A new branch of outreach from the Uehiro Centre By Joanna Demaree-Cotton From this summer, a number of our academics and graduate students will be swapping their offices and lecture halls to teach in a different kind of venue: UK prisons. Philosophy In Prison is a wonderful, small, UK-based charity. Run by philosophers, they organise… Read More »Philosophy in Prison
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
by Neil Levy Doomsayers have always been with us. Equally, predictions of doom have always failed to materialise. Apocalyptic cults have been a recurrent feature of American society, in particular. Some have given specific dates for the destruction of the world, which the faithful would survive through preparation and prayer. The failures of the prophesied… Read More »Dreaming of the End of the World
In March, we were delighted to have the finalists of our annual Practical Ethics and Responsibility Competition (PERC) arrive in Oxford for a day of ethics and debate. Our four teams were from The Royal Latin School, The Laurels School, and Westminster. They earned their place at the Schools Day through their winning video entries… Read More »Practical Ethics Schools Day 2024
by Dominic Wilkinson In an interesting legal case earlier this year, the court held an emergency hearing about the medical care of a 16 year old, recently diagnosed with acute leukaemia. The hearing, conducted remotely in the middle of the night, was to decide whether she should have medical treatment imposed against her wishes. Should an “intelligent… Read More »Quasi-Refusal and Teens
written by Neil Levy and Keith Raymond Harris There’s a lot of debate over the harms of misinformation today: whether it is more prevalent now than in the past, how often it misleads people, whether people act on misleading misinformation, and on whether the costs of content moderation or algorithmic depriorisation mightn’t be higher than… Read More »Truthful Misinformation
In a recent paper I published with my colleagues Lavinia Marin (TU Delft) and Constantin Vica (University of Bucharest), titled “Digital Slot Machines: Social Media Platforms as Attentional Scaffolds” we take a step back from AI and return to an older problem in digital ethics, that despite its urgency, is often overlooked: the impact of… Read More »Social Media Platforms as Digital Slot Machines
This is the third in a series of blogposts by the members of the Expanding Autonomy project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Written By: Oscar A. Piedrahita & Matthew Vermaire, COGITO, University of Glasgow.
Don’t you find that other people’s beliefs are always getting in the way of progress? They seem to be full of bad views about everything from geopolitics to zoning laws to the most bizarre conspiracy theories; and what’s worse is that they seem often perversely immune to rational methods of persuasion, bristling with a panoply of biases. It’s a free country and everyone’s entitled to their opinions. Wouldn’t it be nice, though, if—without having to resort to positively illiberal measures of censorship and forced re-education—we could get those opinions to be a little more tolerable? What if the secret is all in the way in which evidence and potential beliefs are presented to people, so that with more carefully calibrated interventions we could exert a noncoercive but significant influence toward the truth?Read More »Cross Post: Nudging for Better Beliefs
This is the second in a series of blogposts by the members of the Expanding Autonomy project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
by Neil Levy
As Adam Carter emphasises in the first post in this series, offloading cognitive capacities comes at a cost: the more we depend on external scaffolding and supports to perform a certain task, the less we develop the internal capacities to perform that task. The phenomenon is familiar: people probably really are much less able to do mental arithmetic today than in the past, thanks to the introduction of the calculator. We tend to think of new technologies when we worry about what we lose as a consequence of scaffolding, but the concern is ancient. In the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates approvingly recounting the story of an Egyptian king who worried that the invention of writing “will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it, through lack of practice at using their memory.”Read More »Outsourcing Without Fear?
by Roger Crisp
On 2 November 2023, at one of the most well-attended (in-person and remotely) New St Cross Ethics seminars to date, Professor Predrag Cicovacki, Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, USA presented a fascinating lecture on ‘Morality and Personality’.
