Written by Daniel Villiger Do I want to have children? This is one of the big life decisions. If I choose to have a child and am successful, I will become a parent and will experience the ups and downs, the advantages and disadvantages of being a parent. On the other hand, if I choose to remain childfree, I may miss out on all of these experiences; or I may be spared from them. So, how should I decide? Fortunately, decision theory provides a general guideline for making decisions rationally. We start by imagining what it would be like if we chose option A and assign a value to this state. Then ..read more

Written by Rebecca Brown Imagine going to a cafe for a drink and snack. At some point you need the loo – you go to the bathroom but discover the toilet seat is higher than your waist! Somehow you manage to clamber up, unfortunately touching parts of a toilet you would prefer you didn’t have to touch. When you’re finished, you jump down and go to wash your hands. But – disaster! – the sink is higher up than your head! You can’t even see into it, let alone reach the taps. You look around for something you could use to stand on and give you some extra height but there’s nothing. You eventually gi ..read more

Written by MSt student Mahdi Ghuloom Reports this year from May indicate that the college council of Trinity College Cambridge, has voted to divest from all arms companies (Mulla, 2024). Pressure has been rising from students on universities to conduct similar actions, often in a non-discriminatory set of demands. Some of course, have been focusing on the Gaza war recently, and have limited their calls for divestment only in so far as the arms companies are “complicit” in the war. However, this is beyond the discussion: I want to focus in this post on those calling for all arms companies to be ..read more

Written by Joseph Moore Earlier this year, Alex Ruck Keene KC (Hon) delivered a Practical Ethics and Law Lecture at the Uehiro Centre on the topic of consent and autonomy-based arguments in medical ethics and law, to which the Centre’s Esther Braun responded. In the course of this enlightening discussion (and in private conversation since), Braun proposed that it is misleading to think about assisted dying, in particular, primarily in terms of consent. Talk of ‘consent’ paradigmatically evokes a situation in which one person proposes a course of action to which another agrees and thereby rende ..read more

Written by Professor Cinara Nahra One of the most important issues that arises in relation to artificial intelligence is how to handle it, that is, how to make AI something that can be developed for the good of humanity and not to promote its destruction. This is directly linked to the problem of aligning artificial intelligence. In an informal way the alignment problem is frequently described as the problem of making AI do what we, humans, want. In order to explain the alignment problem Stuart Russel (Human compatible, 2019) offers an analogy with the well-known King Midas fable where Midas ..read more

Written by MSt in Practical Ethics student Dr Jeremy Gauntlett-Gilbert Human beings, as a species, love to tell stories and to imagine that there are person-like agents behind events. The Ancient Greeks saw the rivers and the winds as personalised deities, placating them if they appeared ‘angry’. Psychologists  in classic 1940s experiments were impressed at how participants could generate complex narratives about animations of small abstract shapes simply bumping into each other. This human tendency collided with technology in the 1960s. Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist, wrote soft ..read more

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 for volunteers, like us, to bring philosophy courses to prison populations. Their approach is to make philosophy accessible to anyone in prison, irrespective of educational background and literacy. I first taught in prison as part of the Yale Prison Education Init ..read more

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 destruction, followed by the subsequent renewal of religious fervor among many of the disappointed, formed the basis of Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance. Predictions of doom occur outside a religious context, to ..read more

by Alberto Giubilini,  Sally Frampton,  Tess Johnson,  Will Matlock  Originally published one the TORCH Medical Humanities website The conference Communication, Narratives and Antimicrobial Resistance took place on the 16th of May at Merton College, Oxford, as part of the TORCH Medical Humanities programme and with the generous contribution of the John Fell Fund and the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. The hybrid event (over 30 attendees in person and 100 online) explored the issue of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) , which typically is fra ..read more

We were honoured to welcome Professor Elizabeth Harman, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy and Human Values at Princeton University, to Oxford to deliver the 2024 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics. The three-part lecture series, entitled “Love and Abortion”, took place in the H B Allen Centre, Keble College, on 25 April, 2 and 9 May 2024. What does love teach us about abortion?  How does love challenge our ideas about abortion?  How can love explain the importance of abortion? The engaging lectures were very well received, and each was followed by thoughtfu ..read more