correctly understood as socially constructed kinds, even though they arise as unintended biproducts of the more positive construction of some other kind. I argue that, for instance, certain disability kinds, sexuality kinds, and race kinds plausibly fall into this subset of human kinds. Rather than being constituted by meeting positively stated membership conditions, these kinds consist of individuals who figure in regularities as a result of failing to meet the relevant conditions for membership in other kinds.
The normative-mechanism style theory of social construction defended here helps address concerns raised by both Epstein (2025) and R.K. Cooper (2024). Epstein argues that “agreement-like theories” of social construction face a problem insofar as some kinds—race, for example—seem to be constructed through conflict rather than cooperative agreement, making such theories appear naïve. Cooper argues that “social role” theories of human kinds cannot account for all cases of interest, since at least some sexuality kinds and disability kinds, for instance, do not seem plausibly defined by social roles.
One reason for this is that, even when the target features are unknown (and thus constraints and enablements cannot be conferred), regularities among individuals with the relevant cluster of properties are plausibly socially constructed. There are plausibly robust regularities among such individuals even though they are not “out” (as, e.g., being bisexual). However, it is not plausible to say in such cases that a shared social role explains the regularity. Yet it does seem plausible that what Cooper (2024) terms covert normativity plays a role in shaping or explaining the regularities among those individuals with the relevant cluster of properties, and thus that such kinds are socially constructed.
Put differently, the regularities among individuals with the relevant cluster of properties are “negatively” shaped by norms in the sense that norms are not guiding such individuals to meet the membership conditions for some positively defined kind. Rather, we can make reliable predictions about individuals with the cluster of properties insofar as they fail to uphold the norms upheld for those kinds. They are still socially constructed, even if in some sense more indirectly.

This paper argues that the existence and nature of artifacts are shaped mainly by social interaction between authors and users, rather than by authors’ intentions alone. Although intentions play an important role in starting the production of artifacts and guiding early use, they function primarily as initial frameworks. In practice, however, users often depart from original intentions in stable and systematic ways. Over time, such departures can become socially accepted and form new categories of artifacts. Many artifacts develop functions that differ from what their designers originally planned, showing that artifact kinds are not fixed by intention but instead constituted through patterns of use.
The paper highlights the importance of functional success in the formation of artifact categories. If artifact categories emerge through repeated practices of reproduction based on the successful realization of certain functions, then neither the author’s plan nor the user’s practice alone can account for an artifact’s identity. What matters is the ongoing interaction between the two. Authors introduce artifacts with intended purposes and expectations, while users interpret and adapt them in real contexts. Through repeated use, adjustment, and coordination, socially recognized functions become stabilized. It is this interactive process that gives artifacts their social reality.
Emphasizing interaction also leads to a more relational ontology of artifacts. Artifacts should not be understood as isolated objects whose nature is fixed at creation. Instead, they are socially embedded entities whose identities are continuously shaped within networks of relations among authors, users, and their broader social environment. An artifact’s kind and function depend on ongoing social practices rather than on original design intentions.
The paper further argues that this interactive model helps explain the nature of law. The relationship between artifact authors and users is similar to that between lawmakers and legal subjects. While lawmakers create laws with specific aims, the practical meaning of legal norms is shaped through interpretation, obedience, resistance, and enforcement practices. Over time, practices that differ from original legislative intentions can become established and reshape legal categories.
This approach is inspired by Lon Fuller’s conception of interactional law, which depends on ongoing interaction between lawmakers and citizens. Fuller emphasized that law works through reciprocal guidance and response rather than through one-sided commands. Drawing on this insight, the paper suggests that both artifacts and legal systems are socially constructed through interaction.
By focusing on interaction rather than intention, the paper offers a relational and socially grounded account of artifacts and law, highlighting the central role of collective practices in shaping their existence and nature.

Participants in legal discourse frequently invoke legal facts, such as the president’s authority to grant pardons or the prohibition of capital punishment. These facts are ostensibly related to legal norms. However, such norms are typically conceived as abstract objects, thus lacking spatio-temporal location. This raises a central ontological challenge: how can such facts be situated within the fabric of the natural world?

Following the insight that integrating manifest facts into the actual world requires identifying

their grounding foundations4, this paper investigates the grounding of legal facts. In this regard, I discuss five strategies outlined by Samuele Chilovi that seek to clarify the role of legal norms in relation to legal facts:

1. Legal norms ground legal facts.

2. Legal norms ground the grounding facts.

3. Legal facts are metaphysically explained by, but not grounded in, legal norms.

4. Legal norms are mere generalizations that summarize legal facts, brute facts fully ground legal facts.

5. Legal norms do not exist.

While determining which strategy is most plausible may be regarded as a primary concern of legal philosophy, this paper adopts the more modest aim of analyzing how each approach addresses the placement of legal facts within a naturalistic framework. I contend that while strategies 4 and 5 align easily with naturalism, strategies 1, 2, and 3 face a significant dilemma: they require either an expansion of our conception of the natural world or the admission of a domain beyond it. To resolve this, I explore possible paths that entail abandoning the view of norms as abstract objects.

Legal definitions are often treated as technical instruments for precision: they stipulate meanings to reduce vagueness and improve rule-application. I argue that this picture is incomplete. In many central domains (e.g., “employee,” “hate speech,” “consent,” “family,” “public place”), legal definitions function as conceptual interventions that reconfigure social ontology: they reshape which social kinds there are for legal purposes, how those kinds are tracked in practice, and which normative statuses attach to them. From a conceptual engineering perspective, definitional work is therefore closer to institution design than to semantic housekeeping.

Building on the ethics of conceptualization (drawing on Queloz’s account of responsible conceptual change), I propose a framework for evaluating legal definitions along three dimensions. First, ontological effects: which social kind is being stabilized, transformed, or created, and what dependency relations (collective acceptance, enforcement practices, evidential infrastructures) sustain it. Second, uptake and coordination: whether the engineered concept is likely to be adopted across relevant social roles (courts, administrators, citizens) without systematic distortion, strategic manipulation, or unequal interpretive burdens. Third, normative distribution: how the definition reallocates powers, duties, entitlements, and vulnerabilities, including risks of conceptual injustice and domination produced by definitional authority.

The upshot is a shift in what counts as a “good” legal definition. Adequacy is not exhausted by clarity or extension-matching; it also requires ethical justification of the social-ontological intervention being performed. I close by sketching practical implications: (i) how legislators should justify definitions as publicly accountable engineering proposals, (ii) how courts should treat definitional disputes as conflicts over institutional design, and (iii) how impact-oriented “uptake analysis” can become part of responsible definitional methodology.

Are legal norms and institutions the kind of things that can be functionally explained? What conceptual commitments do we undertake when ascribing functions to specific legal entities? Why does this matter?
Functional ascriptions are pervasive in legal theory and philosophy, permeating various fields and disciplines where the concept of ‘function’ is used extensively (e.g., private law, tax law, comparative law, jurisprudence). Without a functional dimension, explanations of legal phenomena may appear incomplete or deficient. Structural similarities between a tax and a criminal sanction, while noteworthy, cannot explain their difference nor give a complete account of them. We need to know what a tax or a criminal sanction is for. What is their purpose? Functional explanations seem to satisfactorily cover for such a need. Functions are, therefore, powerful explanantia.
And yet functional language often breeds ambiguity, as functional explanations and ascriptions of functionality track different metaphysical relations depending on the nature of thing we take the explanandum to be. This is true of all kinds of things, but it is all the truer in the case of legal entities, whose ontological status is highly contested among theorists. Insofar as theories about the nature of law remain hidden in our functional analysis, functional explanations about the law can only make things more obscure, not clearer.
This article seeks to address two questions: (i) what kinds of functional explanations can we ascribe to legal entities?; and (ii) what theoretical assumptions about the law underpin the various functional explanations found in legal scholarship?
Section 1 starts by doing some conceptual clarification. It sets out the formal structure of explanations in general and functional explanations in particular, giving an account of them and the kinds of questions they seek to answer. Section 2 engages with the main debates on functional explanations in the context of the philosophy of science. In particular, it draws from these debates to identify the kinds of things that can be meaningfully (but differently) explained by means of functionality: artefacts and organisms. Section 3 explores how (and if) legal entities fit in this scheme. It shows how jurisprudential theories of the law can respond to this inquiry and enrich them by incorporating categories developed within the framework of social ontology. The fourth and last Section concludes by elucidating the implications of the previous sections for ongoing debates on functional explanations in the law, aiming to untangle some conceptual knots and, in this way, clarifying the explanatory scope of functional ascriptions in the law.

Room 7

Negligent wrongdoing challenges legal scholars and philosophers alike. A negligent agent is ignorant of the potential harm they might cause. However, they are usually not intentionally ignorant but due to inattention or forgetfulness. Thereby, their ignorance is not obviously blameworthy, yet they seem to have done something wrong. This issue becomes even more difficult when considering the negligent misconduct of group agents such as corporations. The involvement of multiple individuals and the complexity of corporate structure complicate the attribution of ignorance and assessment of responsibility. In my presentation, I will outline the UK’s Corporate Manslaughter and Homicide Act 2007, which seeks to penalise corporations for negligent killings. I will use this example to illustrate the problem of negligent corporate wrongdoing and to highlight the legal difficulties in addressing collective epistemic shortcomings and the harm they cause. I aim to solve this problem in two steps:

First, I will present a way to categorise different types of group ignorance and identify negligence as one such category. This typology encompasses various aspects of group ignorance, including, for example, how information and ignorance are distributed among members, whether the ignorance is wilful or unwilful, and whether the cause of ignorance originates at the collective or individual level. To determine how moral and, later, legal blame should be assigned in such cases, we need to examine these aspects and their implications for responsibility.

In the second step, I will provide a list of conditions under which a corporation can be held morally responsible despite its ignorance, with a particular focus on the special case of negligence. The typology, combined with criteria for assessing the responsibility of an ignorant group agent, can serve as a tool for evaluating real-world cases. It helps identify a corporation’s epistemic shortcomings, their connection to subsequent harm, and their implications for its responsibility.

Ultimately, I will offer a recommendation on how this method could be used to provide a minimally invasive solution for legal models such as the Corporate Manslaughter Act. Moreover, my analysis presents a novel approach to responsibility for negligent wrongdoing: when holding a negligent agent accountable for harm they caused, we should not only consider the cause of their ignorance in determining their blameworthiness. We must also examine the available courses of action at the time, and despite the ignorance, to judge how they could and should have acted instead.

Edit

Edit

In this paper, we address a puzzle at the intersection of epistemic injustice and moral responsibility. We understand testimonial privilege as a condition in which some individuals, qua members of socially salient groups, are systematically granted more credibility than others due to entrenched prejudicial norms and assumptions. Whenever credibility assessments are shaped by such norms, we assume that a distinctive testimonial wrong occurs in which the victim is the agent receiving less credibility than warranted. The central question we investigate is whether those who enact testimonial privilege are fitting objects of blame.
We start by pointing out that attempts to ground blameworthiness in these cases fail. First, we show that testimonial privilege can arise without agents violating epistemic or moral norms. Given the deep embedding of prejudicial norms within ordinary epistemic practices, it is often unreasonable to demand that agents critically reassess the very background assumptions they rely on to evaluate testimony. Second, we challenge attempts to attribute responsibility purely based on quality of will. While patterns of credibility assessment associated with testimonial privilege may reasonably be interpreted as expressing disregard toward certain groups, it does not follow that the agents who employ those patterns themselves express a poor quality of will.
Despite rejecting blameworthiness, we defend a limited and novel role for the expression of blame in cases of testimonial privilege. We argue that expressing blame toward agents who are not morally responsible can nevertheless be fitting when blame is understood as a way of giving moral evidence of wrongdoing. The evidence given should not be taken by the blamed agents to entail that they are responsible for wrongdoing, but that they are agentially involved in morally significant harm. We claim that this form of blame seeks a kind of first-person reactive attitude in response that is akin to agent-regret.
This form of blame functions as a primarily communicative response that censures past behavior, protests one’s suffering of harm, and demands moral recognition, even when it does not track culpability. We emphasize that this is not a sui generis but an ordinary form of blame, familiar to anyone who has been unfairly but unwittingly mistreated, and who seeks to remedy the wrongdoer’s ignorance.
Finally, we articulate two fittingness constraints on such blame. First, since blaming is supposed to induce a negative emotion in the blamed agent, its expression must be proportionate to the gravity of the act, even if not to the gravity of their culpability. Second, blame-as-giving-evidence is justified only when there is a reasonable prospect that the target agent is susceptible to the moral evidence it provides. Together, these constraints explain how blaming those that enact testimonial privilege can be justified without presupposing their moral culpability.

In this paper, I argue that solidarity, as a relationship of cooperative struggle against an imposing problem or injustice, grounded in conflict and the material interdependence of all political subjects, is a uniquely valuable identity-constituting relationship. Solidarity provides subjects with a shared framework for developing a moral understanding of the relevant injustice (Dishaw 2024), reinforced through both inter- and intra-group conflict (DuFord 2022). Solidary subjects debate tactics and disagree on strategies, yet ‘win’ and ‘lose’ cooperative actions together, ultimately strengthening the shared moral understanding at the foundation of those disagreements. Solidarity reflects what matters most to people, as it is will-dependent (i.e., it must be chosen) and cause-mediated (i.e., it is oriented toward a specific problem/injustice) (Viehoff 2025). For instance, the solidarity within a labor union is not borne of a shared identity of ‘organizer’ or ‘co-/worker’; it arises from a personal, voluntary commitment to opposing exploitation in the specific, relevant workplace and the recognition that one cannot successfully combat workplace exploitation alone. The amalgamation of personal dedication to the cause and the recognition of the necessity of cooperation for its success fosters a trusting discursive environment in which the advantages of various direct-action tactics are vigorously debated. Ironically, this process of internal conflict enables those in solidarity to articulate a unified external voice, thereby constituting the solidary group (Pettit 2025). Moreover, this process actively shapes a shared moral understanding of the particular exploitation (or injustice), a process that affords autonomous creation of their evaluative outlooks—and thus, their selves. Solidarity does not simply illuminate interdependence among those already in solidarity but also affords a new way of evaluating—and thus, strategically addressing—chronic problems once thought ontologically immovable. As this foundation of autonomous self-creation, solidarity is an intrinsically valuable relationship independent of the goals a solidary group pursues.
This paper presents a theoretical argument regarding the nature of solidarity with normative implications, grounded in social-ontological theory and ethnographic research on direct action groups (David Graeber’s Direct Action; Shon Meckfessel’s Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used to Be), as well as autoethnographic work on my higher education union. Consequently, my account more accurately reflects the lived experiences of those actively organizing in solidarity and, furthermore, suggests that the obligations of solidarity are best understood as joint and non-transmissible (see: Mellor 2024, 2025). This approach thereby complicates longstanding assumptions concerning the interpersonal and reciprocal nature of solidarity’s obligations, offering a novel perspective in its place.

My presentation inquires into the social ontology of conflict by situating John Dewey’s political philosophy within contemporary social-ontological debates on the constitution of social groups. While Dewey does not use technical social-ontological vocabulary himself, I suggest—following recent scholarship (Särkelä 2021; Testa 2017)—that his framework offers a genuine social ontology that anticipates and extends Brian Epstein’s (2015; 2019) account of social groups by adding social conflicts to social ontology’s agenda.

I identify two distinct social-ontological perspectives on conflict in Dewey’s work. First, from the individualist perspective, conflict is understood as the friction between the individual agent and social institutions, norms, and practices, meaning that conflicts can be mitigated by harmonising individual and societal interests. Conversely, from the group-based perspective, conflict takes place between social groups that are constituted along conflicting interests. It is therefore necessary to understand the role this very friction plays in the constitution of social groups. Unlike standard “deliberative” readings of Dewey that focus on pacification through participation and communication, I argue that the group-based view conceptualises social groups in relational terms as entities competing for limited resources. In this latter view, conflict is not a residual category of social integration but a driving and irreducible force of social dynamics.

This Deweyan framework provides a necessary intervention in two areas:

(1) For social ontology, it suggests a robust account of what role social conflicts play in the formation and persistence of social groups. More precisely, its emphasis on social dynamics based on what the literature calls “habit ontology” (Gregoratto and Särkelä 2020; Testa 2017) moves beyond the mainstream models centred around collective acceptance (Searle 2006) and joint or shared action (Gilbert 1989), which often struggle to account for groups defined by systemic friction.

(2) For social theory, it offers a path beyond deliberative ideal theory (e.g. Rawls 1971; Habermas 1984) and the Heideggerian/Schmittian agonism of Laclau and Mouffe (2014). While Dewey shares the view that conflict is a basic social category, his social ontology in combination with his social philosophy avoids the ethicalisation and over-valorisation of conflict found in agonistic democratic theory.

My presentation proceeds in four steps: I begin with an outline of Dewey’s habit ontology in order to demonstrate its relevance for social ontology. This is followed, second, by a reconstruction of the individualist vs. group-based ontological notions of conflict I identify in Dewey. Third, I criticise the conflict-aversion of standard intentionalist approaches through a Deweyan lens. Ultimately, I conclude by arguing that conflict-based ontology enhances our understanding of social groups and their dynamics.

Who is worthy of distrust? Usually those who harm us by acting unjustly, betray and disappoint our trust. What if those are the actions of a whole group of people, can we generalize and just deem anyone who might be in that group untrustworthy? In this paper I evaluate the epistemic warrant needed for distrust based on generalizations. My analysis stems from Meena Krishnamurthy’s article “(White) Tyranny and the Democratic Value of Distrust” (The Monist, 2015). Here Krishnamurthy offers a normative account of distrust based on Martin Luther King’s writings, which consist in the confident belief that a subject will not act justly on their own. The target for King are White Moderates whom he distrust to act according to racial justice. Furthermore, the argument maintains that based on this confident belief the African American community is warranted social distrust, i.e. distrust toward members of another group based on the generalization that they will not act justly. The political outcomes of social distrust are claimed to be positive as they defend from abuses of power and motivate social movement for change.
While the political benefits of distrust are numerous, my goal is to analyse its epistemic grounds namely whether distrust of a person based on a generalization about the group they are members of can be epistemically justified. First, I show that distrust based on generalization poses the risk of epistemic irrationality and injustice. Yet, in many cases we would find it reasonable for a member of an oppressed group to distrust a member of the dominant group on the basis of a generalization. Second, I offer a solution to this tension by introducing an understanding of distrust that bridges the epistemic and the moral dimension. I claim that distrust is essentially a defensive attitude and it is epistemically and morally warranted only when given evidence of future harm one adopts it to protect oneself and others. I then adopt a structural understanding of generics to show that defensive distrust based on generic generalization about a group is warranted when certain social and institutional oppressive structures are in place, providing evidence of future harm. Finally, I distinguish between warranted and unwarranted defensive distrust, comparing distrust held by minorities toward dominant groups and the distrust held by conspiracy groups against institutions. By drawing these differences I aim at demarcating a distinction between defensive distrust and political paranoia. Indeed, defensive distrust being based in evidence has the potential for resolution and repair once the oppressive structure is dismantled. In turn, political paranoia cannot lead to social change because it does not track actual harmful structures in society.

Return to Programme Overview

Friday (24.07)

Keynote: Krzysztof Poslajko

See Keynotes

10:30-11:00 | Coffee Break

Room 1

The ontology of social structures has been a topic of longstanding controversy in the social sciences, particularly in sociology and anthropology where various competing conceptions of social structures and structural explanations have been explored. Whether or not social structures can be said to ‘cause’ anything, and particularly ‘downwardly’ causally affect their own constituents is particularly controversial.

One of the most sophisticated recent attempts to defend downward social structural causality, Dave Elder-Vass’s The Causal Power of Social Structures, takes structural causal powers to be emergent features. The principal criticism of his attempt has been that he fails to escape Jaegwon Kim’s well-known critique of emergence and non-reductive physicalism as entailing a problematic causal overdetermination insofar as it is unclear what it means to attribute distinctive causal powers to an emergent composite entity that its compositional dependence base does not already possess.

Jessica Wilson’s concept of weak metaphysical emergence is specifically designed to overcome Kim’s skepticism by advancing a novel approach to the individuation of emergents’ causal power profiles. However, while there has been significant debate about the bearing of Kim’s arguments on the social sciences, Wilson’s proposal has so far been received and reviewed primarily in the philosophy of the natural sciences.

In this presentation, I will briefly introduce Elder-Vass’ critical realist conception of emergent downward social structural causality and discuss the Kim-inspired criticism that has been leveled against it. I will then present Wilson’s schema for weak metaphysical emergence and her arguments in support of the claim that this model of emergence does not trigger Kim’s concerns with causal overdetermination. Centrally, I will then canvas the viability of a Wilsonian weakly emergent conception of social structures by posing and exploring the following set of questions: Which conceptions of causation are both compatible with Wilson’s model and viable within the philosophy of social science? What kinds of entities or properties can make up the dependence base of a social structure? Is social structural emergence best figured through degree of freedom elimination, or the determinable-determination relation? What range of entities or properties can social structures affect and can they ‘downwardly’ affect their dependence bases, in whole or in part? Finally, what role might weakly emergent structures play in social explanations?

Kenneth Silver (2024) has recently argued that the social world contains examples in which people genuinely change the past, for example by retroactively revoking a sports title. This would be a significant result, since it is typically thought that there is no actual backwards causation.

Tobias Hansson Wahlberg (2025) responds to Silver by arguing that there is strong prima facie reason to reject backwards causation. He offers an interpretation of the cases that does not require genuine backwards causation: given a B-theoretic understanding of time, we can say that status declarations like the revocation of a team’s win only create mere “Cambridge change”, not real change. Hansson Wahlberg’s theory therefore renders social properties causally inefficacious.

This paper defends the reality of social causation while casting doubt on the possibility of backwards causation. Backwards causation is prima facie unlikely, but we also have independent reason to think that social properties are causal. It follows that a theory that captures the reality of social causation while blocking the possibility of backwards causation has an advantage. I show that recent developments in social metaphysics support this position, using Muhammad Ali Khalidi’s (2013) taxonomy of social kinds and Aaron Griffith’s recent realist account of the social (2025). The consequences are that there is no backwards causation in the social realm and that status declarations have less power to create social change than one might have thought.

Finally, the foregoing argument has consequences for retroactivity in law. The argument shows that there is a tension between (i) thinking that retroactive laws successfully impart legal status retroactively and (ii) the institutional kinds created by legal activity are real kinds with causal import. The arguments of the paper therefore support a “fictionalist” account of retroactive laws.

The two-level framework of social kinds developed by Brian Epstein has been one of the most influential contributions in recent social ontology. On this picture, there is a distinction between (i) the anchoring facts, that fix what it takes to belong to a social kind, such as facts involving rules, conventions, or collective acceptances, and (ii) the grounding facts, in virtue of which particular entities fall under that kind, such as material, psychological, and institutional facts. The framework promises to clarify the dependence structure of social reality by separating questions about the existence of kinds from questions about the instantiation of those kinds.

At the same time, a largely neglected but prima facie plausible metaphysical thesis suggests itself: social kinds are immanent universals. As fewer philosophers now draw a metaphysical divide between natural and social kinds, and as natural kinds are often taken to be universals, it is tempting to extend immanent realism to social kinds. A further motivation reason is resistance to platonism in the social domain: social kinds do not plausibly “float free” of social reality. The natural conclusion is that social kinds exist only insofar as they are instantiated.

This paper argues that these two claims, each attractive on its own, are jointly incompatible. If social kinds are immanent universals, then the existence of a social kind depends on the existence of its instances. By contrast, according to the anchoring/grounding framework, the existence of a social kind is fully determined by the anchors that fix its membership conditions, independently of whether those conditions are ever satisfied. In short, either the existence of a social kind depends on anchors being in place, or it depends on instances existing: it cannot fully depend on both. This generates a dilemma: either the two-level anchoring picture must be abandoned or revised, or immanent realism about social kinds must be rejected.

The paper has three aims. First, it formulates this dilemma precisely and shows that it does not turn on controversial assumptions about the metaphysical nature of anchoring and grounding: an analogous tension arises for any framework that separates what determines the existence of kinds from what determines the existence of their instances. Second, it distinguishes the present problem from recent grounding-theoretic objections to Aristotelian universals. Third, it evaluates the main strategies for resolving the dilemma. I argue that denying immanent realism, rather than abandoning the anchoring/grounding framework, offers the most promising path forward, and briefly explore the resulting options for understanding the metaphysical status of social kinds.

This paper develops a social-ontological critique of dominant philosophical accounts of the right to housing. I begin by articulating the Independence Principle: home and house are orthogonal concepts. While house denotes a legal-proprietary relation to a place secured through tenure, home is constituted through social relationships, practices, and a sense of belonging, regardless of legal status.
This distinction challenges what I call the Property-Title View (PTV), advanced by philosophers such as Katy Wells and Christopher Essert. The PTV holds that legal title is constitutive of home-related activities: one cannot host dinner parties, develop intimate relationships, or experience security without property rights over space. Essert, for instance, claims that “property rights are constitutive of the familiar sorts of activities and relations that take place in our homes.”
I argue that the PTV rests on a flawed individualist social ontology. It treats persons as bounded, atomistic selves whose autonomy depends on exclusionary control rather than on social relations. This reverses the proper order of explanation: a dinner party is constituted by collective attitudes and friendship, not by the host’s legal title. The PTV cannot adequately characterize cases such as cohabiting partners (where only one holds the lease), couch-surfing students embedded in supportive networks, or squatters who create genuine homes on others’ property.
Against the PTV, I defend a relational social ontology of home. Home-constituting activities—hosting, caring, being vulnerable—are grounded in social relationships that can exist independently of, and sometimes in tension with, legal arrangements. This reconceptualization has normative implications for the right to housing: rather than focusing on distributing property titles, housing rights should protect diverse tenure arrangements that enable homemaking practices, securing access to relational home rather than merely allocating legal entitlements. This paper contributes to legal philosophy, as well as non-ideal approaches in social ontology.

It seems clear that social kinds, like ballet, marriage, and football, were born at some time in history. For example, ballet originated from Renaissance era Italian court dances and did not exist before that. However, it is less clear-cut whether social kinds die. Joseph Raz (2003) suggests that once socially dependent kinds are brought into being through an existing practice they need not ever die; they remain in existence even if the sustaining practices die out. In this talk, I want to complicate this claim by examining how social kinds live, exist, and die.

My proposal is to bring more detail to Raz’s social dependence thesis by analyzing different kinds of social dependence. Raz’s thesis talks of values, such as the excellence of opera or law, but the point can be generalized to the social kinds bearing these values. In modified form, the social dependence thesis states that social kinds exist only if there are (or were) social practices sustaining them. Note that present and past existence of the sustaining practices are on equal footing in the thesis. Following this line of thought, both modern football and the Ancient Chinese ballgame cuju are equally existing social kinds. However, intuitively there seems to be some significant difference in their existence, since football is the most played sport today and the playing of cuju died out during the Ming dynasty.

This difference can be explained by an account that divides social dependence into two different ways that social kinds depend on social practices: (a) the existence of social kinds as real, active parts of social reality depends on there being a sustaining pattern of social interactions, such as organizing around shared aims, mutual responsiveness, and learning, and (b) specific features of social kinds depend on there being material or conceptual resources that specify what they are like. Social kinds are born when a suitable social practice consisting of systematic social interactions and the use of particular resources comes into being. They stay alive as long as some sustaining social practice is alive, and die if the social interactions that sustain them fade out entirely. But note that the resources can, and often do, continue existing, and they can preserve a record of the relevant features of the previously active practices and social kinds. In this way, dead social kinds can go on existing in fossilized form. Football is a living social kind, because it is sustained by active social interactions and resources like rules, fields, and so on. But cuju is a fossilized social kind; there are resources like historical texts that describe the rules, so the game has not ceased to exist entirely, but no sustaining social practice. Thus, paying attention to different ways social kinds depend on social practices helps make sense of Raz’s thought that social kinds can continue to exist long after the practice that brought them into existence has died.

Scholars of Spinoza’s political theory have long recognized that his naturalistic metaphysics demands a naturalistic account of the genesis of the state. Spinoza, particularly in his Theological-Political Treatise, claims that the state is formed through a transfer of natural right from subject to sovereign. Such a claim is in line with familiar social contract accounts of state sovereignty. And yet, in that same work, Spinoza famously argues that natural right is coextensive with a being’s causal power: one has a natural right to perform some action if and only if that action follows with necessity from their nature. How, then, can Spinoza account for the transfer of right which is the foundation of the state?

In this paper, I argue for an “ontological reading” of Spinoza’s social contract on which subjects’ agreement to transfer their right is just their formation of a new metaphysical individual, the state. I examine in turn both of Spinoza’s accounts of metaphysical individuation, that of “singular things” and “individuals”, and argue that on both definitions Spinoza’s social contract is a means of forming the metaphysical basis for a new individual entity. I then offer a detailed account of the means by which subjects in the state of nature might form this new individual according to Spinoza’s own metaphysical commitments. Having explained this ontological machinery, I then draw out some implications of my reading for interpreting the distinction between treason and mere crime or injury, as well as Spinoza’s analysis of what it is to be a subject or citizen of a state and to be bound by its laws. Ultimately, my reconstruction of Spinoza’s social contract speaks against interpretations of his political theory which posit a sharp discontinuity between the social contract of the TTP and the spontaneous formation of the state which he recounts in his Political Treatise. Attending to the ontological story that he tells in each of these works shows that, with some differences in detail, both accounts are of the same social-ontological phenomenon.

Room 2

The aim of this paper is to clarify some key questions in metanormative theory regarding the nature of normative reality and the structure of normative explanation, and to outline some theoretical options addressing them. These questions concern the way the normative realm is structured, how its domains relate to each other, the nature of the normative force they possess, and whether there exists an ultimate notion of authority – of what ought to be the case simpliciter, or all things considered.

In approaching these questions, two motivating thoughts guide my analysis (though they might ultimately be rejected). The first is that normative reality appears to be varied and plural, as our ordinary thought and talk makes reference to norms and reasons of many kinds, including morality, prudence, law, religion, aesthetics, games, etiquette, sports and others. The second is that, within this plenitude of reasons and norms, there appears to be an asymmetry between them. Some appear to matter more than others. For instance, it is often thought that moral norms are more important than the rules of etiquette.

In short, we want to allow for a multiplicity of normative kinds, but also be able to differentiate between their normative force. Some possess a normativity that is robust, and guide our conduct with authority, while others have a normativity that is merely formal. The latter include what may still legitimately be called “rules”, since they set standards of correctness or compliance, and tell us what to do. But they give no genuine guidance, and make no real contribution to answering the question of what one really ought to do.

This raises the question of whether there exists a notion of ultimate authority, and of how the distinction between formal and authoritative normativity is to be drawn. An initial suggestion might be to try to capture this in terms of the distinction between categorical and hypothetical norms. However, since Foot (“Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives”, Philosophical Review 81 (3):305-316, 1972), it has been shown that this won’t work. For instance, consider the social norm that men ought not to express fear, grief or emotional dependency. This norm applies to the individuals it does regardless of whether they intend it or not. Thus, rules such as this are at once both formal and categorical.

Given problems such as this, the hypothesis I explore is that we should reverse the order of explanation. Rather than starting with a distinction between robust and formal normativity and then understanding ultimate normativity in terms of it, I take the latter notion – of what one really ought to do (or ought to do simpliciter) – as primitive, and understand the varieties of normative force in terms of it.

Is social normativity a distinct kind of normativity? The question is twofold: Is social normativity irreducible or reducible to other sorts such as moral or prudential? And is there only one kind of social normativity or are there several?

Charlotte Witt has recently argued (*Social Goodness*, Oxford, 2023) that social normativity is neither reducible to moral normativity nor to prudential normativity. Witt thinks social normativity is a distinct sort of normativity that comes with occupying a social position. The source of it is the social occupancy itself and the content of the norms in question are developed in accordance with the artisanal model of how one functions well in that role.

## The argument for externalism

Why would the source of social normativity be the mere occupancy of the role? Many people believe that you are not bound by the norms of a social role like being a woman, a student, or a father unless you have chosen those norms yourself. Witt thinks this cannot be right. You ought to take care of your kid because you are their father even though you have not chosen the norms that come with that social role yourself.

This case exemplifies the idea that the source of social normativity is external to the individual, not internal to them. You ought to take care of your kid, not because that would be to act in accordance with laws or norms you have yourself chosen to abide by. Nor should you do it because it is in accordance with your preferences. You should do it because you occupy the role of father and the standards of being a good father demand it.
In general, on Witt’s view, the reason you ought to follow the norms of a particular social role you occupy is that you do occupy that role and “around here”, to use her locution, social goodness in that role involves adhering to those norms.

## Why social normativity is not reducible

To get a glimpse of Witt’s argument, let us consider gender as a social role.

Accoring to Witt, an important reason for why gender normativity is not reducible to moral normativity is the difficulty in explaining how one could criticize oppressive social norms that one nevertheless ought to follow. Similarly for the normativity governing the carpenter: although the carpenter ought to use a level in their construction, that is not a moral ought!

Social normativity is also not reducible to prudential normativity, on Witt’s view: What Witt ought to do as a professor may not be in her best interest. For example it may be in her interest to give everyone an A in a class, but nevertheless that is not what she ought to do.

In this talk I argue against Witt’s *monism* about social normativity and advocate instead *pluralism*.

In From Normativity to Responsibility, Joseph Raz argues that an action is normative when the reasons supporting it fulfill metaphysical, evaluative, and explanatory roles. According to Tria Gkouvas’s interpretation of this model, legal reasons count as normative when they appear in three corresponding metanormative statements: (1) a metaphysical claim identifying which facts speak in favor of, or mandate, a given action; (2) an evaluative claim specifying which facts set the standards for assessing conduct; and (3) an explanatory claim identifying which facts allow us to recognize an intentional action as a normative one. Gkouvas maintains that making the explanatory claim demands a distinction between two types of facts: those that identify legal facts, and those that allow us to recognize legal facts as normative reasons for action.

This presentation examines the explanatory claim within accounts of legal practice that rely on linguistic‑practice models of explanation. The central question is: which facts matter for normativity in theories that emphasize semantic consequences of pragmatically structured interaction among legal practitioners? If law is understood through the doings and sayings that constitute a practice, which facts should count as explanatory? I argue that Brandom‑inspired inferentialist models of legal practice provide the conceptual resources to distinguish, and relate, the two types of facts highlighted by Gkouvas.

The first type consists of facts about which actions are treated as justified within the practice, as manifested in participants’ assertions and performances. The second type consists of facts about how reasons are transmitted—or “inherited”—through the practice, specifically when agents occupy institutional roles that entitle others to take up their reasons as normative for future action.

I argue that these two types of facts stand in a relation of pragmatic grounding: justificatory treatments of actions ground normative reasons only when embedded in a practice that confers the relevant institutional statuses. This supplements standard metaphysical grounding with a practice‑dependent condition, aligning with recent work by Pavlakos and Chilovi on grounding principles in legal theory.

The talk outlines this model, shows how it clarifies the explanatory dimension of normativity in law, and discusses its implications for metanormative theories that treat legal normativity as practice‑constituted.

This paper argues that endogenizing reference network selection is necessary to explain the normativity of
social norms, and develops a game-theoretic model of how rational agents select their reference networks.
Contemporary social norm theory—from Bicchieri’s expectation-based account to Dietrich and Spiekermann’s process-based account—treats the “reference network” (the specific group whose behaviors and attitudes matter to an individual) as exogenous. This creates a critical explanatory gap: if the reference network is simply imposed by the environment, the “ought” of a social norm is either reduced to a prudential calculation of external sanctions or inflated into a universal dictate of objective reason.

We offer two arguments for the necessity of making the reference network endogenous. The Argument from Autonomy addresses the validity of the “ought”: for others’ expectations to be genuinely binding rather than merely coercive, individuals must autonomously authorize the source of their obligations. Social normativity is thus a self-imposed constraint: we are bound by the expectations of those we choose to value. The Argument from Exclusivity addresses the ontology of “the social”. If networks were exogenous and all-inclusive, norms would lose their ability to coordinate agents around specific shared identities. For social norms to exist as distinct entities, reference networks must be exclusive, which necessitates endogenous selection.

Building on this philosophical foundation, we develop a game-theoretic model of rational reference
network selection. Moving beyond intra-game strategy, we model inter-game selection: how rational agents, facing multiple possible coordination games, choose which game to enter. This involves a rational trade-off between coordination scale (network size) and coordination sophistication(fineness of shared information partitions). The model rests on three core assumptions: (1) Scale Effect: Larger networks yield higher payoffs through greater coordination volume. (2) Sophistication Effect: Finer-grained information partitions yield higher payoffs through more precise coordination. (3) Cognitive Convergence: as network size increases, maintaining sophisticated shared partitions becomes increasingly difficult, forcing a move toward coarser coordination.

The model demonstrates that rational agents converge toward an equilibrium network that is large enough for coordination benefits, yet exclusive enough to sustain
meaningful informational common ground. Crucially, while network entry is autonomous, the resulting equilibrium generates self-binding constraints. Agents accept the network’s authority as a constitutive condition for high-sophistication coordination, rendering the “ought” distinct from transient strategic interest. This framework provides crucial foundations for future work explaining rational norm polarization.

Social cohesion plays a central role in our understanding of social order. Political philosophers treat it as a requirement of justice; social scientists regard it as a cause of social goods such as economic growth and effective governance; and policymakers routinely cite threats to cohesion as reasons for intervention. Yet despite its prominence, the concept remains poorly understood and has received little sustained philosophical attention. Existing definitions vary widely and often combine attitudinal, behavioral, structural, and even normative elements without clarifying what kind of property social cohesion is or clearly distinguishing its constituents from enabling conditions and consequences.
In this paper, I offer a clearer account of the nature of social cohesion. I start by asking what social cohesion must be if it is to play the central explanatory and normative roles typically assigned to it, and identify four desiderata. First, social cohesion must concern the possibility of sustaining cooperation under conditions of social differentiation. Second, it must have generality of application, applying to social systems at different scales, in different historical periods, and with different cultural styles. Third, social cohesion requires motivational depth, in the sense that cooperation must be sustained by certain motivations rather than by coercion or mere self-interest. Fourth, social cohesion is normatively neutral and must be analyzed independently of normative conceptions of social order such as legitimacy and justice.
I then argue that dominant attitudinal accounts, which define social cohesion in terms of trust, belonging, or norm alignment, fail to meet these desiderata.
I propose instead a disposition-based account. On this account, social cohesion consists in the system-scale manifestation of members’ generalized cooperative dispositions (GCDs), enabled by favorable structural conditions. Generalized cooperative dispositions are standing motivations to cooperate with others in virtue of shared membership in a bounded social system. A society is socially cohesive if and only if its members’ GCDs are manifested in cooperation across the system. This framework explains why attitudes such as trust, belonging, and norm alignment so often accompany social cohesion, while also showing that they are neither necessary nor sufficient. It also clarifies that a system-level property of social cohesion can emerge from individual motivations only when appropriate structural conditions allow those motivations to manifest by making cooperation epistemically accessible, practically feasible, and reproducible over time.
I close by outlining an upshot of the account: the disposition-based approach provides a principled way of distinguishing different kinds of social cohesion deficits (distributional, structural, and precondition deficits) and links each type of deficit to a distinct form of remedy.

Accounts of social cohesion typically privilege explicit shared intentions, joint commitments, or institutional structures as the primary sources of social order. While such accounts capture important aspects of collective life, they struggle to explain how coordination, mutual expectation, and a sense of belonging arise and persist in the absence of explicit agreement or reflective endorsement. This talk develops an alternative starting point by focusing on shared habits: socially learned, repeatable patterns of action that give rise to a shared sense of familiarity. I argue that this sense of familiarity plays a central, yet underappreciated, normative role in sustaining social cohesion.

Drawing on recent work in philosophy of action and cognitive science, I characterize habits as acquired dispositions that structure perception, responsiveness, and practical orientation. Through repeated interaction, agents become familiar with particular ways of acting in particular contexts, and this familiarity generates a pre-reflective sense that “this is how we do things.” I argue that such felt familiarity can function as a source of proxy-reasons for action: motivations that guide and justify behavior in practice without requiring explicit deliberation or propositional articulation. Proxy-reasons differ from full-fledged justificatory reasons in that they are normatively thin and epistemically fragile, yet they are sufficient to render actions intelligible as actions rather than mere behavior.

By situating habits and familiarity within the space of reasons in this qualified way, the talk bridges a gap between psychological accounts of coordination and normative theories of social action. Familiarity-based proxy-reasons help explain how agents come to rely on one another, anticipate compliance, and hold each other to expectations, even in loosely structured or large-scale social settings. These reasons operate diachronically and socially: they depend on ongoing patterns of confirmation and uptake, and they can misfire when familiarity ceases to track shared values or practices.

In the final part of the talk, I explore how proxy-reasons grounded in shared habits contribute to the emergence and stabilization of interpersonal attitudes such as trust, belonging, and mutual expectation. Rather than being the outcome of explicit commitments alone, these attitudes are often sustained by familiar ways of interacting that make social life predictable and navigable. The account thus clarifies how a shared sense of familiarity can function as a normatively significant proxy for reasons, guiding action and shaping interpersonal expectations without relying on explicit deliberation or formal commitment.

Room 3

Recent work in social ontology has utilized hylomorphic approaches to describe collective agents, most notably in Stephanie Collins’s account of organizations as moral agents. Collins models organizations on Kathrin Koslicki’s hylomorphic treatment of ordinary objects, arguing that organizations are structured wholes whose matter consists exclusively in human members. Non-human elements, such as buildings, machines, algorithms, and infrastructures, are treated merely as property rather than as constitutive parts. This paper challenges that restriction. I argue that once Collins’s own functional criteria for organizational membership are taken seriously, non-human components must be included among the matter of organizations.
Collins characterizes organizational membership via three conditions: commitment to collective decisions, systematic influence on decision-making inputs, and participation in the enactment of organizational outcomes. Although Collins interprets these conditions psychologically and thereby restricts membership to human agents, I argue that their theoretical role is functional rather than mentalistic. Each condition describes a role that is multiply realizable and is in fact routinely realized by non-human systems within contemporary organizations. Algorithms, databases, automated production lines, and institutional infrastructures reliably implement organizational commitments, shape decision inputs, and enact outcomes in ways functionally indistinguishable from, and often more stable than, human participation. Interpreted functionally, Collins’s criteria therefore support rather than exclude the inclusion of non-human matter.
I develop a positive hylomorphic alternative grounded in a contribution-based account of material parthood. On this view, matter consists of all components that contribute to the realization of the essential functions imposed by an organization’s form. Because such contributions vary in importance, material parthood is graded rather than binary. I formalize this idea using a fuzzy parthood function that measures the degree to which a component contributes to the organization’s essential dispositional profile. This framework preserves Collins’s ethical motivations by grounding differential responsibility in metaphysical structure rather than psychological exclusivity.
Finally, the account clarifies cases of organizational persistence during periods of partial or total human memberlessness. Some organizations like courts become dysfunctional when essential human contributions are absent, while others such as highly automated systems or decentralized autonomous organizations may continue to realize their essential functions through non-human matter alone. The hylomorphic framework thus explains organizational impairment without invoking ontological disappearance, and it avoids alienating organizations from the very material systems through which they act.

Philosophical accounts of corporate agency typically presuppose a determinate relation between a corporate agent and its individual members, yet this relation remains undertheorized in contemporary social ontology. Collectivist theories treat corporations as genuine agents and bearers of responsibility, while critics argue that such entities are either reducible to individuals or metaphysically “spooky.” This paper diagnoses the source of this impasse and offers a precise metaphysical account of the corporate agent–member relation within Kendy Hess’s holist framework of corporate agency. I argue that the tension between dependence and autonomy arises from the absence of an adequate metaphysical articulation of this relation. To remedy this, I defend a dual-aspect account integrating non-reductive entity-grounding and strong ontological emergence.

First, I argue that corporate agents are non-reductively grounded in their members. Drawing on work on entity-grounding, I show that corporate agents depend asymmetrically on the structured participation of individual members. This grounding relation explains why corporate agents exist at all, without collapsing them into aggregates of individual intentions or actions. It aligns with Hess’s emphasis on “re-membering” the corporate agent by foregrounding the constitutive role of members without reverting to individualism (Hess 2025, 984).

Second, I argue that grounding alone is insufficient to account for the distinctive agential capacities of corporate agents. Certain features central to corporate agency—most notably distinctive intentionality and causal capacities—resist explanation solely in terms of their members. To account for this, I defend the claim that corporate agents are strongly emergent from their members. I introduce the notion of strong emergence+, on which what emerges is not merely a set of higher-level truths but a novel entity with irreducible causal powers. This explains how corporations can form intentions, incur obligations, and bear responsibility in ways unavailable to individual members or mere aggregates.

The core contribution of the paper lies in reconciling these two relations. I argue that non-reductive grounding and strong emergence+ are not incompatible but jointly necessary. Grounding captures ontological dependence; emergence captures irreducibility and autonomy. Taken together, these two relations can adequately explain how corporate agents are both dependent on, and irreducible to, their members. Hence, they dissolve the alleged dilemma between reduction and metaphysical excess that has long structured debates about corporate agency. By articulating the corporate agent–member relation with metaphysical precision, this paper strengthens the ontological foundations of Hess’s holist framework and provides a principled response to skepticism about collective agents.

Methodological individualism falls short of accounting for many important issues such as generational justice. For instance, Habermas uses the conceptual framework of autonomy and equality to criticize the technology of genetic editing, arguing that by unilaterally deciding to change the genetic makeup of their child, the parents violate the autonomy of the child. However, autonomy is not an apt conceptual framework to discuss the issue, for the relation between parents and infants/young children is not the sort of relations between free and equal adults in the public realm. Thus, we need some fundamentally relational conceptual apparatus to capture the generational situation involving not-yet rational humans.
The sort of efforts care ethics is making is along this line: it takes mother taking care of the children as the paradigm of care relationship, and demonstrates the moral value of the intrinsically dependent and vulnerable features of humanity. Care ethics highlights the aspect of human life that was traditionally ignored by moral philosophy, which emphasizes the independence and autonomy of adult individuals in public life. But care ethics stays within the realm of normative ethics without going deeper to provide an ontological grounding of the relational aspect of human life.
Contemporary Chinese philosopher Sun Xiangchen put forward a “dual-ontology of individuality and generationality” that addresses exactly this issue. Sun defines “generationality” as the generational relationship in a family, and argues that generationality as a fundament ontological structure is irreducible to the individual level. Sun establishes this by criticizing and improving on Heidegger’s Dasein ontology: one is not thrown into the world but rather being born into the generational relationships of one’s family, one does not only take care and plan for one’s own life, but also does this for one’s offsprings (at least when they are very young). Thus, generational relationships are important constituents of one’s existence. Instead of “Being-in-the-World” that emphasizes more of the spatial situatedness of one’s existence, it should rather be that humans are “Being-in-the-World in Generations” that also brings the temporal dimension of humans (not just the individual human being) to the fore.
I agree that generationlity should be an irreducible ontological structure, but Sun’s attempt of attaching Confucian filial piety to be the ethical implication of generationality is rather dubious. First, the traditional Confucian idea of social and ethical hierarchy should not be accepted into the modern world without a thorough critique. Second, the sort of ideal filial relationships portrayed by Confucian ethics does not reflect humanity as it actually is and conceals evils that may endanger the disadvantaged party in generational relationships. As I shall show in my talk, we should instead develop the ethical implications of generationality in some other way.

What is a language, and what is a linguistic community? This question, at the intersection of philosophy of language and social ontology, was influentially answered by David Lewis (1969, 1975): linguistic communities use particular languages as a matter of convention, where conventions are certain sorts of regularities in behavior and mental attitudes among the community. Lewis’s Conventionalist theory promises to deliver a notion of semantic content that can explain reliable communicative success, in addition to supplying a standard for linguistic correctness and a foundation for cross-contextual semantic stability.

However, there’s a new wave of anti-Conventionalism on the rise, inspired by philosophical engagement with the enormous diversity of language use discovered by sociolinguists. Lewis’s Conventionalism is threatened by cases of what I call ‘legitimate communal linguistic variation’: cases in which different speakers in a linguistic community fail to share knowledge of a common convention, yet neither can be legitimately accused of speaking incorrectly. These phenomena, in various ways, appear to undermine the Conventionalist’s claims that we communicate by relying on shared prior expectations of a communal language, and that there is a shared standard for linguistic correctness we should all try to conform to. Challenges from legitimate communal variation pose a more serious threat to Conventionalism than earlier objections from cases of ignorance and error.

We can reconcile Conventionalism with legitimate communal linguistic variation by providing principled, social criteria for belonging to a linguistic community and sharing a language. Building on ideas from Herb Clark, I argue that linguistic communities are ‘robust social groups’: densely-interacting social groups whose members share a common purpose and a system of social norms. Semantic content is determined by the linguistic conventions of robust social groups. Individual speakers belong to many different robust social groups, and try to conform to in-group norms and expectations for their present social context. Then, I argue that Conventionalism is not just compatible with linguistic variation, but predicts and explains it: linguistic variation functions as a marker to help speakers navigate between distinct systems of social norms for different social groups and social contexts. As a result, Conventionalism offers a powerful framework for explaining socially-meaningful language.

Recent work on the moral status of groups is lopsided. Many argue that certain groups have mental capacities and attitudes, can be held morally responsible and blamed in much the same sense as individuals. Further, they claim that such ascriptions can be made non-distributively meaning that, for example, moral responsibility ascribed to the group cannot be cashed out, or cannot be cashed out fully, as the moral responsibility of one or more individual members of the group.

However, even philosophers willing to place burdensome aspects of moral status such as moral responsibility and blame on the shoulders of groups are typically reluctant to recognize them as qualifying for the more positive aspects of having such a status. This is odd because without our philosopher’s hat on we seem to talk unproblematically about things we owe to groups: moral obligations we have to formal organisations such as, say, the corporation or university where we work, but even to informal groups such as our neighbourhood or our political cohort.

This paper will not try to question the philosophical assumptions about the fragmented moral status of groups. It does, however, propose a way in which non-distributive obligations can be owed to collectives as a group. The argument analyses only one type of situation in which obligations to a group do not distribute among individual members of the group. So, I present a sufficient not a necessary condition for non-distributivity. However, if the argument works, then it establishes one way of showing how we can have obligations towards collectives which are not distributive in the sense that they are not merely the sum of obligations towards individual members of these collectives (or towards other individuals). By presenting this argument, I seek to join a handful of authors who have reached similar conclusions already, although not along the same path this paper follows (Collins 2023; Lovett & Riedener 2021; Silver 2019). Moreover, the paper’s argument is also novel insofar as I reject an assumption shared by these authors, namely that we can only have obligations towards agential groups.

In sum, the paper argues that some obligations are owed to the group and not to some or all of its members. Further, it argues that we can have such obligations towards certain unorganised and only very loosely structured groups as well. The central consideration for this conclusion is such that some obligations are such that they are to be discharged not to specific individuals, but a specific number of individuals and it is ex ante indeterminate who these individuals are. Therefore, the obligation can be discharged in a wide variety of configurations. Because of the “multiple realisability” of obligations neither interest nor will theories of the directionality of obligations support the claim that the obligation is owed to individuals. Nor are the special characteristics of group agents necessary for groups to qualify as obligees.

In *Logic and Conversation*, Paul Grice claimed that conversation is a cooperative enterprise. This is a basis of his theory of conversational implicature, the phenomenon whereby an utterance conveys a meaning in addition to (or in place of) what it literally says. On Grice’s view, addressees recognize implicatures because they can assume that speakers are being cooperative. Thus, the interpretation of conversational implicature does not require specialized linguistic knowledge but draws on general social cognition.

Critics have argued that the presumption of cooperativeness cannot play the role Grice assigns to it. Conversations are not always intuitively cooperative: speakers lie, withhold information, or attempt to deceive. And, implicatures can be successfully conveyed even when the addressee knows that the speaker is not being cooperative. Consider the following exchange (cf. Solan & Tiersma 2005, based on Bronston v. United States).

Prosecutor: Have you ever had [any bank accounts in Swiss banks]?
Bronston: The company had a bank account there for about six months, in Zurich.

Bronston’s response implicates that he did not have any personal Swiss bank accounts. But the prosecutor is not entitled to expect cooperation from him in this adversarial context. Thus, Grice’s appeal to cooperativeness cannot explain how the prosecutor recognizes the implicature.

I propose an account of conversational cooperation and argue that it explains how it is possible for addressees to recognize implicatures. Conversations are cooperative in the sense that core conversation is a collective intentional action type. That is, agents engage in conversation either by jointly intending to do their conversational parts (in the core case) or by acting as if they so intend (in the extended case). Parties to a shared action are entitled to expect one another to perform their parts appropriately. The same holds for agents who are led to believe that they are parties to a shared action.

What exactly does this entitle them to expect? Certain collective intentional action types are characterized by collective action plans. The plan for conversation consists of cooperatively neutral constraints such that agents who collectively intentionally implement them are thereby engaged in conversation. Thus, all conversations are minimally cooperative in the sense that participants are entitled to expect one another to act in accordance with the conversational plan.

This explains the implicature in the Bronston case. One constraint of the conversational plan is that an utterance following a question should be pertinent to answering it. An utterance can be pertinent in this context if it either provides relevant information, rejects the question’s presupposition, or openly refuses to respond. Since Bronston’s reply plausibly neither rejects the presupposition of the question nor refuses to respond, the prosecutor is entitled to treat it as an indirect answer.

Room 4

Whether we trust others depends on how trusting we are – our readiness to make ourselves vulnerable to others – and how trustworthy others are. But this presupposes that we accurately recognise others’ trustworthiness (or otherwise), which, especially when dealing with strangers, we may not always do. So, trust depends on how trusting we are and how trustworthy we take others to be: trust is responsive to perceptions of trustworthiness, which ideally track actual trustworthiness. This paper explores how social processes effect perceptions of trustworthiness. My aim is to intervene in the debate in political philosophy about the role of social or generalised trust in achieving goods like cohesion and justice (Banting & Kymlicka 2017; Holtug 2021). Up to now, little has been said about the impact of processes like enculturation, whereby normatively structured cultural practices shape our cognitive capacities (McGeer 2019). I argue that social processes shape perceptions of trustworthiness insofar as: (1) perceptions of trustworthiness are partly a function of perceived similarity – often understood in terms of descent, culture, and values (Miller & Ali 2014) – and (2) perceived similarity is socially produced and transmitted through culture. I begin by discussing the relation between trust, trustworthiness, and perceptions of trustworthiness, and argue for the significance of perceived trustworthiness over actual trustworthiness on the grounds of our sociality and finitude. I then introduce the Similarity Principle (SP), roughly the (debatable) idea that we are more likely to find people trustworthy if they are similar to us. SP is common to the literature and is used to argue for (e.g.) reduced cultural diversity for the sake of cohesion or redistribution. Here, it enables us to explain one way in which social processes determine perceptions of trustworthiness. I draw on the literature on enculturation to argue two points about SP. First, that how SP functions is shaped by enculturation. Culture renders certain features socially salient, and this determines in what way someone must be like us to be taken as such. The relevant features are thus not natural givens but socially and historically contingent. Second, that SP functions at all is similarly contingent. That some people do tend to trust those similar to them does not tell us that this is necessarily so. Finally, I set out one key upshot relevant to discussions of cohesion and justice, the problem of consent (in Gramsci’s sense). Trust can be a function of consent when vulnerable groups trust dominant groups to their own disadvantage, because they learn through culture to perceive members of dominant groups as similar to them (which they may be in some, but not other, respects) and trustworthy. This may legitimise and perpetuate unjust social arrangements. As Baier noted in her seminal article, exploitation as much as justice can thrive in trusting conditions.

This paper criticizes the dominant trend of using chimpanzees and other primates as the primary starting point for comparing the social capacities of humans to those of other animal species. This tendency has been especially pronounced in the work of Michael Tomasello, although he has recently expanded his theorizing to a wider range of species (Tomasello 2022). While chimpanzees are the species that are genetically most closely related to the hominins, genetic closeness it not the only thing that matters for understanding social evolution. Another issue is convergent evolution, or the tendency of organisms to develop similar phenotypic solutions to similar ecological challenges (McGhee 2011). A classical example is wings, which have evolved independently across multiple lines of descent simply because they are an efficient solution to the problem of traversing long distances (relative to body size) in a short period of time.

Elephants are another highly intelligent, social species with metabolically expensive brains, which require an extended gestation period and cooperation in the provision of food and care for calves (Moss et al. 2011). For many purposes, elephants provide a more relevant point of comparison for understanding human social evolution than primates, because they evolved in similar savannah-like environments. By contrast, chimpanzees did not face the same ecological challenges as humans, because our species diverged at a time when the homo genus descended onto open grasslands, while most of the extant great ape species stayed in (or near) the forest canopy. (Maslin 2016) Elephants seem to have even evolved something resembling a proto-language, where individuals are identified by names, low-frequency rumblings are used to communicate over short distances, and seismic waves (generated by thumping on the ground) over long distances (Moss et al. 2011)—a near-literal analogue of Clark’s (1996)’common ground’ metaphor.

There are also interesting differences between the (social) intelligence of humans and elephants. While elephants have a larger cerebellum, contributing to spatial cognition and memory (including fine-tuned trunk movements), humans have a larger number of cortical neurons and deeper arrays of ’hidden neurons’, which are directly connected to neither sensory inputs nor action-oriented outputs (Herculano-Houzel 2016). This allows humans to generate a large number of offline simulations of counterfactual scenarios to run in their minds, and is likely to be at least in part responsible for human creativity in its various forms, but may also have some detrimental consequences. In particular, while it allows humans to use their powers of imagination to test the feasibility of various courses of action without trying them out with potentially fatal consequences (Dennett 1996), it also brings about new types of hazards having to do with mass delusions and societal disinformation (Harrison&Ross 2025).

Research on conspiracy theories has grown exponentially over the last decades, making them a prominent topic both within and beyond academia. While this expansion has brought renewed attention and conceptual innovation, it has also produced overlapping ideas and terminology, rendering the debate fragmented and difficult to navigate. A central point of contention concerns the very nature of conspiracy theories. Some philosophers—the _particularists_—argue that conspiracy theories are simply theories of a certain sort: just as scientific theories explain phenomena, conspiracy theories explain events by positing the existence of a conspiracy (Dentith 2014). On this view, there is nothing intrinsically problematic about conspiracy theories, and each should be assessed on its own merits (Hagen et al. 2025). Others—the _generalists_—maintain that conspiracy theories are defined by characteristic epistemic flaws, such as irrationality (Cassam 2019) or self-insulation from counterevidence (Napolitano 2021). Despite an extensive literature, this debate appears to have reached an impasse (Boudry&Napolitano 2023).

In this contribution, we propose to reframe the debate using the conceptual tools of social ontology. We first ask whether _conspiracy theory_ constitutes a genuine kind—namely, whether the label picks out a unified phenomenon or should instead be understood as an umbrella term covering heterogeneous phenomena. To tackle this question, we draw on Boyd’s (1999) Homeostatic Property Cluster theory (HCP), which offers an alternative to the essentialist assumptions often underlying the debate. On the HPC framework, kinds are not defined by necessary and sufficient conditions, but by clusters of properties that tend to co-occur and are sustained by underlying mechanisms.

We then examine what type of kind conspiracy theory could be. In particular, we assess the generalist claim that conspiracy theories are characterized by epistemic flaws. Contrary to what is often assumed, we argue that whether conspiracy theories form a genuine kind is conceptually independent of whether they are epistemically defective. The former concerns whether the category tracks a real and explanatorily useful phenomenon, while the latter concerns the epistemic standards imposed on that category.

Building on this distinction, we argue that defining conspiracy theories in terms of epistemic flaws involves a partially normative choice. Including epistemic defects yields a more epistemically reliable category, but at the cost of generality and explanatory reach. Excluding such defects and defining conspiracy theories more minimally—as explanations featuring conspiratorial plots—maximizes generality but risks grouping together phenomena that differ in important respects. Neither option is cost-free, and making these trade-offs explicit helps clarify a debate in which questions of kindhood, epistemic evaluation, and normative standards are often conflated.

Philosophers of law have recently been writing a lot about the metaphysics of burdens of proof. The last five years or so have seen an explosion of work from legal theorists attempting to determine what burdens of proof are and what it means for a party to a legal action to meet them. As the literature currently stands there are two basic approaches to understanding the nature of a burden of proof and how to satisfy it, one probabilistic and the other epistemic. Take for example the burden of proof in civil trials in the USA, according to which the party bringing suit must show that the respondent is liable by a preponderance of the evidence. On a probabilistic understanding of the metaphysics of the preponderance of evidence burden of proof, what it means to show that the respondent is liable is that the evidence presented at trial renders the probability that the defendant is liable greater than .5. One classic critique of probabilistic approaches to the metaphysics of burdens of proof is that it cannot excuse blame for a false conviction, whereas an epistemic approach can. Epistemic approaches to burdens of proof come in many varieties. This paper focuses only on one: Sarah Moss’s proposal that practical factors affect what it means for someone to be found liable or guilty. On Moss’s proposal, if the stakes for falsely finding someone guilty are very high, e.g., because they would be wrongly sentenced to death, then it is more difficult for the prosecution to meet its burden of proof. Moss’s proposal draws on the pragmatic encroachment tradition from the epistemology literature, according to which it is generally harder for an agent to be justified in believing something if their acting on the belief would be disastrous because it is actually false. I develop two objections here against Moss’s proposal. First, it fails to offer a unified metaphysics of burdens of proof. Since what it means for a party to legal action to meet its burden varies case to case depending on how high or low the stakes are for returning various verdicts, Moss’s proposal entails that the burden of proof also varies case to case so that there is no fixed standard of proof common to all cases of the same kind, e.g., civil or criminal. Second but similarly, since on Moss’s proposal the burden of proof varies case to case, it follows that one defendant could be found guilty while another could be found not guilty even if the evidence presented against each were identical, all because the stakes for falsely returning one verdict were very high in one case but very low in the other.

Defenders of the traditional usage of thought experiments in philosophical inquiry have generally argued that their primary epistemic role is to provide evidence: that by imagining the contents of some scenario, and judging whether some philosophically relevant proposition applies to it, we arrive at beliefs that can support our philosophical theories (Gendler 2000; Williamson 2007; Häggqvist & Cohnitz 2017). Years of empirical research and theoretical scrutiny have, however, given rise to doubts whether this employment of the imagination can reliably deliver on its promise, particularly given the fact that philosophical thought experiments usually depict scenarios which are highly idealised, outlandish, or tightly constrained, and are thus far removed from our everyday contexts of judging philosophically relevant propositions (Baz 2017; Machery 2017; Stich & Tobia 2018). Such concerns are arguably amplified in the domain of social ontology, where the philosophical subject matter is particularly susceptible to looping effects and contextual variation, features which are likely to exacerbate any pre-existing instability in our capacity to form reliable imaginary judgments (Hacking 1995; Ismael 2017). A pressing question, then, is how the prominent philosophical method of using thought experiments should be adapted to the aims of social ontological inquiry.

In this paper, I address this question by arguing in favour of adopting a perspectivalist account of philosophical thought experiments in social ontological inquiry. On this view, the primary epistemic role of philosophical thought experiments is not to reliably deliver evidence regarding the truth or falsity of philosophically relevant propositions, but to effectively communicate, implement, and stabilise apt perspectives: intuitive and open-ended ways of responding to and construing the world which specifically serve to further our understanding (Stuart 2018; Fraser 2021; Sliwa 2023; Yumuşak 2024; El Shazly 2025; Camp 2017, 2025). I motivate this perspectivalist approach in three stages. First, I argue that defenders of the traditional evidential view implicitly rely on an overly neat account of imaginative resistance, one that mischaracterises how our actual beliefs are involved in imaginative engagement. Instead, I propose that once we take the widespread phenomena of disparate response and imaginative contagion seriously, we quickly arrive at the view that the practice of using thought experiments in philosophical inquiry is part of a broader narrative tradition of communicating perspectives. I subsequently situate the perspectivalist account within recent philosophical work on the epistemic value of understanding, arguing that perspectives play a particularly prominent epistemic role in social ontology insofar as they shape and motivate what counts as evidence for our theories of social reality.

In June 2025, the UNHCR announced that, due to insufficient funds, it would close some of its offices (Grandi, 2025). The closure of these offices means that refugees in certain regions will have difficulty accessing humanitarian aid; in other words, they lose their chance to be rescued. In practice, the UNHCR tends to retain those offices where refugees are more concentrated and where aid delivery is more efficient (Grandi, 2025). This aligns with the spirit of utilitarianism, which aims to maximize total utility by rescuing the majority. However, egalitarianism finds this decision problematic, as it deprives refugees in remote areas of their chance of rescue and fails to respect the equal moral status of refugees across regions.
Philosophers debate the rescue dilemma—namely, the moral dilemma of choosing between saving the majority or the minority when both groups are endangered (Taurek, 1977; Timmerman, 2004). The conflict between utilitarianism and egalitarianism seems inevitable. Yet neither pure utilitarianism nor pure egalitarianism offers a satisfactory solution. Beyond these two traditional approaches, a new solution was proposed by Jen Timmerman: the weighted lottery theory, which holds that chances of rescue should be assigned proportionately to the number of people in each group (Timmerman, 2004). Some literature treats the weighted lottery approach as a branch of egalitarianism, as it guarantees equal consideration for all worthy claimants (Saunders, 2009). However, this essay aims to demonstrate that the current egalitarian defense of the lottery approach ultimately fails.
I aim to defend the weighted lottery through a pluralistic framework. This theory balances the core values of traditional utilitarianism and egalitarianism by seeking to maximize overall utility while respecting the separateness of persons, a principle that safeguards minority rights as a normative baseline. On a theoretical level, the weighted lottery addresses significant ontological concerns about the aggregation of property, rights, and human life. In practice, its relevance extends beyond rescue dilemmas to broader domains of public policy. It challenges the aggregative principles that often govern the redistribution of scarce, indivisible resources such as medical care, education, and career opportunities, offering a compelling alternative for equitable allocation.

Room 5

Organizations routinely perpetrate moral wrongs (Collins 2023; Hindricks 2025; List and Pettit 2011). This paper examines wrongs stemming from organizational epistemic malfunction, reflecting values embedded in epistemic architectures (e.g., prioritizing short-term profit or reputational protection over accuracy of group belief and assertions). A group can be culpably ignorant even when none of its members is personally culpable, indicating collective standards for justified ignorance and blame (Biebel 2025). By integrating work on organizational epistemic malfunction with the normative assessment of doxastic conduct, the paper develops a unified account of moral responsibility for institutional ignorance. It explains how flaws in organizational epistemic architectures, such as failures of information flow, communication, and knowledge integration, can generate culpable ignorance even when individual agents believe in good faith.

While epistemology theorizes individual knowledge, group agents require distinct concepts of knowing (Lackey 2021; Schwenkenbecher 2021; Hormio 2024). On Lackey’s (2021) view, group beliefs must be formed via proper procedures; failures to integrate distributed evidence indicate a defective belief-forming mechanism. Information must be formally pooled to become action-guiding institutional knowledge (Lackey 2021; Roy and Schwenkenbecher 2019). Thus, even if many employees harbor doubts, without authorized uptake the group may still count as believing the system is reliable; conversely, once whistleblower evidence is properly integrated, the group can cease to believe even if some members persist in error. Central is a distinction between group-held information and genuinely distributed evidence integrated into action-guiding institutional knowledge, clarifying when group ignorance is culpable.

To assess responsibility for these failures, a norm-domain framework is utilised. Doxastic conduct can violate epistemic, moral, or prudential norms, and the relevant domain is identified by the fitting reactive attitude (Kauppinen 2018). Corporate agents bear epistemic responsibilities not only in doxastic states but in designing, maintaining, and revising structures that convert distributed information into action-guiding knowledge. Control over epistemic structures anchors agency; faulty architectures do not excuse ignorance. Fitting reactive attitudes include epistemic blame for violating negative epistemic norms (e.g., neglecting evidence integration), moral blame for harms foreseeably enabled by those violations, and prudential criticism when belief policies jeopardize long-term interests. This synthesis differentiates epistemic from moral/prudential failures in institutional ignorance and articulates an ethical imperative to design for knowledge

Edit

The aim of this paper is to introduce a distinction between two types of oughts governing social institutions. The suggestion is that we need to distinguish between oughts rooted in the second-personal aspect of human social relations and those attached to specific institutional statuses.
I begin by constructing a triangle of three authors, each asserting in their own way that humans are capable of essentially-social activities, as activities involving second-personal, or joint, engagements. Thomas Reid, Adolph Reinach, and Michael Tomasello, each pursuing distinct philosophical projects and originating from different backgrounds, share a conception of activities or practices that can be performed in a second-personal way without presupposing any conventions or institutional settings. Reid and Reinach introduce the idea of social acts of the mind as those that can have no existence without the intervention of another [intelligent] being but remain intelligible independently of human conventions or institutional structures. Tomasello hypothesizes about capacities for joint intentionality, as a uniquely human form of second-personal relationship with specific others in face-to-face interactions, predating the emergence of cultural and institutional forms of cognition and sociality. All three authors regard the capacities for such second-personal, or joint, engagements as a foundational requirement for the possibility of conventional/institutional practices; furthermore, all three of them hold, each in a different way, that there are rights and obligations originating in second- personal social activities. Based on Tomasello’s two-step account of the evolution of human social cognition, I reformulate the distinction between brute essentially-social activities, on the one hand, and institutional activities in general, on the other hand, in terms of a distinction between activities that are, in principle, possible by mere capacities for joint intentionality and those that can only exist at the level of collective intentionality.
In the second part, I tentatively introduce a distinction between oughts linked to essentially-social activities qua second-personal engagements and oughts attached to institutional statuses, which are built on top of this. I refer to them second-personal oughts and institutional oughts, respectively. I conclude by offering some suggestions regarding the implications of this distinction, particularly for debates on speech acts. With regard to my purposes, and in alignment with Reid’s insights on good faith and trust, I propose considering the norm of trustworthiness as a second-personal ought that in particular governs all our communicative acts, regardless of whether they fall within the category of institutional activities/practices or not.

Social properties such as being a citizen or being a court are pervasive features of social reality, yet they are often treated in analytic metaphysics as non-fundamental, derivative upon a more basic physical domain. This paper argues that this assumption rests on a failure to distinguish between two questions about fundamentality and the different senses of fundamentality they implicate. Once these are disentangled, social properties are found to be fundamental in some respects but not in others.
The first is a cross-domain question: whether social properties can be fundamental relative to physical properties. The second is an intra-domain question: which social properties are more fundamental than others within the social domain itself. I argue that much of the literature in social ontology runs these questions together, obscuring both the stakes of social metaphysics and the sense in which social properties might plausibly count as fundamental.
To clarify these issues, I treat fundamentality as a relative and multidimensional notion, distinguishing constitutive, explanatory, and existential dimensions. Regarding the cross-domain question, I argue that while social properties are plausibly constitutively dependent on physical properties in their realization, this dependence does not determine their explanatory or existential status. Some social properties are explanatorily more fundamental than certain physical properties in virtue of the role they play in structuring physical facts. In paradigmatically legal and political systems, explanations of physical distributions, access patterns, and coordinated behavior must appeal to institutional statuses, roles, or offices—such as ownership, jurisdiction, or legal authority—rather than to purely physical descriptions alone. I further argue that some social properties can be existentially more fundamental than certain physical properties, insofar as the existence of some physically described configurations depends on the existence of social roles, norms, or institutions that sustain them.
The paper then turns to the intra-domain question, arguing that the multidimensional framework of constitutive, explanatory, and existential dependence does not yield a stable, single ordering of fundamentality among social properties. Nevertheless, social properties are not ontologically on a par, as emphasized in recent work on social fundamentality. I argue that the relevant contrast is best understood in terms of sparseness, treated as a constraint on fundamentality rather than as an additional type of it. Sparse social properties carve the social domain at its joints and are eligible to play fundamental roles along constitutive, explanatory, or existential dimensions, whereas many gerrymandered or highly localized properties are explanatorily inert. I argue that the result is a more fine-grained account of social fundamentality.

Edit

Actions are the objects of regret. Specifically, an agent may regret an action which they have performed. It does not make sense, however, for an agent to regret another’s action; this is the nature of regret. A statement of the form “I regret x” makes sense only if x is an action (or the result of an action) over which the speaker had control. This simple account of the semantics of “regret” statements begins to fail when considering cases in which one’s agency is limited, or in which there may be shared control or responsibility for action. Games provide a prime example of these cases, and collaborative roleplaying games specifically are likely to give rise to situations which require a deeper consideration of these statements. Consider a player who makes the following statement about their participation in one of these games: “I regret burning down the forest.”
A few things are immediately of note about this statement. First, the statement blurs the line between fiction and reality. The player of the game exists in the real world, while the forest they are implied to have burned down exists in the story-world of the game. The player is not present in the world of the story, and they are not the one that interacts with the fictional forest – that is the character. Alyson the pharmacy technician does not exist in this fictional world, but the character Mara does, and Alyson and Mara are not identical. Second, the collaborative nature of these games limits the amount of responsibility a single player may be said to hold for certain events. The game involves a group of people acting together to tell a story. This collaborative aspect complicates the relationship between an individual player and the story as a whole: no one player is solely responsible for the events of the story, so it cannot be as simple as regretting having caused the burning event. Perhaps a player may regret their contribution to the narrative, but the regret cannot come from purely narrative considerations, for the action may have made an excellent narrative contribution. Nor does it seem that the regret will in all cases be driven by an adverse effect on other players, for the action may not have affected the others at all. So what, precisely, does the player regret? 
Drawing on the work of C. Thi Ngyuen (2020), I argue that these roleplaying games involve a specific kind of agential structure which allows for the prioritization and mis-prioritization of goals relating to the character and the narrative development. The regret in these cases would arise as a response to mis-prioritization. When a player regrets an action which makes a strong narrative contribution and has no adverse effects on other players, they are regretting the decisions that they made in the structuring of their goals and their agency.

It is commonplace to make claims about social phenomena that suggest, when combined in pairs, that social explanations can be loopy. For instance, consider the following three pairs of claims.

The American society is racist because it systematically disadvantages black people. The American society systematically disadvantages black people because it is racist.

I’m constrained thus-and-so because I’m a woman.
I’m a woman because I’m constrained thus-and-so.

The word ‘duck’ has a meaning because it has a pattern of correct use. The word ‘duck’ has a pattern of correct use because it has a meaning.

Each pair, however, seems to violate the canonical view that explanation is asymmetric: if x explains y, y can’t explain x. It would be highly implausible to give up the principle that explanation is asymmetric. So, is it simply confused to think that there is nothing wrong about these pairs of statements that are routinely made about social phenomena?

In this talk, we vindicate such explanatory loops without giving up the asymmtery of explanation. Our argument makes two key moves. First, we show that the asymmetry of explanation does not hold for all instances of mixed explanations, in particular in cases where x explains causally y and y explains ground-theoretically x. Second, we argue that explanations of social phenomena embody these mixed explanatory loops, when the appropriate level of explanation involves coarse-grained social facts about a practice or an institution. Along the way, we sharpen our argument by discussing how to determine the appropriate level of explanation for social phenomena and by clarifying why our argument is consistent with the principle against bootstrapping.

Room 6

Some influential accounts of group beliefs include a voluntary element, such as collective acceptance, agreement, or joint commitment (Gilbert 1989, Tuomela 1992). Individual belief, in contrast, is usually seen as involuntary and normatively guided by truth (Shah 2003, Arpaly 2023). Lackey (2021) has recently suggested that the concept of belief for groups should be similar to that for individuals. In Lackey’s account, group beliefs inherit properties from individual beliefs.
According to Shah (2003), first-person doxastic deliberation has the property of transparency. This means that when an agent deliberates whether to believe that p, this question is fully and only settled by answering whether it is true that p. There is no intermediate inferential step between finding out how things are and coming to believe accordingly.
In this work, we study what consequences Shah’s suggestion would have for group beliefs. Even though Shah does not mention groups as believers, we take it that if groups are taken to have beliefs and transparency is taken to be a conceptual truth about belief, it should hold also in the case of collective doxastic deliberation. We argue that it entails that individual beliefs and beliefs formed by ideal epistemic groups are more similar than previous accounts suggest. To argue this, we consider an ideal case: an epistemically motivated group where the members deliberate on whether to believe p as a group. A real-life example could be a small scientific research group.
Deliberation in an ideal group consists of sharing evidence among members to settle whether p. When group members share information relevant to p, this prompts them to ask themselves whether p. When belief revision takes the form of first personal deliberation, it results in a belief that retains the property of transparency. By transparency, a group belief concerning p is formed when the group has come to settle the question of whether p by sharing the relevant evidence and by using the group’s epistemic resources. This is marked by a common awareness that p. In an ideal case, it is possible for any group member to form the belief that p using the group’s epistemic resources. This type of group belief is involuntary and transparent in the same way that individual beliefs are.
Using Shah’s insight that belief accounts can be tested on whether they retain the property of transparency, we can now test accounts of group beliefs. Formulating the ideal epistemic group in Gilbert’s and Tuomela’s accounts yields the result that even though the question of whether p is settled, a further inferential step is required for the group to believe that p. This violates transparency. This suggests that these accounts do not capture what it is for a group to believe. In Lackey’s account, group beliefs can be transparent on the assumptions that individual beliefs are, and the group belief is settled in deliberation using the group’s epistemic bases.

In collective epistemology, there are two primary disputes on the justification of collective beliefs: whether non-epistemic norms can provide epistemic reasons, and how collective beliefs relate to its members’ beliefs. In this paper, I focus specifically on the beliefs of “organized social groups”—such as corporations, courts, and committees—whose internal governance structures define their institutional identity. The central conflict lies between evidentialism (often associated with summativism), which claims doxastic responsibility of institutions is a function of individual evidence-sharing, and non-evidentialism (usually also non-summativism), which highlights “divergence problems” where a group’s justified belief does not align with its members’ individual beliefs.
In contrast to the evidentialist approach of doxastic responsibility, a non-evidentialist approach is inspired by Wittgenstein’s hinge epistemology. In this framework, the standards of epistemic rationality are not independent but are constituted by “hinge commitments”—assertions like “I have two hands” or “I am not a brain in a vat” (Not-BIV) that remain immune to doubt not because they are justified by evidence, but because they make the very practice of inquiring and doubting possible.
Evidentialists often attempt to resolve divergence problem. There are two divergence case mainly focused. One is exclusion of hearsay evidence in courts, and the other is cognitive risk tolerance in hiring committees. Jennifer Lackey (2021, p. 67) argues that, when an institution is supposed to hold a belief while its members are not responsible to do so, the institution is irresponsibly falling in “Illegitimate Manipulation of Evidence Problem” (IMEP).
I argue, against Lackey, that both cases should not be IMEP. The core of hinge epistemologist proposal is that non-epistemic governance norms function as “institutional hinges”. Institutional rationality is built upon those governance norms. For example, when a jury excludes hearsay evidence, or a hiring committee tolerates higher cognitive risk to meet practical deadlines, they are not failing their epistemic duties. Rather, these non-epistemic governance norms are constitutive of the special notion of rationality for some particular institutions. Just as a Not-BIV belief is a default hinge for perceptual knowledge, these norms serve as hinge commitments in justification of institutional beliefs.
Collective doxastic responsibility is distinct from individual responsibility. Collective and individual beliefs are governed by different sets of hinge commitments, and therefore, different standards of epistemic rationality. This inconsistency does not means relativism; Rather, it points toward an epistemic pluralism that acknowledges diversity of doxastic responsibilities for institutions in various domains.

This paper defends an anti-summativist view about when organizational belief ascriptions are warranted, even though such beliefs are typically elicited and measured through individual surveys, interviews, and behavioral traces. A common assumption is that individual-level measurement commits us to a summativist picture on which organizational beliefs are inherited from, or reducible to, member beliefs (e.g., Collins 2019). Building on Wang et al. (2025), we argue that this assumption conflates a method of access with a norm of attribution. Our proposal draws on Werner’s conception of institutions as forms of problematization: institutions structure which questions are live, what counts as an answer, and how answers are produced. On this basis, we distinguish (i) anchoring, the evidential and operational role that member attitudes and avowals (often held qua organizational roles) play in making institutional beliefs measurable, from (ii) the attributional basis for treating the relevant belief-content as the organization’s—namely, its role-, procedure-, and mandate-structured problem domain.
We motivate a turnover criterion: institutional belief ascriptions are appropriate when the attributed stance is role-robust (and, in this sense, question-robust)—stable under personnel change because the organization’s problem structure and decision procedures reliably recruit successive occupants into the same epistemic positions. This role-focused account is compatible with externalist approaches to role normativity that locate role standards in social structure rather than personal endorsement (e.g., Witt 2023). We illustrate the framework with two pervasive phenomena: (i) individuals’ moral or normative avowals “on behalf of” organizations, and (ii) organizational self-interpretation over time, where groups rationalize past actions by attributing beliefs and commitments to themselves. The upshot is a principled way to connect individual-level evidence to group-level belief attribution without treating aggregation as the default model.

In a polarised society where people with strongly opposing views need to manage to live together, it is important to understand the bounds of civility. To be civil, one must stay polite in the face of disagreement, be respectful towards those expressing contrasting opinions, and uphold space for public debates on values. Yet, the commitment to one’s own values tends to bring a temptation towards uncivil responses. In The Wrong of Rudeness (2019), Amy Olberding argues that such incivility can be morally justified in particular cases – namely, when the views expressed are in conflict with the society’s established values and fall outside of what is collectively accepted to be up for debate. The problem is that when we do face a serious disagreement, we are easily more confident than warranted that the conditions for righteous incivility have been met: what seems beyond the pale to an individual may not actually be established as such by the society at large. Olberding argues that due to this risk of overconfidence, our opportunities for morally desirable incivility are more limited than we may think. To understand the risk of unjustified rudeness in public debates and to get a better grasp of when incivility is in fact called for, then, we need to look closely at the epistemic obstacles involved.
In this talk, I will focus on the epistemic challenge to righteous incivility that Olberding has highlighted, further developing her account in two ways. First, I will fill in the explanation of how we can falsely come to believe that certain views are beyond the pale by connecting this topic to work on epistemic bubbles and echo chambers. Epistemic bubbles also act as ‘value bubbles’: when we encounter only a particular subset of viewpoints present in our society, we work with a distorted picture of what is collectively established and what may reasonably be debated. In an echo chamber, where outside voices are actively discredited, the sense that alternative views are too unacceptable to be given the floor is heightened in an unwarranted way.
Second, I will uncover an additional challenge to identifying righteous cases of incivility: we can be mistaken not only about which views are beyond the pale, but also about which view the other is actually committed to. Especially in epistemic structures that involve elements of an echo chamber, we are at risk of having an inflated perception of disagreements and ascribing a more extreme view to our opponents than they mean to express. At the same time, it would be a mistake to interpret claims from the other side as in accordance with our core values whenever possible; the phenomenon of dog whistles calls for caution in simply taking expressed opinions at face value. Overall, as important as it can be for society to treat the unacceptable as unacceptable, there are several thorny epistemic obstacles that call for careful consideration when we aim to practice righteous incivility.

Political polarization is widely regarded as one of the main drivers of the contemporary crisis of democracy. Despite extensive empirical study, polarization has received limited engagement within political theory. I argue that the concept requires further theoretical clarification in order to better understand current democratic backsliding. This paper proceeds in three steps. First, I provide an account of the existing conceptualizations of polarization; second, I introduce a new concept, which I call reflexive polarization; and third, I argue that Hannah Arendt offers crucial resources for understanding and countering this particular kind of polarization.
The literature on polarization generally distinguishes between three kinds. Ideological polarization concerns differences in beliefs about policy; affective polarization refers to negative feelings toward out-group members; and partisan sorting describes political parties becoming more internally homogeneous. In a recent paper, Rostbøll (2025) adds a fourth kind, which he terms intransigent polarization. This kind does not concern what people believe but how firmly they hold their beliefs, i.e., their confidence in the correctness of those beliefs.
I argue that this fourth kind of polarization offers some important insight but remains incomplete. It focuses exclusively on individuals’ attitudes toward their own beliefs, while neglecting their attitudes toward the beliefs of others. I therefore propose an overarching concept, which I call reflexive polarization — a concept which concerns attitudes toward attitudes, both one’s own and those of others.
Reflexive polarization encompasses two distinct dimensions. The first concerns attitudes toward one’s own beliefs and may still be described as intransigent, while the second —which I will term dismissive— relates to the attitudes toward the belief of others. Distinguishing between these dimensions is crucial, as it is entirely possible to be dismissive of out-group views without being particularly confident in one’s own beliefs. Likewise, confidence in one’s own beliefs does not necessarily entail dismissiveness.
The possibility of being confident without being dismissive may stem from the fact that politics is not solely a domain of knowledge but fundamentally one of opinion. This is basically an Arendtian insight, and I suggest that Arendt’s political phenomenology can help to flesh out what it means to be confident without being dismissive. According to Arendt, the problem of dismissiveness can be understood as an unwillingness to consider the perspectives of others. Opinions are not merely possessed but formed through judgment and deliberation, which require taking others’ perspectives into account. Exercising this capacity for communicability might strengthen one’s confidence in opinions formed through engagement with others. Thus, for Arendt, the danger of polarization lies not in increasing confidence but in increasing one-sidedness.

Contemporary discussions on the concept of the firm primarily focus on the issue of the profit motive, responsibility, and their purpose within a society (Singer 2019; Anderson and Macedo 2017). This talk explores the role of the firm as a social entity that shapes social structures, rather than merely pursuing profit within a pre-given institutional environment. The central claim of this talk is that firms are not only agents within fixed social structures but are themselves powerful sites of structuration.
In a first step, I introduce firms within the framework of Anthony Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory, conceptualizing them not just as institutionalized systems but as agents as well. On this account, firms participate in the duality of structure: they rely on existing norms and responsibility ascriptions while simultaneously transforming them through coordinated corporate practices oriented toward profit. In doing so, firms contribute to the stabilization of social kinds and to the reshaping of collective understandings of agency and responsibility. This perspective stands in contrast to functionalist and neoclassical conceptions of the firm, which typically treat firms as structurally embedded agents whose role is limited to the efficient fulfilment of economic functions.
In a second step, the argument is developed through two case examples. First, the fossil fuel industry’s introduction of the individual “carbon footprint” is analysed as an instance of corporate structuration, whereby responsibility for climate change is rearticulated as a matter of individual consumption rather than collective action. Second, historically corporate-backed anti-littering campaigns in the United States are examined as efforts to reshape social norms and habits, redirecting moral blame toward individual behaviour while obscuring industrial sources of environmental harm (Hormio and Wringe 2024). In both cases, firms do not merely influence preferences but actively reorganize the normative frameworks through which social problems are interpreted and acted upon.
The talk proposes that such interventions constitute social change through firms: they modify the background conditions of practical (moral) reasoning, redefine social expectations, reconfigure patterns of collective behaviour and contribute to structural injustice (Young 2011). Treating firms as merely legal persons or profit-maximizing agents fails to capture these structuring capacities.

Room 7

Negligent wrongdoing challenges legal scholars and philosophers alike. A negligent agent is ignorant of the potential harm they might cause. However, they are usually not intentionally ignorant but due to inattention or forgetfulness. Thereby, their ignorance is not obviously blameworthy, yet they seem to have done something wrong. This issue becomes even more difficult when considering the negligent misconduct of group agents such as corporations. The involvement of multiple individuals and the complexity of corporate structure complicate the attribution of ignorance and assessment of responsibility. In my presentation, I will outline the UK’s Corporate Manslaughter and Homicide Act 2007, which seeks to penalise corporations for negligent killings. I will use this example to illustrate the problem of negligent corporate wrongdoing and to highlight the legal difficulties in addressing collective epistemic shortcomings and the harm they cause. I aim to solve this problem in two steps:

First, I will present a way to categorise different types of group ignorance and identify negligence as one such category. This typology encompasses various aspects of group ignorance, including, for example, how information and ignorance are distributed among members, whether the ignorance is wilful or unwilful, and whether the cause of ignorance originates at the collective or individual level. To determine how moral and, later, legal blame should be assigned in such cases, we need to examine these aspects and their implications for responsibility.

In the second step, I will provide a list of conditions under which a corporation can be held morally responsible despite its ignorance, with a particular focus on the special case of negligence. The typology, combined with criteria for assessing the responsibility of an ignorant group agent, can serve as a tool for evaluating real-world cases. It helps identify a corporation’s epistemic shortcomings, their connection to subsequent harm, and their implications for its responsibility.

Ultimately, I will offer a recommendation on how this method could be used to provide a minimally invasive solution for legal models such as the Corporate Manslaughter Act. Moreover, my analysis presents a novel approach to responsibility for negligent wrongdoing: when holding a negligent agent accountable for harm they caused, we should not only consider the cause of their ignorance in determining their blameworthiness. We must also examine the available courses of action at the time, and despite the ignorance, to judge how they could and should have acted instead.

Edit

Edit

In this paper, we address a puzzle at the intersection of epistemic injustice and moral responsibility. We understand testimonial privilege as a condition in which some individuals, qua members of socially salient groups, are systematically granted more credibility than others due to entrenched prejudicial norms and assumptions. Whenever credibility assessments are shaped by such norms, we assume that a distinctive testimonial wrong occurs in which the victim is the agent receiving less credibility than warranted. The central question we investigate is whether those who enact testimonial privilege are fitting objects of blame.
We start by pointing out that attempts to ground blameworthiness in these cases fail. First, we show that testimonial privilege can arise without agents violating epistemic or moral norms. Given the deep embedding of prejudicial norms within ordinary epistemic practices, it is often unreasonable to demand that agents critically reassess the very background assumptions they rely on to evaluate testimony. Second, we challenge attempts to attribute responsibility purely based on quality of will. While patterns of credibility assessment associated with testimonial privilege may reasonably be interpreted as expressing disregard toward certain groups, it does not follow that the agents who employ those patterns themselves express a poor quality of will.
Despite rejecting blameworthiness, we defend a limited and novel role for the expression of blame in cases of testimonial privilege. We argue that expressing blame toward agents who are not morally responsible can nevertheless be fitting when blame is understood as a way of giving moral evidence of wrongdoing. The evidence given should not be taken by the blamed agents to entail that they are responsible for wrongdoing, but that they are agentially involved in morally significant harm. We claim that this form of blame seeks a kind of first-person reactive attitude in response that is akin to agent-regret.
This form of blame functions as a primarily communicative response that censures past behavior, protests one’s suffering of harm, and demands moral recognition, even when it does not track culpability. We emphasize that this is not a sui generis but an ordinary form of blame, familiar to anyone who has been unfairly but unwittingly mistreated, and who seeks to remedy the wrongdoer’s ignorance.
Finally, we articulate two fittingness constraints on such blame. First, since blaming is supposed to induce a negative emotion in the blamed agent, its expression must be proportionate to the gravity of the act, even if not to the gravity of their culpability. Second, blame-as-giving-evidence is justified only when there is a reasonable prospect that the target agent is susceptible to the moral evidence it provides. Together, these constraints explain how blaming those that enact testimonial privilege can be justified without presupposing their moral culpability.

In this paper, I argue that solidarity, as a relationship of cooperative struggle against an imposing problem or injustice, grounded in conflict and the material interdependence of all political subjects, is a uniquely valuable identity-constituting relationship. Solidarity provides subjects with a shared framework for developing a moral understanding of the relevant injustice (Dishaw 2024), reinforced through both inter- and intra-group conflict (DuFord 2022). Solidary subjects debate tactics and disagree on strategies, yet ‘win’ and ‘lose’ cooperative actions together, ultimately strengthening the shared moral understanding at the foundation of those disagreements. Solidarity reflects what matters most to people, as it is will-dependent (i.e., it must be chosen) and cause-mediated (i.e., it is oriented toward a specific problem/injustice) (Viehoff 2025). For instance, the solidarity within a labor union is not borne of a shared identity of ‘organizer’ or ‘co-/worker’; it arises from a personal, voluntary commitment to opposing exploitation in the specific, relevant workplace and the recognition that one cannot successfully combat workplace exploitation alone. The amalgamation of personal dedication to the cause and the recognition of the necessity of cooperation for its success fosters a trusting discursive environment in which the advantages of various direct-action tactics are vigorously debated. Ironically, this process of internal conflict enables those in solidarity to articulate a unified external voice, thereby constituting the solidary group (Pettit 2025). Moreover, this process actively shapes a shared moral understanding of the particular exploitation (or injustice), a process that affords autonomous creation of their evaluative outlooks—and thus, their selves. Solidarity does not simply illuminate interdependence among those already in solidarity but also affords a new way of evaluating—and thus, strategically addressing—chronic problems once thought ontologically immovable. As this foundation of autonomous self-creation, solidarity is an intrinsically valuable relationship independent of the goals a solidary group pursues.
This paper presents a theoretical argument regarding the nature of solidarity with normative implications, grounded in social-ontological theory and ethnographic research on direct action groups (David Graeber’s Direct Action; Shon Meckfessel’s Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used to Be), as well as autoethnographic work on my higher education union. Consequently, my account more accurately reflects the lived experiences of those actively organizing in solidarity and, furthermore, suggests that the obligations of solidarity are best understood as joint and non-transmissible (see: Mellor 2024, 2025). This approach thereby complicates longstanding assumptions concerning the interpersonal and reciprocal nature of solidarity’s obligations, offering a novel perspective in its place.

Return to Programme Overview

Summer School ISOS 2026

The Summer School is organized by Brian Epstein and is a separate event.

Monday, July 20, 2026, from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, followed by dinner.

We will meet at the conference site in Kraków; exact room TBA

Faculty:
The sessions this year will be led by Brian Epstein (Tufts), Kendy Hess (College of the Holy Cross), Jade Fletcher (Leeds), and Kirk Ludwig (Indiana). Each leads a 75-minute seminar-style session.

Schedule for the day:

9:00 – 9:30 Welcome and introductions
9:30 – 10:45 Session 1 — Brian Epstein
10:45 – 11:05 Coffee break
11:05 – 12:20 Session 2 — Kendy Hess
12:20 – 1:20 Lunch
1:20 – 2:35 Session 3 — Jade Fletcher
2:35 – 3:25 Breakout session (small-group discussions)
3:25 – 3:45 Coffee break
3:45 – 5:00 Session 4 — Kirk Ludwig
6:00 – 6:30 Drinks
6:30 – … Dinner

Meals and stipend:
Lunch, coffee breaks, drinks, and dinner are all included. As I mentioned in the earlier note, there is a stipend of PLN 400 in cash, given out on the day, to help offset the extra night of lodging. If you don’t need the stipend, please do let me know — we’ll use it to fund others; thanks to those who have already let me know.

Readings:
The instructors have each suggested a small set of readings; if you have the time to read them, they’ll make the sessions more fun and useful.

– Epstein session: my Cambridge Element on social ontology (open-access). I’ll mostly focus on sections 4-7.
– Hess session: three short pieces attached.
– Fletcher session: four pieces attached. Please read the Mikkola and Fletcher first; optionally the Barnes and Payton and the Jenkins.
– Ludwig session: three pieces attached. Main focus will be “The Conceptual Scaffolding”; others helpful supplementary reading.

Venue: Jagiellonian University, Law and Administration Faculty

Jagiellonian University, Law and Administration Faculty

New building!

ul. Krupnicza 33a, 31-123 Kraków

or google maps

Short description if you want it here, eg practical information, public transport options, parking etc: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. 

The image above should please be a floorplan, or if there is none, then I guess this picture can stay?

Welcome to Kraków!

For the enjoyment of your stay here, we have collected a few recommendations for you.

In Krakow

  • Main Square (Rynek Główny), one of the largest medieval squares in Europe, historic center of civic and trade life since the 13th century | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps | Wikipedia
  • St. Mary’s Basilica, 14th-century Gothic church famous for its wooden altarpiece by Veit Stoss and the hourly trumpet call (hejnał) | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps | Wikipedia
  • Cloth Hall (Sukiennice), Renaissance-era trading hall at the center of the Main Square, historically the hub of Kraków’s textile trade | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps | Wikipedia
  • Rynek Underground Museum, archaeological exhibition beneath the Main Square showing medieval trade routes and city life | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps | Wikipedia
  • Wawel Royal Castle, seat of Polish monarchs for centuries and a symbol of national sovereignty | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps | Wikipedia
  • Wawel Cathedral, coronation and burial site of Polish kings, adjoining the castle complex | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps | Wikipedia
  • Collegium Maius, oldest building of the Jagiellonian University (founded 1364), one of Europe’s oldest universities, contains museum of its own history | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps | Wikipedia
  • Kazimierz, former independent town and historic Jewish quarter, now a center for reflecting on Jewish-Polish history and culture | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps | Wikipedia
  • Old Synagogue, oldest surviving synagogue in Poland, now a museum of Kraków Jewish history | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps | Wikipedia
  • Remuh Synagogue and Cemetery, 16th-century synagogue with an adjoining cemetery containing rare surviving Renaissance-era Jewish gravestones | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps | Wikipedia
  • Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory Museum, former factory turned museum on Nazi occupation and daily life in wartime Kraków | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps | Wikipedia
  • Ghetto Heroes Square (Plac Bohaterów Getta), Podgórze square marking the site of the Kraków Ghetto, memorialized with symbolic empty chairs | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps | Wikipedia
  • Kraków Barbican, well-preserved Gothic fortified outpost, once part of the city’s medieval defensive walls | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps | Wikipedia
  • Czartoryski Museum, home to Leonardo da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine” and one ofPoland’s oldest art collections | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps | Wikipedia
  • Kościuszko Mound, artificial hill built in 1823 honoring national hero Tadeusz Kościuszko, offering panoramic city views – location for the dinner on Thursday the 23.07 | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps | Wikipedia

Day Trips from Kraków:

  • Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp, now a UNESCO World Heritage site and memorial (~1.5 hrs from Kraków) | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps | Wikipedia
  • Wieliczka Salt Mine, working salt mine since the 13th century with carved chapels and sculptures, also a UNESCO World Heritage site (~30 min from Kraków) | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps | Wikipedia
  • Nowa Huta, a purpose-built socialist-realist model town and steelworks constructed under Communist rule (~20 min from central Kraków, so not necessarily a day-trip but perhaps an afternoon) | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps | Wikipedia

Food Recommendations:

Restaurants

 

Vegetarian/Vegan

 

Halal

  • Al Medina, Lebanese, Moroccan, and Tunisian restaurant in Kazimierz, one of the city’s few halal Maghrebi options | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps
  • Ottamam, Turkish restaurant near Old Town serving pide and traditional Turkish street food | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps
  • Zayka, central Indian restaurant using halal chicken and lamb for its curries and biryanis | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps
  • Beirut Shawarma Kebab & Falafel Halal, Lebanese/Middle Eastern spot near the Main Square | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps

 

Kosher

 

Gluten-Free

  • Pod Baranem, traditional Polish restaurant certified by the Polish Coeliac Association, most dishes adaptable | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps
  • Old Town Restaurant and Wine Bar, dedicated gluten-free-friendly menu with strong cross-contamination awareness | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps
  • Cakester Cafe, dessert cafe with a 95% gluten-free, vegan, and sugar-free menu | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps
  • Zapiekane Gluten Free Bistro, dedicated 100% gluten-free bistro specializing in Polish street food | OpenStreetMap | Google Maps

Classic Polish Food

Pierogi: boiled dumplings filled with options like potato-and-cheese, meat, mushroom-and-sauerkraut, or sweet fruit, taste best fried in onions.

Bigos: a slow-cooked “hunter’s stew” of sauerkraut, fresh cabbage, and mixed meats, often served in a bowl of bread.

Żurek: a sour rye-fermented soup, typically served with sausage and a boiled egg.

Kotlet schabowy: a breaded, pan-fried pork cutlet, Poland’s take on schnitzel.

Barszcz: beet soup, served either clear as a starter or with small dumplings (uszka).

Gołąbki: cabbage leaves stuffed with minced meat and rice, baked in tomato sauce.

Placki ziemniaczane: savory potato pancakes, often served with sour cream or goulash.

Oscypek: a smoked cheese made from salted sheep’s milk, a specialty of the Tatra highlands.

Sernik: Polish cheesecake made with twaróg (farmer’s cheese) rather than cream cheese.

Obwarzanek krakowski: a braided, boiled-then-baked bread ring sold from street stalls all over Kraków; a protected regional specialty unique to the city.