Legislation emerging from Treaty of Waitangi settlements provide Māori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand, with new opportunities to destabilize and decolonize the colonial knowledge, processes and practices that contribute towards negative material and metaphysical impacts on their rohe [traditional lands and waters]. In this article we focus our attention on the Nga Wai o Maniapoto (Waipa River) Act 2012 and the Deed of Settlement signed between the Crown (the New Zealand government) and Ngāti Maniapoto (the tribal group with ancestral authority over the Waipā River) as an example of how the law in Aotearoa New Zealand is increasingly stretched beyond settler-colonial confines to embrace legal and ontological pluralism. We illustrate how this Act serves as the foundation upon which Ngāti Maniapoto are seeking to restore, manage, and enhance the health of their river. Such legislation, we argue, provides a far higher degree of recognition of Māori rights and interests both as an outcome of the settlement process and by strengthening provisions under the Resource Management Act 1991 regarding the role of Māori in resource management. We conclude by suggesting that co-governance and co-management arrangements hold great potential for transforming river management by recognizing and accommodating ontological and epistemological pluralism, which moves Aotearoa New Zealand closer to achieving sustainable and just river futures for all.

Commonsense morality seems to feature both agent-neutral and agent-relative elements. For a long time, the core debate between consequentialists and deontologists was which of these features should take centerstage. With the introduction of the consequentializing project and agent-relative value, however, agent-neutrality has been left behind. While I likewise favor an agent-relative view, agent-neutral views capture important features of commonsense morality.

This article investigates whether an agent-relative view can maintain what is attractive about typical agent-neutral views. In particular, I argue that the agent-relative reasons-wielding deontologist is ultimately able to capture those features ordinarily associated with agent-neutral views, while the agent-relative value wielding consequentialist is left with a dilemma. The consequentializer either succumbs to the concerns of her agent-neutral opponents or else abandons the distinctive and attractive features of her view. Either way, I conclude that agent-relative value is best left behind.

There is little agreement among moral and political philosophers when it comes to determining what it is that makes adaptive preferences problematic. The large number of competing explanations offered by philosophers illustrates the absence of any consensus. The most prominent versions of these explanations have recently come under attack by Dale Dorsey, who argues that adaptive preferences are a red herring: the problematic nature of adaptive preferences is not explained by the fact of adaptation but by an appeal to some other normative consideration. In this article I offer an account of adaptive preferences that both accommodates the thought that only some of our adaptive preferences are problematic and responds to the skeptical challenge pressed by Dorsey. I argue that some adaptive preferences are prima facie irrational as they exhibit a peculiar error in reasoning where individuals change the semantic content of the reasons underpinning the new preference.

For Karol Berger

This article begins with an analysis of the ‘F.A.E. Sonata’ (fall 1853), a work for violin and piano composed jointly by Robert Schumann (movements 2 and 4), Albert Dietrich (first movement), and Johannes Brahms, for their returning friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim. The title of the work derives from the musical motto that Joachim had chosen as his own, representing the words ‘Frei aber einsam’ (free but alone). The analysis identifies the unifying elements of the movements; allusions play a role, especially regarding Beethoven.

The study then proposes that Wagner's 1850 essay ‘The Artwork of the Future’ inspired this collegial effort as a rebuttal to several ideas, suggesting that Joachim took his personal motto as a contradiction of Wagner's statement: ‘The solitary individual is unfree’ (Der Einsame ist unfrei). One of the more intriguing sections for Schumann and his followers was likely the chapter entitled ‘The Artist of the Future’. There he asserts that individuality will never be as consequential as a collective effort, proclaiming that ‘the free artistic community is therefore the basic prerequisite for the artwork itself’. Schumann challenged his devoted disciples to take Wagner at his word and compose something as a collective. The stakes of the dispute between Schumann and Wagner were high: a path into the future that best continued the line connecting both of them to Beethoven. This sonata was composed at the same time as Schumann's article, ‘New Paths’ (Neue Bahnen), which also constitutes a response to Wagner's The Artwork of the Future.