Uehiro Oxford Institute

Legal punishment as the routine infliction of suffering poses a serious challenge of justification. The challenge becomes more urgent as a number of thinkers argue that the dominant, retributivist answer fails in the light of the findings of neuroscience. In this talk I sketch a general account of retributivist justification of punishment and the basic neuroscientific argument against it. I then explore ways of challenging the argument by modifying the retributivist account of responsibility and desert. I analyze several variations and argue that none are plausible. I conclude by suggesting one way in which the notion of criminal responsibility can be rescued, but at the theoretical cost of changing the grounds of justification.

Many aims that motivate unjust wars could be achieved without violence if not met with military resistance. So is self-defense against aggression always permissible? Are the values of state sovereignty important enough to justify war in their defense? Wrongful aggressors often claim to love peace, and there is a sense in which that is true, for they would prefer to get what they want without having to fight a war. Many of the aims that motivate unjust wars could be achieved without violence: for example, control of certain natural resources such as oil, limited political control over another state, the annexation of a bit of its territory, and so on. In such cases, war and killing become necessary for aggressors only if they meet with military resistance. If an aggressor's aims were limited, so that the aggressor would not kill or seriously harm any citizen if it could achieve its goals without violence, would it be permissible for the victims to go to war in self-defense? The traditional assumption is that self-defense against aggression is always permissible. But are the values of state sovereignty and territorial integrity always, or even generally, sufficiently important on their own to justify the resort to war in their defense?

How do we know when our donations are helping, and how much they are helping? Are charities roughly equally good, or are some much more effective than others? Toby Ord and Harry Shannon discuss effective philanthropy from different angles. When we make donations to good causes we are trying to help make the world a better place. But what is the best way to do this? How do we know when our donations are helping, and how much they are helping? Are charities roughly equally good, or are some much more effective than others? And should we encourage our governments to do more?

How best to govern the field of assisted reproductive technologies? As UK and US authorities utilise different approaches, will the disparate structures and missions of these two bodies result in significantly different answers? In the past few decades, technologically advanced, democratic societies have struggled with the question of how best to govern the field of assisted reproductive technologies (ART). The UK's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) embody two approaches that highlight the degree of diversity in answering this question. While British politicians fashioned the HFEA as a statutory authority built upon ideals of deliberative democracy, the US has avoided federal regulations on ART, leaving the ASRM - a professional self-regulating society - with the sole responsibility for producing guidelines. Both bodies, however, utilize a deliberative committee to debate and determine rules for ART. Drawing on interviews with committee members of the HFEA and ASRM, this talk will focus on opening these largely opaque deliberative spaces. When examining ethical arguments for and against certain procedures, what reasons do members consider to be "good" reasons, and how do they legitimate such judgements? How do members conceive of the general public and how does this conception affect the role of public perspectives in deliberations and final decisions? Perhaps most importantly, do the disparate structures and missions of these two bodies result in significantly different answers to these questions?

Uncertainty and quality should be integrated into the quantitative sciences of complex systems; this talk offers some practical techniques that illustrate how this could be accomplished. The faith that truth lies in numbers goes back to the Pythagorean attempt to unify both practical and theoretical sciences. Its current manifestation is the idolisation of pre-Einsteinian physics in the quantification of social, economic, and behavioural sciences. The talk will explain how this "crisp number" mode of thinking has promoted the use of over-simplistic models and masking of uncertainties that can in turn lead to incomplete understanding of problems and bad decisions. The quality of a model in terms of its fitness for purpose can be ignored when convenience, especially computerised convenience, offers more easily calculated crisp numbers. Yet these inadequacies matter when computerised models generate pseudo-realities of their own through structures such as financial derivatives and processes such as algorithmic trading. Like Frankenstein's monster, we have already seen financial market pseudo-reality take on an uncontrolled, unstable and dangerous life of its own, all the more beguiling when it generated income for all parties in the merry-go-round. Despite its manifest failings, it is still going on.

Neil Levy explores some of the previous debates about whether psychopaths are fully responsible for their wrongdoing, especially work on the moral/conventional distinction. Psychopaths commit a disproportionate amount of crime, and seem cognitively unimpaired. They are often thought to be bad, not mad. I advance a deflationary explanation of the moral/conventional task, and argue that this explanation entails that psychopaths fail to act with the quality of will that would underwrite holding them to be fully responsible for their actions. Neil Levy specialises in free will and moral responsibility, and empirical approaches to ethics. He has published widely on many topics in philosophy, including bioethics, applied philosophy, continental philosophy and free will. He is the author of 4 books and over 50 articles in refereed journals. He has written a book on neuroethics for Cambridge University Press (2007).

John Broome, the White's Professor of Moral Philosophy, debates the value of life with Jeff McMahan, focussing on McMahan's time-relative account of the value of life, which Broome has criticised. This public event was held as part of Professor McMahan's Astor Visiting Lectureship 2013. The debate was well attended, and provided a rare opportunity to bring together McMahan and Broome in to discuss a topic of enormous and wide ranging practical significance. Jeff McMahan is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He did his graduate work at Oxford and Cambridge and was a research fellow at St. John's College, Cambridge. He is the author of 'The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life' (2002) and 'Killing in War' (2009). He has several other books forthcoming from OUP, including a collection of essays called 'The Values of Lives', a book on war intended for both academic and nonacademic readers called 'The Right Way to Fight', and a sequel to his 2002 book called 'The Ethics of Killing: Self-Defense, War, and Punishment'. John Broome is currently the White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Broome was educated at the University of Cambridge, at the University of London and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a PhD in economics. Before arriving at Oxford he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews and, prior to that, Professor of Economics and Philosophy at the University of Bristol. He has held visiting posts at the University of Virginia, the Australian National University, Princeton University, the University of Washington, the University of British Columbia, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, and the University of Canterbury. In 2007 Broome was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. His book 'Weighing Goods' (1991) explores the way in which goods "located" in each of the three "dimensions" - time, people, states of nature - make up overall goodness. Broome argues that these dimensions are linked by what he calls the interpersonal addition theorem, which supports the utilitarian principle of distribution. In his book Weighing Lives (2004), Broome rejects the presumed intuition that adding people to the population is ethically neutral. In his collection of papers, titled 'Ethics out of Economics' (1999), he discusses topics such as value, equality, fairness, and utility.

Anthony Skelton examines possible reasons why philosophers have neglected to discuss children's welfare. After outlining and evaluating differing views, a rival account is presented. What makes a child's life go well? This paper examines two answers to this question, one put forward by Wayne Sumner in Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics and another by Richard Kraut in What is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-being. The argument of this paper is that neither view is entirely satisfactory. A better account of the nature of children's welfare combines elements of both views. This paper is divided into five sections. The first section examines possible reasons why philosophers have neglected to discuss children's welfare. The second section outlines and evaluates Sumner's view. The third section outlines and evaluates Kraut's view. The fourth section sketches an account of children's welfare that rivals the accounts discussed in sections two and three. The final section summarizes my results.

Discussing a paper co-authored with David Birks, Alexandre Erler suggests sleeping less can provide a greater opportunity for well-being. While many people today are not sleeping long enough, there is still an important minority of the population who sleeps longer than average. Even a small reduction in the number of hours a person sleeps could have a significant positive impact on how well that person's life can go. The authors propose that there is a strong reason to investigate any ways of allowing people, particularly long sleepers, to function on less sleep without harming their health or quality of life.

Emotional pain and difficulty in relationships is potentially dangerous and destructive. In this talk, I explore some of the potential uses and misuses of anti-love biotechnology from a scientific and ethical perspective. "Love hurts" - as the saying goes - and a certain degree of pain and difficulty in intimate relationships is unavoidable. Sometimes it may even be beneficial, since, as it is often argued, some types (and amounts) of suffering can lead to personal growth, self-discovery, and a range of other essential components of a life well-lived. But other times, love is downright dangerous. Either it can trap a person in a cycle of violence, as in some domestic abuse cases, or it can prevent a person from moving on with her life or forming healthier relationships. The idea of an anti-love remedy or a "cure" for love is as old as love itself. References may be found in the writings of Lucretius, Ovid, Shakespeare, and many others, and are tightly linked to the notion that love or infatuation-under certain conditions-can be just like a serious illness: bad for one's physical and mental health and, in some cases, profoundly damaging to one's overall well-being. But unlike these ancient remedies, modern neuroscience and bio-psycho-pharmacology create the possibility of designing a "cure" for love that could actually work, raising a number of ethical questions about their possible use. In this talk, I explore some of the potential uses and misuses of anti-love bio-technlogy from a scientific and ethical perspective.