Blog post by Prof Roger Crisp (Professor of Moral Philosophy/ Director of the Uehiro Oxford Institute) At the invitation of Professor Beatrix Busse, I was recently lucky enough to be asked to participate in the fifth anniversary celebrations of the European University of Well-being (E-Uni-Well), held in Cologne. EUniWell – the European University for Well-Being –… Read More »‘Happy Birthday to E-Uni-Well’
EACME Conference 2025 Healthcare innovation and research often prioritise acceleration and efficiency. This keynote (12th September 2025) challenged this paradigm by drawing on preliminary findings from Project Lazy, which explores judgements about laziness through research and community engagement. The talk had four parts: an introduction to Project Lazy, findings from the philosophical part, findings from… Read More »When Slowing Down Creates Value
Time has flown since the Uehiro Oxford Institute came into existence on 1 October 2024! We continue to seek to improve the world through engagement with others – what we call ‘Thought into Action’ – and have made great progress in fulfilling our mission to work philosophically across many disciplines, including medicine, history, law, computer… Read More »UOI’s First Anniversary!
This is the fourth in a trial blog series called “Practically Prompted” – an experiment in using large language models to independently select a recent, ethically rich news story and then write a Practical Ethics blog-style post about it. The text below is the model’s work, followed by some light human commentary. See this post for the… Read More »Practically prompted #4: Carnival, Cameras, and Consent: The Ethics of Live Facial Recognition at Notting Hill
I am just back from a celebration of the 20th anniversary of IDEA: the Ethics Centre, at the University of Leeds. (IDEA stands for ‘Inter-disciplinary Ethics Applied’.) IDEA was founded by Chris Megone, an old friend from my graduate days, and is now directed by Simon Kirchin. The centre has achieved a huge amount in… Read More »Congratulations to ‘IDEA’ in Leeds!
TL;DR High-stake policy decisions often involve conflict between values, like fairness versus efficiency, or individual rights versus the common good. The various committees (like hospital ethics boards or policy advisory groups) tasked with resolving these conflicts often work in ways that are hard to scrutinize, their conclusions shaped by the specific people in the room.… Read More »Press Replay on Ethics: How AI Debate Panels Surface Hidden Value-Trade-Offs
Secretary of State for Justice Shabana Mahmood is reportedly looking into a potential ‘national rollout of voluntary chemical castration for sex offenders’. The proposal is one of the recommendations outlined in the recently published Independent Sentencing Review led by former Lord Chancellor David Gauke, commissioned to investigate ‘the prison overcrowding crisis and to consider alternative… Read More »On plans to extend use of chemical castration for sex offenders in England
Author: Dr César Palacios-Gonzalez Discussions about maternal health and rights in Mexico tend to focus on health outcomes and access to healthcare. Academics and activists have long campaigned for the government to invest more resources in maternal health. Unfortunately, healthcare provision for women who want to have a child and are struggling to conceive hasn’t received enough… Read More »Uterus Transplants – Ethical and Legal Challenges in the Mexican Context
This year, we hosted the sixth edition of our annual Practical Ethics and Responsibility Competition (PERC). We received 42 entries to the video competition, and though we had many great entries, four finalists emerged as our winning teams, and travelled to Oxford for a day of ethics and debate, supported by their teachers.
Read More »Practical Ethics Schools Day 2025
What makes health ‘global’? This is the question I have addressed in a recent article in the journal Developing World Bioethics. I am afraid, however, that I don’t have an answer. Nor was answering the aim of the article. After all, many definitions of ‘global health’ exist in the literature and most of them are… Read More »‘Global health’: a problematic concept?
