Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics

Research shows that implicit moral attitudes affect our thinking and behavior. This talk reports new psychological and neuroscientific research and explores potential implications for scientific moral psychology as well as for some philosophical theories.

In this talk, Professor Tony Coady examines the contrast between reason and emotion and argues that much of the separation of reason and emotion that underpins the debate is misguided. In the debate about the pros and cons of human enhancement, proponents of enhancement often accuse their opponents (so-called “conservatives”) of substituting emotion for reason. In this, they are relying upon an ag...

In this St Cross Special Ethics Seminar, Jeremy Howick defends Grünbaum’s work on placebos. He outlines a need to re-examine policies on ethics of placebos, and revise our estimations of their effects in both clinical practice and trials. There is currently no widely accepted definition of ‘placebos’. Yet debates about the ethics of placebo use (in routine practice or clinical trials) and the magn...

Tom Walker discusses autonomy and informed consent to medical treatment There are two features of consenting to medical treatment that have been little explored in the extensive literature on this topic. The first is that the requirement to obtain consent is conditional in the following sense – we only need to obtain consent for those things that are both wrong if done without consent, and that we...

If networking is considered to be either cultivating non-merit-based favouritism or demonstrating one’s merit in advance of formal selection processes, then I argue that it is an attempt to gain illegitimate advantage over competitors and is thus immoral. Networking is taken to be a perfectly innocuous part of business and career-advancement. I argue that, where the aim is to increase one’s prospe...

I argue that the value of love in friendship illuminates issues about parental love and examine whether allowing same-sex couples access to adoption has any bearing on the moral status of prohibitions on same-sex couples using assisted reproduction. An emotional liberty rationale for broad access to IVF and other forms of assisted reproduction focuses on how narrow restrictions on such access prev...

Humans show a bias to favour information related to themselves over information related to other people. How does this effect arise? Are self biases a stable trait of the individual? Do these biases change fundamental perceptual processes? I will review recent work from my laboratory showing that self-biases modulate basic perceptual processes; they are stable for an individual and are difficult t...

Antidepressants are commonplace yet there is much debate about their clinical efficacy. Are they merely placebos or do they have a clinical effect on the way our brains work? In this presentation, Professor Cowen investigates the evidence. Antidepressant drugs are commonly prescribed for clinical depression but have a rather dubious public reception. Professor Ian Reid has commented that, 'antidep...

We explore some possible interactions between enhancement technology and punishment, reflect on ethical issues that arise as a result, and consider what our justice system must do in order to ensure that it keeps pace with developments in technology. Criminal justice systems currently employ a limited range of penal sanctions to punish offenders. The type and nature of the sanctions employed are,...

The talk discusses the balance between cyber security measures and individual rights - any fair and reasonable society should implement the former successfully while respecting and furthering the latter. Defeating online insecurity is like defeating a Hydra with many heads: from e-commerce and online banking scams to malware, from hacking to cyberwar, it requires Herculean efforts to slay the Hydr...

If doping were done in a healthy and fair way, would it be OK? If so, all wrongs would lie in doping abuses involving health risks, deceit and unfairness. I argue that perhaps the doping sinner best exemplifies human dignity and existential authenticity. If doping would be done in a sufficiently healthy, candid, autonomous, wise and fair way, would doping be OK? If so, all wrongs would lie in dopi...

The trolley problem is a thought experiment in ethics. Outside traditional philosophical discussion, the trolley problem has been a significant feature in the fields of cognitive science and neuroethics. You have been set the following trolley problem by a villain. There is a central track, called CONTINUE. If you do nothing, the trolley will continue down this track, and kill whomever is at the e...

Geoengineering, as a response to climate change, raises serious ethical and socio-political issues. Drawing on the latest developments in philosophy and ethics of technology and science, I consider a post-humanist way of analysing such issues. Along with mitigation and adaptation, geoengineering, i.e. "the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic...

In this talk, I argue that non-therapeutic circumcision of infants is unethical, whether performed for reasons of obtaining possible future health benefits, for reasons of cultural transmission, or for reasons of perceived religious obligation. In this talk, I argue that the non-therapeutic circumcision of infant males is unethical, whether it is performed for reasons of obtaining possible future...

The speaker proposes a four-step account of action, within which only two of the four steps benefit from the subject's attention, revealing a potential disconnect between the subject of experience and the morally responsible agent. There is a tendency to think of action as a relatively high-level concept, minimally requiring the input of the experiencing subject through the subject's attention. To...

Exploring different ways in which the metaphysics of religious world views can be used in justifications of violence, this talk concentrates on appeals to the importance of the afterlife to justify violence. Much has been written about the relationship between religion and violence, and much of what has been written is aimed at trying to determine whether, how and why religion causes violence. In...

The lecture describes why financial theory and teaching has ignored ethics, viewing moral values as irrelevant. We trace the reason for the neglect of ethics back to assumptions made by Modern Finance Theory, the en courant theory in finance. The neo-classical assumption that economic agents are rational profit maximizers has, over decades, become uncritically accepted as the norm and the truth ab...

In this talk we first argue that the reactive attitudes originate in very fast non-voluntary processes involving constant facial feedback. In the second part we examine the supposed constitutive relation between the reactive attitudes and responsibility. This talk explores the connections between the folk psychological project of interpretation, the reactive attitudes and responsibility. The first...

Nutt argues that there are serious ethical implications for a simplistic prohibitionist approach to drugs and suggests alternative strategies that might be used. The use of the law to control drug use is long established though still unproven in efficacy. Although seemingly obvious that legal interdictions should work there is little evidence to support this assertion. So for example cannabis thou...

Associate Professor Rob Sparrow (Monash) and PhD student Chris Gyngell (ANU) present talks on the topic of human enhancement. Rob Sparrow on 'Enhancement and Obsolescence: Avoiding An "Enhanced Rat Race"': A claim about continuing technological progress plays an essential, if unacknowledged, role in the philosophical literature on "human enhancement". Advocates for enhancement typically point to t...

Self-harm using poison is a serious public health problem in Sri Lanka. As part of an effort to tackle the problem, clinical trials are used to identify effective antidotes. This talk describes the conduct of trials in this unusual and difficult context. Based on ethnographic material collected in rural hospitals in Sri Lanka between 2008 and 2009, this talk outlines three subject positions crucia...

Legal punishment as the routine infliction of suffering poses a serious challenge of justification. The challenge becomes more urgent as a number of thinkers argue that the dominant, retributivist answer fails in the light of the findings of neuroscience. In this talk I sketch a general account of retributivist justification of punishment and the basic neuroscientific argument against it. I then e...

Many aims that motivate unjust wars could be achieved without violence if not met with military resistance. So is self-defense against aggression always permissible? Are the values of state sovereignty important enough to justify war in their defense? Wrongful aggressors often claim to love peace, and there is a sense in which that is true, for they would prefer to get what they want without havin...

How do we know when our donations are helping, and how much they are helping? Are charities roughly equally good, or are some much more effective than others? Toby Ord and Harry Shannon discuss effective philanthropy from different angles. When we make donations to good causes we are trying to help make the world a better place. But what is the best way to do this? How do we know when our donation...

How best to govern the field of assisted reproductive technologies? As UK and US authorities utilise different approaches, will the disparate structures and missions of these two bodies result in significantly different answers? In the past few decades, technologically advanced, democratic societies have struggled with the question of how best to govern the field of assisted reproductive technolog...