Why Preventing Predation Can Be a Morally Right Cause for Effective Altruism?
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. Continue reading
Ethical Biological Naturalism and the Case Against Moral Status for AIs
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.” Continue reading
Healthcare Allocation for Limited Budgets
By Joshua Parker and Ben Davies
Like many public services, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is under increasing resource pressure across the service. Acute services are under strain, with every stage between dialling 999 and getting into a hospital bed taking longer. Waiting times are also up for non-urgent care: 7 million people are on a waiting list in England, while General Practitioners (GPs, the UK’s primary care physicians) are exceeding safety limits and still not managing to meet demand. These measures are only proxies; the underlying concern is that failures in these metrics betray failures of quality and safety.
In part this is due to chronic under-investment made worse by a range of factors: greater demand generated by Covid and lockdowns; increasing complexity with an ageing patient population; more medical ability due to developments in medical technologies; and staff shortages that are in part a result of the UK’s departure from the European Union. However, some may argue that the pressure is also a sign that the NHS is trying to do too much in straitened times, and perhaps even that the scope of what a health system is responsible for has been expanded too far.
Honesty and Public Health Communication: Part 2
Written by Rebecca Brown
This post is based on two recently accepted articles: Brown and de Barra ‘A Taxonomy of Non-Honesty in Public Health Communication’, and de Barra and Brown ‘Public Health Communication Should be More Transparent’.
In a previous post, I discussed some of the requirements for public health institutions to count as ‘honest’. I now want to follow that up to discuss some of the ways in which public health communication seems to fall short of honesty. 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.
Who Gets to Be a Person?
Written by Muriel Leuenberger
The question of who gets to be a person is one of those old but never outdated classics in philosophy. Throughout history, philosophers have discussed which human beings are persons, when human beings start to be persons, when they are no longer the same person, and whether non-human beings can be persons – and the discussion continues.
The task of defining the concept of a person can be approached from a purely ontological angle, by looking at what kind of entities exist in the world. There are those beings we want to call persons – what unites them and what separates them from non-persons? This ontological project has, at least at first sight, nothing to do with how the world should be and purely with how it is.
But many moral practices are connected to this concept. Persons deserve praise and blame, they should not be experimented on without their consent, they can make promises, they should be respected. The status of personhood is connected to a moral status. Because of the properties persons have they deserve to be treated and can act in a certain way. Personhood is what can be called a thick concept. It combines descriptive and normative dimensions. To be a person one must meet certain descriptive conditions. But being a person also comes with a distinctive moral status.
Affiliations
Recent Comments