Uehiro Oxford Institute

Professor Roger Trigg gives the St Cross Special Ethics Seminar, Trinity Term 2011.

Nigel Warburton interviews Julian Savulescu on the topic of moral enhancement.

Lecture and discussion from Professor Ingmar Persson (Gothenburg University), the discussant is Derek Parfit (Oxford).

2nd Annual Wellcome Lecture in Neuroethics, given by Professor Jorge Moll on 18th January 2011 on the subject of new evidence for Neural bases for moral sentiments.

Dr Mick Blowfield, Fellow of St Cross College, gives the second St Cross Special Ethics Seminar on The Ethical Challenges of 21st Century Businesses. We enjoy a love-hate relationship with business. We expect it to behave like a sentient ethical being, but some of the demands we make of it would tax any conventional definitions of moral acceptability. The dichotomies that result are becoming even greater because of the challenges of building prosperous economies in the C21 when business confronts the prospect of resource constraints, global governance, and shifts in wealth and demography. In this seminar I explore the new ethical environment that business must not only operate within but will have a significant role in shaping and realising.

Dr Adrian Walsh delivers a St Cross College Lecture entitled Good Intentions and Political Life: Against Virtue Parsimony. It is a commonplace that the good life and the good society are intimately interconnected. In order to maximize our chances of living well, we require a well-ordered polity; and this is one of the fundamental challenges of politics. Typically we regard a good society as, amongst other things, a society that has well designed institutions. One crucial aspect of the 'design challenge' concerns itself with the relationship between individual virtue and such political institutions. Is it is in general a good idea to prefer those institutions that demand from participating individuals a virtue-rich input? [...]

Scientists have always had to contend with the idea that their research may be misused. The problem, weighing scientific freedom of inquiry against the possibility that research could be used for harm, is known as the 'dual-use dilemma'.