Uehiro Oxford Institute

Mar 28 2024 136 ep. 48 mins 3.4k
Uehiro Oxford Institute Podcast artwork

A selection of seminars and special lectures on wide-ranging topics relating to practical ethics brought to you by the Uehiro Oxford Institute.

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The Vagueness of Demandingness Objections

Mar 28 2024 38 mins  
A St Cross Special Ethics Seminar, recorded at St Cross College, Oxford in February 2024. Demandingness objections have become a stock argument in ethics claiming that single moral demands or entire moral theories must be given up or altered if they ask too much of agents. But can we clearly distinguish an acceptable level of demandingness from one that is too high? I argue that de

Morality and Personality

Nov 09 2023 45 mins  
Professor Predrag uses a comparison of money and morality to explore the mutual relationship between morality and personality. To clarify the tension that exists between morality and personality, Cicovacki opens his talk by comparing the development of the money economy and morality. Money and morality play a similar function with respect to social interactions: they make most dive

Is AI bad for democracy? Analyzing AI’s impact on epistemic agency

Mar 13 2023 30 mins  
Professor Mark Coeckelbergh considers whether AI poses a risk for democracy n this St Cross Special Ethics Seminar Cases such as Cambridge Analytica or the use of AI by the Chinese government suggest that the use of artificial intelligence (AI) creates some risks for democracy. This paper analyzes these risks by using the concept of epistemic agency and argues that the use of AI ri

Shallow Cognizing for Self-Control over Emotion & Desire

Feb 02 2023 45 mins  
In the first St Cross Special Ethics Seminar of 2023, Dr Larry Lengbeyer explores 'shallow cognizing' as a form of self-control Shallow cognizing is a familiar but overlooked practice of self-control, typically initiated without conscious intention, that enables us to short-circuit potential upwellings of emotion and desire in ourselves. We will consider the range of contexts in wh

The Moral Machine Experiment

Nov 09 2022 49 mins  
In this St Cross Special Ethics Seminar, Dr Edmond Awad discusses his project, the Moral Machine, an internet-based game exploring the ethical dilemmas faced by driverless cars. I describe the Moral Machine, an internet-based serious game exploring the many-dimensional ethical dilemmas faced by autonomous vehicles. The game enabled us to gather 40 million decisions from 3 million p

Hope in Healthcare

Jun 20 2022 48 mins  
In this St Cross Special Ethics Seminar, Professor Stephen Clarke the role of hope in patients undergoing major healthcare procedures, and how it relates to decision-making in situations of risk and uncertainty. It is widely supposed that it is important to imbue patients undergoing medical procedures with a sense of hope. But why is hope so important in healthcare, if indeed it is

Against Legalizing Female 'Circumcision' of Minors

May 16 2022 67 mins  
In this St Cross Special Ethics Seminar, Dr Brian Earp argues that all medically unnecessary genital cutting of non-consenting persons should be opposed on moral and legal grounds. Defenders of male circumcision increasingly argue that female ‘circumcision’ (ritual cutting of the clitoral hood or labia) should be legally allowed in Western liberal democracies even when non-cons

Vaccine policies and challenge trials: the ethics of relative risk in public health

Nov 24 2021 53 mins  
In this St Cross Special Ethics Seminar, Dr Sarah Chan outlines some risks arising from the deliberate infection of human participants to infectious agents for research purposes In this St Cross Special Ethics Seminar, Dr Sarah Chan explores three key areas of risk in ‘challenge trials’ – the deliberate infection of human participants to infectious agents as a tool for vaccin

Do We Need Mental Privacy? The Ethics of Mind Reading Reloaded

Nov 22 2021 35 mins  
Marcello Ienca discusses moral and legal issues surrounding the decoding – ‘mind reading’ - of brain activity In the 1990s, following rapid advances in the use of technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), an ethical debate arose around the concept of 'mind reading': the possibility of decoding a person's mental states (including their conscious experi

Waiver or understanding? A dilemma for autonomists about informed consent

Jun 08 2021 44 mins  
Professor Gopal Sreenivasan delivers a New St Cross Special Ethics Seminar on the topic of Informed Consent. This talk develops a novel argument to show that prospective research subjects can validly consent to participate in a study without understanding (most of) the content of the required disclosure. Its point of departure is the right subjects standardly have to waive (most of