Video Interview: Introducing Academic Visitor Dr María de Jesús Medina Arellano
An interview with academic visitor Dr María de Jesús Medina Arellano, Professor and Researcher at the Institute of Legal Research at the National Autonomous University (UNAM), on her research focusing on the ethics and regulation of biotechnologies in developing countries, such as stem cell science, human genome editing and reproductive technologies.
Book Launch: Pandemic Ethics: From Covid-19 to Disease X
Press release and an interview with Prof Dominic Wilkinson on the new book, Pandemic Ethics: From Covid-19 to Disease X, which he has co-authored with Prof Julian Savulescu.
1 May 2023
According to some estimates, there is more than a one in four chance in the next decade of another global pandemic. We don’t know whether this will be influenza, a coronavirus (like SARS and COVID), or something completely new. The World Health Organisation refers to this unknown future threat as “Disease X”. Continue reading
Video Interview: Introducing Oxford Uehiro Centre’s Academic Visitor, Prof Dr Matthias Braun
In the first of a new series of short videos produced by the OUC introducing the academic visitors at the Oxford Uehiro Centre and the practical ethics research that they are involved in.
Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: Turning up the Hedonic Treadmill: Is It Morally Impermissible for Parents to Give Their Children a Luxurious Standard of Living?
This essay was the overall winner in the Undergraduate Category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Written by University of Oxford student, Lukas Joosten
Most parents think they are helping their children when they give them a very high standard of life. This essay argues that giving luxuries to your children can, in fact, be morally impermissible. The core of my argument is that when parents give their children a luxurious standard of life, they foist an expectation for a higher standard of living upon their children, reducing their lifetime wellbeing if they cannot afford this standard in adulthood.
I argue for this conclusion in four steps. Firstly, I discuss how one can harm someone by changing their preferences. Secondly, I develop a model for the general permissibility of gift giving in the context of adaptive preferences. Thirdly, I apply this to the case of parental giving, arguing it is uniquely problematic. Lastly, I respond to a series of objections to the main argument. Continue reading
Cross Post: Why Government Budgets are Exercises in Distributing Life and Death as Much as Fiscal Calculations
Written by Hazem Zohny, University of Oxford
Sacrificial dilemmas are popular among philosophers. Should you divert a train from five people strapped to the tracks to a side-track with only one person strapped to it? What if that one person were a renowned cancer researcher? What if there were only a 70% chance the five people would die?
These questions sound like they have nothing to do with a government budget. These annual events are, after all, conveyed as an endeavour in accounting. They are a chance to show anticipated tax revenues and propose public spending. We are told the name of the game is “fiscal responsibility” and the goal is stimulating “economic growth”. Never do we talk of budgets in terms of sacrificing some lives to save others.
In reality, though, government budgets are a lot like those trains, in philosophical terms. Whether explicitly intended or not, some of us take those trains to better or similar destinations, and some of us will be left strapped to the tracks. That is because the real business of budgets is in distributing death and life. They are exercises in allocating misery and happiness. Continue reading
National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: The Ambiguous Ethicality of Applause: Ethnography’s Uncomfortable Challenge to the Ethical Subject
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. Continue reading
National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: Why the Responsibility Gap is Not a Compelling Objection to Lethal Autonomous Weapons
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. Continue reading
National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: What is Wrong With Stating Slurs?
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. Continue reading
Announcement: Finalists of the 9th Annual National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics and Final Presentation
We are pleased to announce the four finalists for the National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics 2023 and to invite you to attend the final where they will present their entries. Two finalists have been selected from each category to present their ideas to an audience and respond to a short Q&A as the final round in the competition.
The Presentation will be held on Tuesday 14th March from 5:30pm in the Lecture Room, Faculty of Philosophy, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Oxford OX2 6HT, followed by a drinks reception until 7:45 pm in the Colin Matthew Room.
All are welcome to attend the final and are warmly invited to join the finalists for a drinks reception after the event. Please sign up by the 12th March at: https://bookwhen.com/uehiro/e/ev-sqat-20230314173000
If you are unable to join the event in person, the presentation section will be presented as a hybrid zoom webinar. To register in advance for this webinar sign in here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_2FEbKuvyRCiu59Wa4soa0w
Please book now and support the next generation of Practical Ethicists.
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