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Announcement: Finalists of the 7th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics and Final Presentation

Announcement: Finalists of the 7th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics and Final Presentation

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Please join us in congratulating all of the finalists in the 7th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics.

The 7th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics Final Presentation

 

HT21 Week 8, Wednesday 10th March, 5pm – 6:30 pm.

The Presentation will be held via zoom webinar, the registration details of which are below.Read More »Announcement: Finalists of the 7th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics and Final Presentation

Priority Vaccination for Prison and Homeless Populations

Written by Ben Davies

Last week brought the news that an additional 1.7m people in the UK had been asked to take additional ‘shielding’ measures against COVID-19, following new modelling which considered previously ignored factors such as ethnicity, weight and deprivation. Since many of this group have not yet been vaccinated, they were bumped up the priority list for vaccine access, moving into group 4 of the government’s vaccine plan.

Two other groups, however, have not yet been incorporated into this plan despite appeals from some quarters that they should be. First, new figures reinforced the sense that the virus is disproportionately affecting prisoners, with one in eight of the prison population having had COVID-19, compared with roughly one in twenty in the wider population (in the United States, the prison figure has been estimated to be one in five).

Second, some GP groups and local councils have offered priority vaccination to homeless residents, despite their not officially qualifying for prioritisation on the government’s plan. There have also been calls for the government to incorporate this into national plans, rather than being left to more local decision-making.

Read More »Priority Vaccination for Prison and Homeless Populations

Video Series: How To Prevent Future Pandemics

First interview in the new  Thinking Out Loud series on ‘Animals and Pandemics’: Katrien Devolder in conversation with Jeff Sebo, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU, on how our treatment of animals increases the risk of future pandemics arising, and on what we should do to reduce that risk!

Crosspost: Is It Ethical To Quarantine People In Hotel Rooms?

Written by

Dominic Wilkinson and Jonathan Pugh,

 

The UK government announced that from February 15, British and Irish residents travelling to England from “red list” countries will have to quarantine in a government-sanctioned hotel for ten days, at a personal cost of £1,750. Accommodation must be booked in advance, and people will need to have two COVID tests during the quarantine period.

Failing to quarantine in a designated hotel carries a fine of up to £10,000, and those who lie about visiting a red list country could face a ten-year prison sentence.

Other countries have already implemented mandatory hotel quarantines for travellers, including Australia, New Zealand, China and India. When are such quarantines ethical? And who should pay for them if they are?

Read More »Crosspost: Is It Ethical To Quarantine People In Hotel Rooms?

Cross Post: Not Recommending AstraZeneca Vaccine For The Elderly Risks The Lives Of The Most Vulnerable

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Jonathan Pugh, University of Oxford and Julian Savulescu, University of Oxford

Regulators in Europe are at odds over whether the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine should be given to the elderly. In the UK, the vaccine has been approved for use in adults aged 18 and up, but France, Germany, Sweden and Austria say the vaccine should be prioritised for those under the age of 65. Poland only recommends it for those younger than 60. Italy goes one step further and only recommends it for those 55 and younger.

It is only ethical to approve a vaccine if it is safe and effective. Crucially, the reluctance to approve the AstraZeneca vaccine in the elderly is grounded only in concerns about its efficacy.

The concern is not that there is data showing the vaccine to be ineffective in the elderly, it’s that there is not enough evidence to show that it is effective in this age group. The challenge is in how we manage the degree of uncertainty in the efficacy of the vaccine, given the available evidence.Read More »Cross Post: Not Recommending AstraZeneca Vaccine For The Elderly Risks The Lives Of The Most Vulnerable

Ethics of the GameStop Short Squeeze

By Doug McConnell

Recently a large, loosely coordinated group of individual ‘retail investors’ have been buying up stocks that certain hedge funds had bet against (i.e. ‘shorted’). In doing so, the retail investors have driven up the price of those stocks. This has caused hedge funds that shorted the stock to lose billions of dollars and enabled a number of retail investors to get rich in the process. The phenomenon is anthropologically interesting because it is symbolic of a shift in power away from the traditional Wall Street players towards less wealthy, less well-connected individuals. But what are the ethics of this? Did Average Joe Trader just bring a measure of justice to Wall Street? Or did the mob unethically manipulate the market? If they did, are their actions any more unethical than the usual behaviour of institutional investors?Read More »Ethics of the GameStop Short Squeeze

Guest Post: What Is The Case For Virtual Schooling?

Written by Thomas Moller-Nielsen

News that children in England were to switch to online schooling as part of the country’s third national lockdown in response to the Covid-19 global pandemic was met with widespread support in the British press. Doctors, public health specialists, and even teaching unions similarly applauded the decision. (Nurseries, which have remained open during the latest lockdown period, have also been put under heavy pressure to close.)

The justification for the suspension of in-person schooling during this pandemic, however, is far from obvious. Indeed, there are at least two prima facie plausible reasons for scepticism. Firstly, children are far less susceptible to serious infection or death from Covid-19 than adults are. (While the precise figures are open to dispute, the Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit at the University of Cambridge has estimated that the infection-fatality rate for 5-14 year-olds in England is 0.0013% – which is roughly 24 times smaller than the infection fatality rate for 25-44 year-olds, and approximately 9000 times smaller than the infection-fatality rate for 75+ year-olds.) Secondly, virtual schooling – in addition to being a poor substitute for in-person schooling – is widely recognized to be a key contributing factor in students’ increased feelings of stress, depression, and anxiety during the pandemic, and has been similarly linked to many physical paediatric disorders such as juvenile hypertension and obesity.

In other words, it seems that: (i) children are not in serious danger of being (directly) harmed by Covid-19; and (ii) children are in very real danger of being harmed by online schooling. Why, then, should students be required to attend virtual school?Read More »Guest Post: What Is The Case For Virtual Schooling?

The UK Should Share The Vaccine With The Other Countries – But Only After All The Vulnerable Have Been Vaccinated

Written by Alberto Giubilini, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford

Cross posted with The Conversation

“We are all in this together”, except that we are not. One of the most widely used slogans of the pandemic might need to be adjusted. Maybe: “We are all in this together, until there is a way out.”

The way out is the COVID-19 vaccine. Or more precisely, the many COVID-19 vaccines. The UK has already approved three, with two more pending a decision by the drugs regulator.

Of these, one has been developed in the UK by the University of Oxford, with millions of pounds of funding from the UK government (aka, UK taxpayers), and made by the British/Swedish company AstraZeneca. Part of its manufacturing is in Europe, where Belgian plants have had production problems that have threatened the future supply to the EU.

Three vaccines are produced by US pharmaceutical companies (Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax), although the Pfizer vaccine has been developed in partnership with the German biotechnology company BioNTech, and the Novavax one is being made in the UK. One vaccine is made by Janssen, based in Belgium but owned by the American firm, Johnson & Johnson.

These geographical details might seem superfluous, but they are already making post-Brexit vaccine distribution more complicated than it should be. In the meantime, the World Health Organization has expressed concerns over the fading commitment to Covax, the programme set up to guarantee equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines around the world.

This is the moment countries part ways in their fight against COVID-19. We are no longer in this together. That is because we never chose to be in it together. We just happened to find ourselves in a pandemic that didn’t spare anyone. Now that we do have some choice, each country is taking care of their own first.Read More »The UK Should Share The Vaccine With The Other Countries – But Only After All The Vulnerable Have Been Vaccinated

Reminder: 7th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics – Entries Due By Tuesday 9th February

A reminder that the closing date for entries to the 7th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics is fast approaching. Graduate and undergraduate students currently enrolled at the University of Oxford in any subject are invited to enter the Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics by submitting an essay of up to 2000 words on any topic relevant to practical ethics.  Eligibility includes visiting students who are registered as recognized students, and paying fees, but does not include informal visitors.  Two undergraduate papers and two graduate papers will be shortlisted from those submitted to go forward to an online public presentation and discussion, where the winner of each category will be selected.

The winner from each category will receive £300, and the runner up £100. Revised versions of the two winning essays will be considered for publication in the Journal of Practical Ethics, though publication is not guaranteed.

To enter, please submit your written papers by the end of Tuesday 9th February 2021 to rocci.wilkinson@philosophy.ox.ac.uk. Finalists will be notified on Tuesday 23rd February of selection. The online public presentation will take place in 8th Week, Hilary term 2021, on Wednesday 10th March, from 5pm. Please save this presentation date, as you will need to attend if selected as a finalist. Read More »Reminder: 7th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics – Entries Due By Tuesday 9th February

The Ethics of Age-Selective Restrictions for COVID-19 Control

Written by: Bridget Williams1,2, James Cameron3, James Trauer2, Ben Marais4, Romain Ragonnet2, Julian Savulescu1,3

Cross-posted with the Journal of Medical Ethics blog

One of the major controversies of the COVID-19 pandemic has been disagreement about whether age-selective measures should be introduced, with greater focus on preventing infection in older people but tolerance of some transmission amongst younger people. Some have advocated a path of focusing efforts on protecting those most vulnerable and tolerating transmission in younger people. Others have argued for minimising community transmission. This debate involves important empirical uncertainties; including the feasibility of effectively isolating older people and the consequences of allowing infection in a large number of younger people, as well as the feasibility and consequences of alternative measures such as strict border control and quarantine. It also raises ethical considerations, including whether introducing age-selective restrictions is unjust, and whether it is acceptable for a policy to tolerate foreseeable harms.

Here we address these ethical questions and suggest that, although the appropriateness of age-selective approaches requires further consideration of the empirical evidence, ethical concerns should not prevent its consideration as a policy option.

Read More »The Ethics of Age-Selective Restrictions for COVID-19 Control