About Us
In 2002 the Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education, chaired by Mr Eiji Uehiro, established the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford. The following year, the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics was created within the Philosophy Faculty. Generous support by the Uehiro Foundation enabled the establishment of an annual series of three lectures, The Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics.
The goal of the Centre is to encourage and support debate and deeper rational reflection on practical ethics. The Centre as a whole will not promote a particular philosophy, approach, solution or point of view, though its individual members may give an argument to a substantive conclusion as a basis for dialogue, engagement and reflection. It is the method of rational analytic practical ethics that we aim to advance. The vision is Socratic, not missionary. We seek to be inclusive, encouraging debate between different approaches to ethics, aiming to resolve disagreements and identifying key areas of consensus.
Practical ethics should not only advance knowledge by deeper, rational ethical reflection and dialogue, it should change people’s hearts and so better their own lives and the lives of others.
Humanity has flourished and transformed its planet, creating ever more powerful technology with unprecedented potential for great immediate benefit but also for ultimate harm. Its success creates novel problems and challenges, for which its traditional institutions and norms were not developed: climate change, environmental destruction, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, global inequality and poverty, inter-continental migration and multiculturalism, overuse of antibiotics and the world-wide spread of infectious disease, genetic engineering, and biomedical means of life extension and cognitive and moral enhancement, and artificial intelligence. The fate of humanity in the 21st Century and following centuries will to a greater extent than ever before be determined by the choices made by human beings, the leaders and citizens of nations. It is the values, principles and wider ethics of these people that will determine their choices. We aim to enable practical ethics to develop and more effectively guide human choice.
Current Collaborations
Horizon 2020 Funded Project: High-density cortical implants for cognitive neuroscience and rehabilitation of speech using brain-computer interfaces (#732032)
BrainCom will develop a new generation of cortical implants for speech neural prostheses applications
BrainCom is a Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Proactive project, funded by the European Commission with 8.35M€ for the next 5 years (Dec 2016 - Nov 2021)
Taking advantage of unique properties of novel nanomaterials such as graphene, 2D materials and organic semiconductors, BrainCom proposes a radically new technology of ultra-flexible cortical implants enabling stimulation and neural activity decoding over large brain areas with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution.
The results in BrainCom will permit significant advances in the understanding of the dynamics and neural information processing in cortical speech networks and the development of speech rehabilitation solutions using innovative brain-computer interfaces.
BrainCom is coordinated from ICN2 by ICREA Prof. Jose A. Garrido, Group Leader at ICN2 and deputy leader of the Graphene Flagship Biomedical Technologies Work Package.
OUCs Drs Hannah Maslen and Stephen Rainey are leading the work package on 'Ethics, Implants and Society'.
Further details here.
The Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities is based at the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute. It is a collaboration between the Ethox Centre, the Oxford Neuroscience, Ethics and Society Group, the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and the Wellcome Unit for History of Medicine. The Centre will conduct research on the challenges to ethics and the humanities presented by advances in neuroscience, big data, genomics and global connectedness and their convergence. The establishment of the new Centre responds to a pressing need for a robust and flexible multidisciplinary research platform in the ethics and related humanities capable of engaging successfully with new and profoundly difficult ethical and social challenges presented by the form, scale, scope and societal implications of these developments. Engaging successfully with such challenges requires a paradigm shift and a change of scale in approaches to ethics and the humanities more generally. The Centre will establish a robust research infrastructure to enable multi- disciplinary teams of medical scientists, bioethicists and researchers in the humanities and social sciences to engage with the complex ethical problems presented by developments in neuroscience, big data, genomics, and global connectedness. Through its research and engagement activities, the Centre aims to lead debate on the ethical requirements for 21st Century scientific research capable both of improving health and of commanding public trust and confidence. The Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities is funded by a Wellcome Centre Grant (203132). See all available grant outputs/resources on PMC.
Project Global Terrorism and Collective Moral Responsibility: Redesigning Military, Police and Intelligence Institutions in Liberal Democracies
Researcher (PI) Seumas Miller
Collective moral responsibility: International terrorism, such as Al Qaeda, and ISIS, is a major global security threat. Counter-terrorism is a morally complex enterprise involving police, military, intelligence agencies and non-security agencies. Counter-terrorism should be framed as a collective moral responsibility of governments, security institutions and citizens.
Research questions: Miller’s research focuses on the following research questions: how is international terrorism to be conceptually demarcated? What is the required theoretical notion of collective moral responsibility? What counter-terrorist strategies and tactics are effective, morally acceptable and consistent with liberal democracy? How is this inchoate collective moral responsibility to be institutionally embedded in security agencies?
More information here: https://erc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/content/AdG2014_GTCMR_1.pdf
Host Institution (HI) TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITEIT DELFT
The Oxford Martin Programme on Collective Responsibility for Infectious Disease: Bringing together zoology, history, philosophy, psychology and medicine, our four-year project addresses the central research question: What is the role of collective responsibility in the genesis of and appropriate response to the threat of infectious disease? Our principal aim is to generate disease-specific policy recommendations for collective action on influenza, malaria, antibiotic resistance and vaccine-preventable childhood infections.
The Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics is affiliated with two charities, Giving What We Can and 80, 000 Hours. The Centre strongly supports the vision and aims of these two charities. However, the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics does not have any financial or administrative responsibility or oversight for these charities which are run by staff and student volunteers working independently.
Past Collaborations
The Institute for Science & Ethics participated in a £1.3m research project on Climate Geoengineering Governance funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The work was led from the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, (InSIS), University of Oxford, and also involved the Science and Technology Policy Research (SPRU) at the University of Sussex and the Faculty of Laws at University College London (UCL). The project aimed to provide a timely basis for the governance of geoengineering through robust research on the ethical, legal, social and geopolitical implications of a range of geoengineering approaches.
Jointly with TU Delft University we were involved in an NWO funded project Enhancing Responsibility: the effects of cognitive enhancement on moral and legal responsibility . Might some professionals – e.g. surgeons, pilots and soldiers – have a responsibility to cognitively enhance themselves, and once enhanced might they acquire greater responsibilities? The project aims to shed new light on the relationship between responsibility and mental capacity, and help professional associations, law makers, regulators and judges develop appropriate principles
We were involved in a collaborative project with Oxford Martin School's Programme on Mind and Machine (2011-2018). A key challenge for 21st century biology is to understand how the limited biophysical repertoire of individual neurons in the human brain gives rise to behaviour.The Programme on Mind and Machine conducted research on manipulating the brain and its ethical implications and the research continues as part of the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour (CNCB).
This Visiting Programme has been established by the Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education with a view to providing opportunities for graduate students, postdoctoral and senior academics who are ordinarily resident in Japan to study or conduct research at the University of Oxford for nine or twelve months as a Visiting Scholar. The award is available in the field of practical ethics. A successful graduate student candidate will normally be supervised by Professor Julian Savulescu and academic staff at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and a successful postdoctoral or senior academic candidate will conduct their own relevant research at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. Successful candidates in either case will reside at St Cross College enabling him/her to benefit from the true Oxford college experience. The Visiting Programme aims to provide career development opportunities for those who are at a relatively early stage of their academic careers.
We are honoured to have been entrusted with Derek Parfit’s Library by his wife, Professor Janet Radcliffe Richards. We are currently preparing the collection to be made available as a standalone library that will be a resource for Parfit scholars for generations to come. We would like to thank Professor Radcliffe Richards on behalf of the University for her generosity.
Further information on the Library, its launch, and how to access the collection will follow.
Derek Parfit 1942-2017
Derek Parfit was one of the founders of practical ethics as a discipline. His books, Reasons and Persons, and On What Matters, are the leading texts of the field.
We were privileged and were enormously grateful to receive advice and support from Derek throughout the Centre’s life. Even more so, we were privileged to be working in Oxford alongside him. His memory and his work will live on for generations.
For many of us at the Centre, Derek was not only an inspirational colleague, but also a teacher, mentor, and most importantly, friend. He will be greatly missed throughout Oxford, and far beyond in the international philosophical community, many of whom gathered in June for a celebration of his life and work.
Memorial Service: Speeches from Derek Parfit’s memorial service can be viewed here.
Members of the Centre discuss Derek’s impact on practical ethics in a new weekly series on our YouTube channel. See playlist below.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=PLrZLXu5hwoDOvCcvfl8hIH_TU8WE6gmT5
