Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics

Uncertainty and quality should be integrated into the quantitative sciences of complex systems; this talk offers some practical techniques that illustrate how this could be accomplished. The faith that truth lies in numbers goes back to the Pythagorean attempt to unify both practical and theoretical sciences. Its current manifestation is the idolisation of pre-Einsteinian physics in the quantifica...

Neil Levy explores some of the previous debates about whether psychopaths are fully responsible for their wrongdoing, especially work on the moral/conventional distinction. Psychopaths commit a disproportionate amount of crime, and seem cognitively unimpaired. They are often thought to be bad, not mad. I advance a deflationary explanation of the moral/conventional task, and argue that this explana...

John Broome, the White's Professor of Moral Philosophy, debates the value of life with Jeff McMahan, focussing on McMahan's time-relative account of the value of life, which Broome has criticised. This public event was held as part of Professor McMahan's Astor Visiting Lectureship 2013. The debate was well attended, and provided a rare opportunity to bring together McMahan and Broome in to discuss...

Anthony Skelton examines possible reasons why philosophers have neglected to discuss children's welfare. After outlining and evaluating differing views, a rival account is presented. What makes a child's life go well? This paper examines two answers to this question, one put forward by Wayne Sumner in Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics and another by Richard Kraut in What is Good and Why: The Ethics o...

Discussing a paper co-authored with David Birks, Alexandre Erler suggests sleeping less can provide a greater opportunity for well-being. While many people today are not sleeping long enough, there is still an important minority of the population who sleeps longer than average. Even a small reduction in the number of hours a person sleeps could have a significant positive impact on how well that p...

Emotional pain and difficulty in relationships is potentially dangerous and destructive. In this talk, I explore some of the potential uses and misuses of anti-love biotechnology from a scientific and ethical perspective. "Love hurts" - as the saying goes - and a certain degree of pain and difficulty in intimate relationships is unavoidable. Sometimes it may even be beneficial, since, as it is oft...

This series of lectures attempts to explore whether possible relations between some typical religious virtues, attitudes and practices and typical democratic virtues, attitudes and practices must be a source of conflict or can be mutually supportive. There seem to be several sources of anxiety about the role that religion plays or might play in the world of public democratic politics. Some concern...

This series of lectures attempts to explore whether possible relations between some typical religious virtues, attitudes and practices and typical democratic virtues, attitudes and practices must be a source of conflict or can be mutually supportive. There seem to be several sources of anxiety about the role that religion plays or might play in the world of public democratic politics. Some concern...

This series of lectures attempts to explore whether possible relations between some typical religious virtues, attitudes and practices and typical democratic virtues, attitudes and practices must be a source of conflict or can be mutually supportive. There seem to be several sources of anxiety about the role that religion plays or might play in the world of public democratic politics. Some concern...

The speaker presents some recent work that has been done on children who are seen to be at risk of violence; and raises questions about the social and ethical significance of studying children in this way and for this purpose. Most societies seek to reduce the level of violence that occurs between its members and utilise social and political means to do so. There has been increasing interest in th...

The Possibility of Religious-Secular Ethical Engagement: Abortion.

The Possibility of Religious-Secular Ethical Engagement: Euthanasia. Julian Savulescu and Charles Camosy held two public debates in Michaelmas Term 2012 under the series title 'The Possibility of Religious-Secular Ethical Engagement'.

Julian Savulescu believes that if we can genetically alter the next generation, not only should we be free to do so, it may even turn out that in some circumstances we have an obligation to go ahead and do it. The term 'designer baby' is usually used in a pejorative sense - to conjure up some dystopian Brave New World. There are already ways to affect what kind of children you have - most obviousl...

The brain disease model of addiction: Assessing its validity, utility and implications for public policy towards the treatment and prevention of addiction. Genetic and neuroscience research on addiction has been interpreted by leading figures in the USA as demonstrating that addiction is a chronic relapsing brain disease that reflects enduring changes in brain function that are produced by sustain...

Since the terrorist attacks by Islamic militants upon the US and UK in the early 2000s, a host of anti-terrorist measures have been introduced which raise conceptual and ethical issues that have serious implications for practical politics. Since the terrorist attacks by Islamic militants upon the United States (and Great Britain) in the early 2000s, the drive to prevent further such attacks has pr...

There is widespread belief that terrorism can never be morally justified, ut this belief is not widespread amongst philosophers; they offer a variety of justifications for some terrorist acts. Seminar 2 of 3 in the Series 'The Meaning of Terrorism - philosophical perspectives' Tony Coady is one of Australia's best-known philosophers. He has an outstanding international reputation for his writings...

Schaefer is currently reading for the B.Phil in Philosophy at Oxford. His interests lie in moral philosophy, especially applied ethics, as well as political philosophy and personal identity and he has a background in research ethics. Human embryonic stem cell research has been a lightning rod of controversy since the first embryonic stem cell lines were derived in 1998. Most of the controversy rev...

An introduction to geoengineering, covering the broad range of issues raised by the emergence of climate engineering as a response to climate change. Why geoengineering? What has led us to the point where serious attention is now being paid to the possibility of regulating the Earth's climate system? If the structure of political systems, the power of lobby groups and the influence of denial and e...

Karanjeet de Feo-Giet's thesis focuses on contemporary Chinese and Indian entertainment films in Mandarin and Hindi and their roles in communicating ideas about identity and Asian-ness today. What is the value of entertainment? Is it necessarily consigned to the category of the frivolous, or can it be transformative? Should entertainment films exist at all in countries with deep social problems? D...

David Coady is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Tasmania. He is the author of What to Believe Now: Applying Epistemology to Contemporary Issues and the editor of Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate. Rumour and conspiracy theory are closely linked in both the popular imagination and academic debate, with the rumour often portrayed as a vehicle of conspiracy theory. They are a...

Santorelli is a research fellow in the Zoology department, University of Oxford. He is interested in investigating the evolution of cooperative behaviors of macro and microorganisms. While discussions of cooperation and conflict are common in the study of animal and human societies, only within the last few decades we have realized that these acts also occur in more primitive, microscopic forms of...

Professor Aurora Plomer is Chair in Law and Bioethics at the University of Sheffield. The paper retraces the historical genesis and philosophical foundations of the right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress in international law in order to explore how the right may be adapted to address emerging ethical challenges in "the century of biology".

In this talk, Professor Plomer (Chair in Law and Bioethics, University of Sheffield) argues that, from a legal perspective, the EU ban on hESC patents is seriously flawed. To her knowledge, it is the first ruling of a supranational court conferring legal protection to frozen embryos on the back of legislation formally relating to patents and in disregard of diversity of moral and legal cultures on...

Whose Ethics? Six Principles and Six Guidelines determinative of a superior ethics. Note: due to a technical issue the first ten minutes of the presentation are missing. In this exploratory presentation it will be suggested that perplexing moral dilemmas may be resolved effectively by employing a meta-ethics, consisting of six designated principles, which are multi-dimensional, critical and inclus...

Onora O'Neill, formerly principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, has been thinking about the issue of 'trust': trust is vital in most areas of human interaction - but nowhere more so than in health and medicine.