About Us
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.
Research Projects
Current Research Projects
Julian Savulescu’s Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award: Individual Responsibility and Healthcare.
Wellcome Trust 104848/Z/14/Z
This project addresses questions such as: What is moral responsibility and does it matter in healthcare? Should treatment decisions and the allocation of resources take into account whether patients are responsible for their condition? Is it the physician’s role to encourage patients to take responsibility for their health? Does addiction undermine responsibility?
See Hot Topics section for resources, podcasts etc, and Europe PMC for open access papers.
The Ethics of Genome Editing in Livestock
Wellcome Trust 208189/Z/17/Z
Genome editing in livestock (GEL) could potentially be used to mitigate urgent global problems of infectious disease, antimicrobial resistance, global warming, and animal suffering while also increasing agricultural productivity. Despite its imminence and potentially transformative potential, there has been minimal ethical debate about GEL. This project will provide the first in-depth philosophical analysis of GEL, focussing on four questions on which such research is most urgently needed: (1) How far do ethical concerns raised in relation to conventional genetic engineering using previous techniques carry over to GEL? (2) Are the arguments in favour of GEL best understood in terms of cost-benefit analysis, an obligation to 'arm ourselves for the future' or an obligation to correct past complicity in unethical agricultural practices? (3) How should duties to animals be understood in the context of GEL, and what is the relative importance of welfare, respect, and avoidance of commodification? (4) Would application of GEL to improve human and animal welfare entail complicity in maintaining unethical agricultural practices and if so, how could this complicity be reduced or offset? I will then investigate how my findings bear on how GEL should be regulated, and on related areas of public policy.
Protecting Minds: The Right to Mental Integrity and the Ethics of Arational Influence
PI: Tom Douglas
European Research Council Consolidator Award of €1,960,264 for a 5-year project commencing January 2020.
Link to project webpage on ERC website.
About the project: Unlike most traditional forms of behavioural influence, such as rational persuasion, incentivisation and coercion, many novel forms of behavioural influence operate at a subrational level, bypassing the targeted individual's capacity to respond to reasons. Examples may include bottomless newsfeeds, randomised rewards, and other 'persuasive' technologies employed by online platforms and computer game designers. They also include biological interventions, such as the use of drugs, nutritional supplements or non-invasive brain stimulation to facilitate criminal rehabilitation.
The ethical acceptability of such arational influence depends crucially on whether we possess a moral right to mental integrity, and, if so, what kinds of mental interference it rules out. Unfortunately, these questions are yet to be answered. Though the right to bodily integrity is well-established, the possibility of a right to mental integrity has attracted little philosophical scrutiny.
The purposes of this project are to (1) determine whether and how a moral right to mental integrity can be established; (2) develop a comprehensive and fine-grained account of its scope, weight, and robustness, and (3) determine what forms of arational influence infringe it, and whether and when these might nevertheless be justified. The analysis will yield guidance on controversial forms of arational influence including persuasive digital technologies, salience-based nudges, treatments for childhood behavioural disorders, and biological interventions in criminal rehabilitation.
In this highly competitive funding round, approximately 12% of the 2,389 research proposals received by the ERC were successful.
Past Projects
Wellcome Trust 100705/Z/12/Z
See grant outputs on Europe PMC.
Interventions that act directly on the brain, or ‘neurointerventions’, are increasingly being used or advocated for crime prevention. For instance, drugs that attenuate sexual desire are sometimes used to prevent recidivism in sex offenders, while drug-based treatments for substance abuse have been used to reduce addiction-related offending. Recent scientific developments suggest that the range of neurointerventions capable of preventing criminal offending may eventually expand to include, for example, drugs capable of reducing aggression or enhancing empathy.
In this Wellcome Trust-funded project, we are investigating ethical questions raised by the use of such interventions to prevent criminal offending, focusing particularly on cases where they are imposed on convicted offenders as part of a criminal sentence or as a condition of parole. On the one hand, there seems to be at least some reason to support the use of neurointerventions in this way, since there is a clear need for new means of preventing crime. Traditional means of crime prevention, such as incarceration, are frequently ineffective and can have serious negative side-effects; neurointervention may increasingly seem, and sometimes be, a more effective and humane alternative. On the other hand, neurointerventions can be highly intrusive and may threaten fundamental human values, such as bodily integrity and freedom of thought. In addition, humanity has a track record of misguided and unwarrantedly coercive use of psychosurgery and other neurotechnological 'solutions' to criminality.
We are deploying philosophical methods and recent thinking on autonomy, coercion, mental integrity and moral liability to answer two over-arching questions:
- When, if ever, may the state force neurointerventions on criminal offenders?
- When, if ever, may the state offer neurointerventions to criminal offenders?
We plan also to examine how our answers to these questions bear on the use of neurointerventions to prevent offending in individuals who have not previously offended, but are thought to be at high risk of doing so. This project is led by Dr Thomas Douglas, and is assisted by Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Jonathan Pugh.
Project website: https://ebip-oxford.org/
PI: Dr Jonathan Pugh
Wellcome Trust 203195/Z/16/Z
See grant outputs on EuropePMC.
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a neurosurgical procedure that has been used to ameliorate motor symptoms associated with neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease. Following its success in this regard, DBS has been increasingly considered as a treatment for psychiatric disorders including obsessive-compulsive-disorder,depression, anorexia nervosa, schizophrenia, and addiction. As well as promising beneficial treatment outcomes, the use of DBS in psychiatry might also provide researchers with insights into the neurological mechanisms underlying psychiatric disorders. Although this is an important development, the use of DBS in psychiatry raises ethical issues that are distinct from those raised by its use in the treatment of non-psychiatric neurological conditions, due to the diminished decision-making competence amongst many psychiatric patients, and the effects that psychiatric disorders often have on the patient’s self-conception and values, effects that DBS may exacerbate. The disturbing historical abuses of neurosurgery in psychiatry also suggest that it is imperative to develop adequate ethical guidelines for the use of DBS in this context.
In this Wellcome Trust funded project, I aim to provide a comprehensive study of the ethics of novel therapeutic applications of DBS, and to develop policy recommendations and ethical guidelines for its use. I seek to address the ethical issues alluded to above by focusing on questions pertaining to the following interrelated four core themes:
Authenticity and Personal Identity
The Significance Of Consent and Weighing Risks
The Research Ethics Paradigm
Distributive Justice and Resource Allocation
PI: Professor Dominic Wilkinson
Wellcome Trust 106587/Z/14/Z
See grant outputs in Europe PMC.
I will examine the controversial questions that arise in the care of seriously ill infants whose lives might be saved, but only at great expense. Public health systems can’t provide every treatment that parents might want for their child and I will ask if there is a way to fairly decide which infants should be treated.
I will draw on both medical ethics and medical science and address questions that doctors in newborn intensive care units (NICU) face regularly, such as how expensive is too expensive, how effective does a treatment need to be to justify the cost of treatment, should intensive care treatment be assessed on the same basis as new medicines, and how society should deal with conflicts between parents and doctors about providing treatment.
The project will aim to help NICU doctors think clearly about the ethical questions involved in rationing treatment, both in wealthy countries and low-income countries. It will provide guidelines for policies relating to costly treatment and for people who have to make these decisions.
Hosted by the Oxford Uehiro Centre between 2013 and 2016, The Oxford Loebel Lectures and Research Programme (OLLRP) presented and reviewed the best evidence of causal interaction between the biological, psychological, and social factors that contribute to mental illness, and philosophically analysed the conceptual relationships between them. Through a series of six Loebel lectures held over three years, excellent research, and clinical impact, the programme aimed to lay the ground work for a unified theoretical basis for psychiatric practice. Free resources on OLLRP webpages.
Funded by Wellcome Trust, 086041/Z/08/Z
See grant outputs on Europe PMC.
Established in January 2009, The Oxford Centre for Neuroethics (hosted by the Uehiro Centre) aimed to address concerns about the effects neuroscience and neurotechnologies will have on various aspects of human life. Its research focussed on five key areas: cognitive enhancement; borderline consciousness and severe neurological impairment; free will, responsibility and addiction; the neuroscience of morality and decision making; applied neuroethics. Free resouces on OCN webpages.
Science and Religious Conflict: The past decade has seen an explosion in empirical work on moral reasoning. We are coming to understand how people's moral judgments are shaped by interactions with others in their society. There are good reasons for thinking that people's moral judgements are mostly intuitive (recent empirical work by Jonathan Haidt and his collaborators supports this view) and that people's intuitions are powerfully shaped by the institutions around them, including religious institutions. Free resources on project webpages.
Science in the 21st Century may radically and profoundly change human life. Without practical ethics, our knowledge of what we can do will radically outstrip our understanding of what we should do. The Institute for Science and Ethics was established in June 2005 with funding from the Oxford Martin School. It was based within the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Philosophy and directed by Professor Julian Savulescu. The project's multidisciplinary team included experts in medicine, philosophy, practical ethics, sociology and psychology. More information and resources on project webpage.
The interdisciplinary research project Intuition and Emotion in Moral Decision Making: Empirical Research and Normative Implications, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, aimed to elucidate the role of emotion and intuition in moral decision-making from an empirical, historical, and philosophical perspective. The project funded an international conference 'Normative Significance of Cognitive Science' (further details and audio files below).
Venue: St Hugh's College, University of Oxford
Dates: 17-18 July, 2012 (1.5 days)
Speakers:
Kwame Anthony Appiah (Princeton University)
Stephen Darwall (Yale University)
Antti Kauppinen (Trinity College Dublin)
Regina Rini (University of Oxford)
Maureen Sie (Erasmus University)
Alex Voorhoeve (London School of Economics)
Liane Young (Boston College)
What is the relationship between normative ethics and scientific research on moral judgment and decision-making? What potential is there for drawing ethical implications from such empirical investigations? While questions in this area have received considerable attention lately, the discussion so far has been largely dominated by two opposing scepticisms: scepticism about the relevance of empirical research to ethics, and scepticism about the value of ‘traditional’ moral theory. This workshop aims to go beyond such outright scepticism by investigating different ways in which empirical research might impact on normative ethics. The focus will be on philosophical reflection, whether critical or constructive, rather than on simply showcasing the latest scientific research.
Hosted by the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University.
Audio files:
- Maureen Sie (Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam) “Science, Responsibility & The Traffic Participation View on Human Agency”
- Alex Voorhoeve (London School of Economics) “When Can('t) We Trust Our Moral Intuitions in Distributive Cases?”
- Kwame Anthony Appiah (Princeton University) “Accepting our natures. When should we accept the ways people tend to behave; when should we aim to change them?”
- Liane Young (Boston College) “When the mind matters for morality”
- Stephen Darwall (Yale University) “Experimental Evidence for Morality As Accountability”
Principal Investigators: Julian Savulescu, Guy Kahane, Nadira Faber, Andreas Kappes
A Uehiro Centre research project, in collaboration with the Department of Experimental Psychology, and funded by the Wellcome Trust (ISSF).
Our lives are fraught with uncertainty. How people learn about uncertainty in their decision-making has become a central part of research in neuroscience. Yet, a substantial number of people’s decisions not only affects them, but also others. And little is known about how people learn about the effects of their actions on others. For research on altruism in psychology, neuroscience and philosophy, understanding how people learn about the outcomes of their actions for others is crucial. The results of this social learning process provide the foundations for people’s social decisions. For psychologists and neuroscientists, a better understanding of these foundations is essential if we want to know what motivates people to act altruistically and the underlying biology of prosocial decisions. For philosophers, normative theories of ethical behaviour need to integrate how outcome uncertainty should be integrated into people’s decision-making.
Investigator: Dr Josh Shepherd, Society & Ethics Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
Wellcome Grant 104347/Z/14/Z
Dr Shepherd's research goals were:
1. Develop an account of the value of consciousness that is sensitive to important distinctions between forms and levels of consciousness, as well as important philosophical and scientific work on the nature of consciousness.
2. Offer systematic analyses of the place of consciousness in our understanding of three ethical concepts: moral status, well-being, and morally responsible agency.
3. Apply understanding of the ethical significance of consciousness to emerging issues in biomedical research and ethics.
Open Access Grant Outputs
Chapters and Journal Articles: See list on Europe PMC.
Book: Shepherd, J., (2018), 'Consciousness and Moral Status', (Routledge) [NBK540410]
Collaborations
Current Collaborations
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.
We are involved in a collaborative project with Oxford Martin School's Programme on Mind and Machine. 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 will conduct research on manipulating the brain and its ethical implications.
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.
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.
Academic Visitor Programmes
Oxford Uehiro St Cross Visiting Programme
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.
Parfit Library
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