Video Series: Trailer for Interviews on Ethical Questions Raised by the Corona Crisis
Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: What, if Anything, is Wrong About Algorithmic Administration?
This essay received an honourable mention in the undergraduate category.
Written by University of Oxford student, Angelo Ryu.
Introduction
The scope of modern administration is vast. We expect the state to perform an ever-increasing number of tasks, including the provision of services and the regulation of economic activity. This requires the state to make a large number of decisions in a wide array of areas. Inevitably, the scale and complexity of such decisions stretch the capacity of good governance.
In response, policymakers have begun to implement systems capable of automated decision making. For example, certain jurisdictions within the United States use an automated system to advise on criminal sentences. Australia uses an automated system for parts of its welfare program.
Such systems, it is said, will help address the costs of modern administration. It is plausibly argued that automation will lead to quicker, efficient, and more consistent decisions – that it will ward off a return to the days of Dickens’ Bleak House.Read More »Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: What, if Anything, is Wrong About Algorithmic Administration?
Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: If Doctors Could Administer a Treatment That Would Move a Patient From a Vegetative State to a Minimally Conscious One, Should They Do So?
This essay was the runner up in the graduate category of the 6th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics.
Written by University of Oxford student Matthew Minehan.
INTRODUCTION
Sally is a healthy young woman who suffers catastrophic brain trauma. Over many months, her doctors subject her to functional Magnetic Resonance Imagining (fMRI) scans and other assessments that leave them in no doubt that she is in a vegetative state. While she shows sleeping and waking activity patterns, her body is operating on ‘automatic’ and she has no consciousness. She is “incognizant, incapacitated and insensate” (Fenwick 1998, p.86).
Sally’s doctors are aware of a new treatment that, if administered, would move her from the vegetative state to a minimally conscious one. This new state would involve fractured consciousness, a lack of awareness of her condition, an inability to direct her own life and an incapacity for complex thought. Because Sally has no known next of kin and issued no advance directive, the decision on her treatment is left to her medical team.
Should the doctors in this hypothetical scenario administer the treatment to Sally?Read More »Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: If Doctors Could Administer a Treatment That Would Move a Patient From a Vegetative State to a Minimally Conscious One, Should They Do So?
Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: Can it be Wrong For Victims to Report Crimes?
This essay was the winning entry in the graduate category of the 6th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics.
Written by University of Oxford student, Maya Krishnan.
Introduction
Late one night in Managua, Nicaragua, a man punched Leslie Jamison in the face and then ran away with her camera. Jamison called the police. Forty minutes later, a police truck pulled up with a man in the back. A sense of discomfort informs Jamison’s subsequent narration of the incident in her essay collection, The Empathy Exams (2014). Jamison found herself occupying a morally fraught role: that of a white American in Nicaragua who got the police to try to hunt down a likely significantly poorer man. Had she done something wrong by calling the police?Read More »Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: Can it be Wrong For Victims to Report Crimes?
Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: Can Science Ethically Make Use Of Data Which Was Gathered By Unethical Means?
This essay was the runner up in the undergraduate category of the 6th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Written by University of Oxford student Toby Lowther
In this paper, I discuss the question of whether science can ethically make use of data which has been gathered by unethical means in seeking scientific and medical advances to alleviate future suffering. This is an ever-controversial issue of practical ethics, and although the American Medical Assosciation provides firm guidelines on the matter (AMA, 1995), the ethical question remains complex. I will begin by laying out the core issue: the conflict between the desire to censure unethical practices used in gathering such data and the desire to use all data available to bring about the greatest good for society. I will present arguments either side, leading to an ethical stalemate, before presenting how issues of practical consideration for scientific methodology resolve the conflict. I conclude that science cannot make use of data gathered by unethical means, because such data cannot ethically be replicated, and reproducibility is necessary for the validity of the scientific method. I leave open the question of whether it is ethical for the findings of such unethical experiments to guide future, ethical research.Read More »Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: Can Science Ethically Make Use Of Data Which Was Gathered By Unethical Means?
Pandemic Ethics: Is it right to cut corners in the search for a coronavirus cure?
By Julian Savulescu Cross-posted from The Guardian The race is on to find a treatment for coronavirus. This race is split between two approaches: the trialling of pre-existing drugs used for similar diseases, and the hunt for a vaccine. In both instances, important ethical decisions must be made. Is it OK to reassign a treatment that… Read More »Pandemic Ethics: Is it right to cut corners in the search for a coronavirus cure?
Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: Why Is Virtual Wrongdoing Morally Disquieting, Insofar As It Is?
This essay was the winning entry in the undergraduate category of the 6th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics.
Written by University of Oxford student, Eric Sheng.
In the computer game Red Dead Redemption 2 (henceforward, RDR2), players control a character in a virtual world. Among the characters represented by computer graphics but not controlled by a real-world player are suffragettes. Controversy arose when it became known that some players used their characters to torture or kill suffragettes. (One player’s character, for example, feeds a suffragette to an alligator.) In this essay, I seek to explain the moral disquiet – the intuition that things are awry from the moral perspective – that the players’ actions (call them, for short, ‘assaulting suffragettes’) provoke. The explanation will be an exercise in ‘moral psychology, philosophical not psychological’:[1] I seek not to causally explain our disquiet through the science of human nature, but to explain why things are indeed awry, and thus justify our disquiet.
My intention in posing the question in this way is to leave open the possibilities that our disquiet is justified although the players’ actions are not wrong, or that it’s justified but not principally by the wrongness of the players’ actions. These possibilities are neglected by previous discussions of virtual wrongdoing that ask: is this or that kind of virtual wrongdoing wrong? Indeed, I argue that some common arguments for the wrongness of virtual wrongdoing do not succeed in explaining our disquiet, and sketch a more plausible account of why virtual wrongdoing is morally disquieting insofar as it is, which invokes not the wrongness of the players’ actions but what these actions reveal about the players. By ‘virtual wrongdoing’ I mean an action by a player in the real world that intentionally brings about an action φV by a character in a virtual world V such that φV is wrong-in-V; and the criteria for evaluating an action’s wrongness-in-V are the same as those for evaluating an action’s wrongness in the real world.[2]Read More »Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: Why Is Virtual Wrongdoing Morally Disquieting, Insofar As It Is?
Cross Post: Flouting Quarantine
Written by Dr Thomas Douglas Dr Tom Douglas has recently published a fascinating article on the Stockholm Centre, For the Ethics of War and Peace blog: As I write this, COVID-19, an illness caused by the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, is sweeping the globe. Over 15,000 people have died, and it is likely that at least… Read More »Cross Post: Flouting Quarantine
Pandemic Ethics: Covid-19 Shows Just How Much of Ethics Depends on (Good) Data
Written by Hazem Zohny
In times of crises, the archetypal ethicist sits in the proverbial armchair and hums and haws, testing out intuitions about an action or policy against a jumble of moral theories. Covid-19 shows why the archetypal ethicist is as useless as antibiotics are for viral infections.
This is because virtually all the difficult ethical questions this pandemic raises boil down to having access to the relevant data, rather than the relevant intuitions or theories.
Consider these questions, all sourced from recent blogs in this Pandemic Ethics Series:
- When and to what degree should different infectious pathogen control measures be employed?
- How much risk should social care workers be subjected to during this outbreak?
- If you wake up with a cough, do you have a moral duty to stay home?
- Should doctors at the frontline of the pandemic receive preferential treatment if they get sick?
But also: Should isolation have started earlier? How draconian is too draconian? Should we aim for herd immunity? What criteria should determine who gets the ventilator if they start to run out? Etc. Etc.
These all seem like meaty moral questions – and they are. But their meatiness does not really stem from the values or principles they call into question. Instead, it is the uncertainty of the empirical data surrounding all aspects of the pandemic that should incite all the humming and hawing.
Read More »Pandemic Ethics: Covid-19 Shows Just How Much of Ethics Depends on (Good) Data
Pandemic Ethics: Who gets the ventilator in the coronavirus pandemic? These are the ethical approaches to allocating medical care
By Julian Savulescu and Dominic Wilkinson Cross-posted from ABC Online Imagine there are two patients with respiratory failure. Joan is 40, normally employed with two children and no other health conditions or disabilities. Mary is 80, with severe dementia, in a nursing home. In the Western world, doctors are gearing up for an explosion of… Read More »Pandemic Ethics: Who gets the ventilator in the coronavirus pandemic? These are the ethical approaches to allocating medical care