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Press Replay on Ethics: How AI Debate Panels Surface Hidden Value-Trade-Offs
TL;DR High-stake policy decisions often involve conflict between values, like fairness versus efficiency, or individual rights versus the common good. The various committees (like hospital ethics boards or policy advisory groups) tasked with resolving these conflicts often work in ways that are hard to scrutinize, their conclusions shaped by the specific people in the room.…
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On plans to extend use of chemical castration for sex offenders in England
Secretary of State for Justice Shabana Mahmood is reportedly looking into a potential ‘national rollout of voluntary chemical castration for sex offenders’. The proposal is one of the recommendations outlined in the recently published Independent Sentencing Review led by former Lord Chancellor David Gauke, commissioned to investigate ‘the prison overcrowding crisis and to consider alternative…
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Profiting from Misery: Is There Something Different About Healthcare Data?
By Dr Jeremy Gauntlett-Gilbert – student on the MSt Practical Ethics programme The advent of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence has opened up new possibilities for health research. Specifically, these techniques could be let loose on ‘big data’, such as the collective data of healthcare organisations (including the NHS), and would likely reveal new insights…
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Dire Wolves and Deep Prompts: Language Models in Applied Ethics
You might have seen the headlines: Colossal Biosciences claims to have brought back the dire wolf. Except, it’s not quite a direct resurrection. What Colossal actually created are genetically engineered proxies: grey wolves modified to have some dire wolf traits. I wondered if the news might renew interest in the ethics of “de-extinction” and perhaps…
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Uterus Transplants – Ethical and Legal Challenges in the Mexican Context
Author: Dr César Palacios-Gonzalez Discussions about maternal health and rights in Mexico tend to focus on health outcomes and access to healthcare. Academics and activists have long campaigned for the government to invest more resources in maternal health. Unfortunately, healthcare provision for women who want to have a child and are struggling to conceive hasn’t received enough…
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Practical Ethics Schools Day 2025
This year, we hosted the sixth edition of our annual Practical Ethics and Responsibility Competition (PERC). We received 42 entries to the video competition, and though we had many great entries, four finalists emerged as our winning teams, and travelled to Oxford for a day of ethics and debate, supported by their teachers.
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‘Global health’: a problematic concept?
What makes health ‘global’? This is the question I have addressed in a recent article in the journal Developing World Bioethics. I am afraid, however, that I don’t have an answer. Nor was answering the aim of the article. After all, many definitions of ‘global health’ exist in the literature and most of them are…
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Justifying Exclusion From Public Sport
Graduate Highly Commended paper in the 2025 National Uehiro Oxford Essay Prize in Practical Ethics. By Edward Lamb. During the 2024 Paris Olympics, the inclusion of Dutch beach volleyball player Steven van de Velde generated serious controversy. Van de Velde had previously been sentenced to four years in British jail, convicted of child rape.[1] After…
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Bridging the Gaps: How Language Models Can Connect Ethics, Science, and Policy
What this post explores: At its best, practical ethics addresses normative questions with philosophical rigor while remaining grounded in empirical evidence and offering meaningful input for policy. However, the field frequently faces challenges in demonstrating clear connections between normative analysis, empirical and policy research. The Structural Disconnect The challenge is partly due to the…
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Bring Back Shame: Does the Ethical Value of Shame Justify Shaming?
Undergraduate Highly Commended paper in the 2025 National Uehiro Oxford Essay Prize in Practical Ethics. By Nicole Chinenyenwa Oboko. I have always been told that if a person has nothing nice to say, they should say nothing at all. For most of my life, I’ve upheld this belief. A decent person, as part of a decent…