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Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics

Announcing the Winners and Runners Up in the 9th Annual National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics

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Please join us in congratulating all four of the finalists in the National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics 2023, and in particular our winners, Lukas Joosten and Avital Fried. We would also like to thank our judges, Prof Roger Crisp, Prof Edward Harcourt and Dr Sarah Raskoff.

This, the final of the 9th Annual National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics, was held on the 14th March in the lecture theatre of the Faculty of Philosophy, as well as online. During the final the four finalists presented their papers and ideas to an audience and responded to a short Q&A as the deciding round in the competition. A selection of the winning essays and honourable mentions will be published on this blog.Read More »Announcing the Winners and Runners Up in the 9th Annual National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics

Should Social Media Companies Use Artificial Intelligence to Automate Content Moderation on their Platforms and, if so, Under What Conditions?

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This article received an honourable mention in the graduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics

Written by University of Oxford student Trenton Andrew Sewell 

Social Media Companies (SMCs) should use artificial intelligence (‘AI’) to automate content moderation (‘CM’) presuming they meet two kinds of conditions. Firstly, ‘End Conditions’ (‘ECs’) which restrict what content is moderated. Secondly, ‘Means Conditions’ (‘MCs’) which restrict how moderation occurs.

This essay focuses on MCs. Assuming some form of moderation is permissible, I will discuss how/whether SMCs should use AI to moderate. To this end, I outline CM AI should respect users ‘moral agency’ (‘MA’) through transparency, clarity, and providing an option to appeal the AI’s judgment. I then address whether AI failing to respect MA proscribes its use. It does not. SMCs are permitted[1] to use AI, despite procedural failures, to discharge substantive obligations to users and owners.Read More »Should Social Media Companies Use Artificial Intelligence to Automate Content Moderation on their Platforms and, if so, Under What Conditions?

How Confucian Harmony Can Help Us Deal with Echo Chambers

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This article received an honourable mention in the graduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics

Written by Kyle van Oosterum, University of Oxford student

Section 1 – Introduction

Many of us are part of or aware of the existence of widespread echo chambers on social media. Echo chambers seem concerning because their members are led to believe bizarre things and disagree viciously with others. For example, some people genuinely believe the Earth is flat. Others disagree about basic political reality as we saw with those who stormed the U.S. Capital on January 6th 2021 and, more recently, the Brazilian congress. A great deal of this may be attributable to the way social media algorithmically sorts us into echo chambers. However, this sorting is partly so effective because we have not become disposed to exit echo chambers or deal well with the individuals who inhabit them. Even if we change these algorithms, we may also need to change our dispositions to better deal with these individuals.Read More »How Confucian Harmony Can Help Us Deal with Echo Chambers

Why Preventing Predation Can Be a Morally Right Cause for Effective Altruism?

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This article received an honourable mention in the graduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics

Written by University of Oxford student Pablo Neira

If the interests of sentient animals matter, then there are (at least pro tanto) reasons to prevent the harms they suffer. There are many different natural harms that wild animals suffer, including hunger, disease, parasitism and extreme weather conditions (Singer 1975; Clark 1979; Sapontzis 1984; Cowen 2003; Fink 2005; Simmons 2009; Horta 2010; McMahan 2010; Ebert and Mavhan 2012; Keulartz 2016; Palmer 2013; Sözmen 2013; Bruers 2015; Tomasik 2015; McMahan 2016; Bramble 2021; Johannsen 2021). One of these (on which I will focus in this paper) is the suffering caused by predation. Predation is an antagonistic relationship in which a predator obtains energy by consuming a prey animal—either wholly or partially—which is alive when it is attacked (Begon et al. 2006, 266). The harms predation cause to prey animals can vary greatly, depending on the kind of injuries they suffer in the process and how painful they are, the amount of time it takes them to die, the release of endorphins that reduce pain or the extent to which psychological suffering—mostly distress—affects them during the process. In addition, beyond the pain of predation itself, there are other substantial harms related to predation.Read More »Why Preventing Predation Can Be a Morally Right Cause for Effective Altruism?

Eth­i­cal Bi­o­log­i­cal Nat­u­ral­ism and the Case Against Moral Sta­tus for AIs

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This article received an honourable mention in the graduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics

Written by University of Oxford student Samuel Iglesias

 

In­tro­duc­tion

6.522. “There are, in­deed, things that can­not be put into words. They make them­selves man­i­fest. They are what is mys­ti­cal”. —Lud­wig Wittgen­stein, Trac­ta­tus Logi­co Philo­soph­icus.

What de­ter­mines whether an ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence has moral sta­tus? Do men­tal states, such as the vivid and con­scious feel­ings of plea­sure or pain, mat­ter? Some ethicists ar­gue that “what goes on in the in­side mat­ters great­ly” (Ny­holm and Frank 2017). Oth­ers, like John Dana­her, ar­gue that “per­for­ma­tive ar­ti­fice, by it­self, can be suf­ficient to ground a claim of moral sta­tus” (2018). This view, called eth­i­cal be­hav­ior­ism, “re­spects our epis­temic lim­its” and states that if an en­ti­ty “con­sis­tent­ly be­haves like anoth­er en­ti­ty to whom we af­ford moral sta­tus, then it should be grant­ed the same moral sta­tus.”Read More »Eth­i­cal Bi­o­log­i­cal Nat­u­ral­ism and the Case Against Moral Sta­tus for AIs

National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: The Ambiguous Ethicality of Applause: Ethnography’s Uncomfortable Challenge to the Ethical Subject

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This article received an honourable mention in the graduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics

Written by University of Manchester student Thomas Long

Abstract

This essay presents, first and foremost, the recollections of a doctoral anthropologist as they attempt to make sense of a moment of embodied, ethical dissonance: a moment where the “familiar” of their own ethical positionality was suddenly and violently made very “strange” to them through participation in applause. Applause is one of the most practical ways we can perform our support for a cause, idea or individual within corporeal social space. Through a vignette, I examine the ethical challenge presented by my own, unexpected applause – applause for the Pro-Life movement – that occurred during fieldwork with Evangelical Christians in the U.S.A. I use this vignette to question the impact of the field on an anthropologist’s capacity to practice what they see as good ethics, and in doing so, consider the practical ethical limits of conducting ethnographic research with so called “repugnant cultural others” (Harding 1991). I argue that moments of uncomfortable alienation from one’s own perceived ethical positionality present not a moral, but a conceptual challenge, in that through this alienation the elasticity of our ethical selves is laid bare. I conclude by suggesting that the challenge presented by doing ethnography with ethically divergent interlocutors constitutes an “object dissolving critique” (Robbins, 2003, p.193) of our implicit conception of what it means to be a coherent ethical subject at all.Read More »National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: The Ambiguous Ethicality of Applause: Ethnography’s Uncomfortable Challenge to the Ethical Subject

National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: Why the Responsibility Gap is Not a Compelling Objection to Lethal Autonomous Weapons

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This article received an honourable mention in the undergraduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics

Written by Tanae Rao, University of Oxford student

There are some crimes, such as killing non-combatants and mutilating corpses, so vile that they are clearly impermissible even in the brutal chaos of war. Upholding human dignity, or whatever is left of it, in these situations may require us to hold someone morally responsible for violation of the rules of combat. Common sense morality dictates that we owe it to those unlawfully killed or injured to punish the people who carried out the atrocity. But what if the perpetrators weren’t people at all? Robert Sparrow argues that, when lethal autonomous weapons cause war crimes, it is often impossible to identify someone–man or machine–who can appropriately be held morally responsible (Sparrow 2007; Sparrow 2016). This might explain some of our ambivalence about the deployment of autonomous weapons, even if their use would replace human combatants who commit war crimes more frequently than their robotic counterparts.Read More »National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: Why the Responsibility Gap is Not a Compelling Objection to Lethal Autonomous Weapons

National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: What is Wrong With Stating Slurs?

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This article received an honourable mention in the undergraduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics

Written by Leah O’Grady, University of Oxford

 

This essay will argue that it is wrong to use slurs in a non-derogatory context due to the phenomena of constitutive prohibition, put forward by Alexandre and Lepore (2013). That is, I will argue that slurs are wrong because they are considered wrong. Throughout, I will use ‘offensive’ interchangeably with ‘considered wrong (by the marginalised community to which it applies)’. I wish to distinguish ‘offensive’ with ‘wrong’. A slur is wrong if and only if it does harm to the marginalised community to which it applies. I will begin the essay from the assumption that an offensive slur is not necessarily wrong and vice versa. However, through argument I will conclude that slurs are wrong because they are offensive, that is, it is wrong to say slurs because it implies either an ignorance of or a disregard to the wishes of marginalised communities.Read More »National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: What is Wrong With Stating Slurs?

Announcement: National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics Now Open For Entries

NATIONAL OXFORD UEHIRO PRIZE IN PRACTICAL ETHICS 2023 • All graduate and undergraduate students (full and part-time) currently enrolled at any UK university, in any subject, are invited to enter the National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics by submitting an essay of up to 2000 words on any topic relevant to practical ethics. •… Read More »Announcement: National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics Now Open For Entries