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Alberto Giubilini

(Bio)technology and what makes us human

Andrew Moeller, Faculty of History Alberto Giubilini, Uehiro Oxford Institute Themes from the conference “Biotechnology, Artificial Intelligence, and Human Identity” (Medical Humanities Programme) Crossposted from TORCH Medical Humanities The conference “Biotechnologies, Artificial Intelligence, and Human Identity” brought together a crowded room to hear 12 speakers engage in lively discussion on whether and how technologies such… Read More »(Bio)technology and what makes us human

Image credit: Health care workers at an mpox treatment center near Goma, Congo, on Aug. 17, 2024. Photo by Guerchom Ndebo / AFP via Getty Images.

Humanising the Global Response to MPox: Lessons from COVID-19 and the Humanities?

Utsa Bose (Faculty of History, University of Oxford); Alberto Giubilini (Uehiro Oxford Institute, University of Oxford) Tolulope Osayomi (Department of Geography, University of Ibadan; AfOx-TORCH Visiting Fellow, University of Oxford) Crossposted from TORCH Medical Humanities Blog. This post is also the basis of a workshop on 21 November 2024, to be held at the University of… Read More »Humanising the Global Response to MPox: Lessons from COVID-19 and the Humanities?

The Fruits of Moral Disagreement: Conversations and Questions from the Inaugural Ethox-Uehiro Workshop on Moral Disagreement

By Tess Johnson (Ethox Centre) and Alberto Giubilini (Uehiro Oxford Institute) On the 11th of June, 2024, members of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics (soon to become Uehiro Oxford Institute) and the Ethox gathered at St. Anne’s College for an afternoon discussion on the nature, value, and disvalue of moral disagreement, as part… Read More »The Fruits of Moral Disagreement: Conversations and Questions from the Inaugural Ethox-Uehiro Workshop on Moral Disagreement

(artwork and pictures by Anna Dumitriu)

Communication, Narratives and Antimicrobial Resistance

by Alberto Giubilini,  Sally Frampton,  Tess Johnson,  Will Matlock  Originally published one the TORCH Medical Humanities website The conference Communication, Narratives and Antimicrobial Resistance took place on the 16th of May at Merton College, Oxford, as part of the TORCH Medical Humanities programme and with the generous contribution of the John Fell Fund and the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical… Read More »Communication, Narratives and Antimicrobial Resistance

(Bio)technologies, human identity, and the Medical Humanities

Introducing two journal special issues and a conference Written by Alberto Giubilini Two special issues of the journals Bioethics and Monash Bioethics Review will be devoted to, respectively, “New (Bio)technology and Human Identity” and “Medical Humanities in the 21st Century” (academic readers, please consider submitting an article). Here I would like to briefly explain why… Read More »(Bio)technologies, human identity, and the Medical Humanities

Medical assistance in dying: what are we talking about?

Alberto Giubilini

Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics

 

Medical assistance in dying  – or “MAiD”,  to use the somehow infelicitous acronym – is likely to be a central topic in bioethics this year. That might not be true of bioethics as an academic field, where MAiD has been widely discussed over the past 40 years. But it is likely true of bioethics as a wider societal and political area of discussion. There are two reasons to think this.  First, the topic has attracted a lot of attention the last year, especially with “slippery slope” concerns around Canada’s policies. Second, MAiD has recently been in the news in the UK, where national elections will take place in 2024.  It is not hard to imagine it will feature in the heated political polarization that always accompanies election campaigns.

Little can be done to prevent that kind of polarization. However, some clarity about the different issues at stake might help to steer clear of unnecessary quarrels and focus on the relevant points of disagreement. Without claiming to be exhaustive, here I want to try to take some step in that direction.Read More »Medical assistance in dying: what are we talking about?

Cross-post: Fairness and Freedom in Public Health Policy – On the need for a Humanities-based approach to public health policy

by Alberto Giubilini

Originally posted on the Oxford Medical Humanities website

Multidisciplinary Conference, Oxford, 23 and 24 Oct 2023

 

This conference explored two distinct but related issues in public health. One is the extent to which individual freedom could be restricted in the pursuit of public health goals. The other is whose freedom could be restricted. That is, freedom and fairness in public health policy.

The tension between freedom and public goods pervades our lives. Public goods such as functioning healthcare systems or environmental resources depend on actions we collectively take. Collective actions raise issues about whether and how each of us ought to contribute to them by giving up some of our own personal interests. Pandemic policies simply made that tension more salient. However, our living together is a constant negotiation of the boundaries between us as individuals and us as members of communities, often (but not necessarily) through the mediation of Governmental restrictions.

Public goods cost freedom or, if you prefer, freedoms can erode public goods.Read More »Cross-post: Fairness and Freedom in Public Health Policy – On the need for a Humanities-based approach to public health policy

The Language of Freedom in Public Health: the Case of the Smoking Ban

Alberto Giubilini

 

“Enough manipulation of the definition of man, and freedom can be made to mean whatever the manipulator wishes”

(Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, 1958)

 

The UK Prime Minister has announced his plan to ban the sale of tobacco products to young generations in England. Smoking will be phased out by progressively increasing the legal age for buying tobacco every year. Assuming the plan is effective and does not simply open the door to a black market, young generations in England will be prevented from starting to smoke. According to the Prime Minister, “this measure will be the single biggest intervention in public health in a generation.”

It is hardly necessary to provide figures about the risks of smoking. Lighting up that first cigarette is one of the most unhealthy choices one could ever make. In fact, it is a decision many regret later in life. The question is: to what extent is a government justified in preventing competent individuals from making unhealthy decisions for themselves?

Read More »The Language of Freedom in Public Health: the Case of the Smoking Ban

It is not about AI, it is about humans

Written by Alberto Giubilini

We might be forgiven for asking so frequently these days whether we should trust artificial intelligence. Too much has been written about the promises and perils of ChatGPT to escape the question. Upon reading both enthusiastic and concerned accounts of it, there seems to be very little the software cannot do. It can provide or fabricate a huge amount of information in the blink on an eye, reinterpret it and organize it into essays that seem written by humans, produce different forms of art (from figurative art to music, poetry, and so on) virtually indistinguishable from human-made art, and so much more.

It seems fair to ask how we can trust AI not to fabricate evidence, plagiarize, defame, serve anti-democratic political ends, violate privacy, and so on.

One possible answer is that we cannot. This could be true in two senses.

In a first sense, we cannot trust AI because it is not reliable. It gets things wrong too often, there is no way to figure out if it is wrong without doing ourselves the kind of research that the software was supposed to do for us, and it could be used in unethical ways. On this view, the right attitude towards AI is one of cautious distrust. What it does might well be impressive, but not reliable epistemically or ethically.

In a second sense, we cannot trust AI for the same reason why we cannot distrust it, either. Quite simply, trust (and distrust) is not the kind of attitude we can have towards tools. Unlike humans, tools are just means to our ends. They can be more or less reliable, but not more or less trustworthy. In order to trust, we need to have certain dispositions – or ‘reactive attitudes’, to use some philosophical jargon – that can only be appropriately directed at humans. According to Richard Holton’s account of ‘trust’, for instance, trust requires the readiness to feel betrayed by the individual you trust[1]. Or perhaps we can talk, less emphatically, of readiness to feel let down.

Read More »It is not about AI, it is about humans

Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization and doctors’ conscientious commitment to provide abortion

Alberto Giubilini, University of Oxford 

Udo Schuklenk, Queen’s University

Francesca Minerva, University of Milan 

Julian Savulescu, National University of Singapore and University of Oxford

(reposted from the Journal of Medical Ethics Blog )

The reversal of the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling by the US Supreme Court in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization removed the Constitutional protection of women’s right to access abortion services in the US. This decision has resulted in renewed interest in the morality of conscientious commitment by health care professionals to provide abortion care.

Typically, ethical debates on conscience in health care revolve around the morality of doctors refusing to provide professional services on idiosyncratic personal conscience claims. Here the issue is different in that conscientious doctors, motivated by a commitment to professional values, might want to provide services that are arguably in their patients’ best interest, but that are illegal.

Read More »Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization and doctors’ conscientious commitment to provide abortion