Twitter: @ethicsinthenews
Site: podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/uehiro-lectures-practical-solutions-ethical-challenges
36 episodes
2017 to present
Average episode: 61 minutes
Open in Apple Podcasts • RSS
Categories: Ethics • Talk/Seminar Series
Podcaster's summary: The annual public Uehiro Lecture Series captures the ethos of the Uehiro Centre, which is to bring the best scholarship in analytic philosophy to bear on the most significant problems of our time, and to make progress in the analysis and resolution of these issues to the highest academic standard, in a manner that is also accessible to the general public. Philosophy should not only create knowledge, it should make people’s lives better.
| Episodes |
| 2024-Mar-15 • 60 minutes 2023 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics: Knowledge and Achievement as Public Policy Goals (3 of 3) A recording of the third and final of Professor Hurka's rescheduled lectures, series title Knowledge and Achievement: Their Value, Nature, and Public Policy Role We were honoured to welcome Professor Thomas Hurka to Oxford to deliver the 2023 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/... |
| 2024-Mar-15 • 62 minutes 2023 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics: Degrees of Value in Knowledge and Achievement (2 of 3) A recording of the second of Professor Hurka's rescheduled lectures, series title "Knowledge and Achievement: Their Value, Nature, and Public Policy Role" We were honoured to welcome Professor Thomas Hurka to Oxford to deliver the 2023 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/... |
| 2024-Mar-15 • 67 minutes 2023 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics: Knowledge and Achievement as Organic Goods (1 of 3) A recording of the first of Professor Hurka's rescheduled lectures, series title "Knowledge and Achievement: Their Value, Nature, and Public Policy Role" We were honoured to welcome Professor Thomas Hurka to Oxford to deliver the 2023 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/... |
| 2022-May-31 • 74 minutes 2022 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics: Ethics and Artificial Intelligence (3 of 3) In last of the three 2022 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics, Professor Peter Railton explores how we might "programme ethics into AI" Recent, dramatic advancement in the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) raise a host of ethical questions about the development and deployment of AI systems. Some of these are questions long recognized as of fundamental moral concern, and which may occur in particularly acute forms with AI—matters of distributive justice, discrimination, social control, pol... |
| 2022-May-31 • 68 minutes 2022 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics: Ethics and Artificial Intelligence (2 of 3) In the second 2022 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics, Professor Peter Railton explores how we might "programme ethics into AI" Recent, dramatic advancement in the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) raise a host of ethical questions about the development and deployment of AI systems. Some of these are questions long recognized as of fundamental moral concern, and which may occur in particularly acute forms with AI—matters of distributive justice, discrimination, social control, political ... |
| 2022-May-31 • 90 minutes 2022 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics: Ethics and Artificial Intelligence (1 of 3) In the first of three 2022 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics, Professor Peter Railton explores how we might "programme ethics into AI" Recent, dramatic advancement in the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) raise a host of ethical questions about the development and deployment of AI systems. Some of these are questions long recognized as of fundamental moral concern, and which may occur in particularly acute forms with AI—matters of distributive justice, discrimination, social control, po... |
| 2020-Nov-17 • 46 minutes 2020 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics (3/3): The case for an unfunded pay as you go (PAYG) pension Professor Michael Otsuka (London School of Economics) delivers the final of three public lectures in the series 'How to pool risks across generations: the case for collective pensions' The previous two lectures grappled with various challenges that funded collective pension schemes face. In the final lecture, I ask whether an unfunded 'pay as you go' (PAYG) approach might provide a solution. With PAYG, money is directly transferred from those who are currently working to pay the pensions of those who are cu... |
| 2020-Nov-17 • 49 minutes 2020 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics (2/3): The case for collective defined contribution (CDC) Professor Michael Otsuka (London School of Economics) delivers the second of three public lectures in the series 'How to pool risks across generations: the case for collective pensions' On any sensible approach to the valuation of a DB scheme, ineliminable risk will remain that returns on a portfolio weighted towards return-seeking equities and property will fall significantly short of fully funding the DB pension promise. On the actuarial approach, this risk is deemed sufficiently low that it is reasonable... |
| 2020-Nov-17 • 59 minutes 2020 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics (1/3): The case for a funded pension with a defined benefit (DB) Professor Michael Otsuka (London School of Economics) delivers the first of three public lectures in the series 'How to pool risks across generations: the case for collective pensions' I begin by drawing attention to the efficiencies in the pooling of longevity and investment risk that collective funded pension schemes provide over individual defined contribution (IDC) pension pots in guarding against your risk of living too long. I then turn to an analysis of those collective schemes that promise the foll... |
| 2019-Oct-17 • 59 minutes 2019 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics (3/3): Improving Political Discourse (2): Communicating moral concern beyond blaming and shaming Lies, propaganda, and fake news have hijacked political discourse, distracting the electorate from engaging with the global problems we face. These Uehiro Lectures suggest a pathway for democratic institutions to devise solutions to the problems we face t People often resist facts because accepting facts exposes them to shame and blame. Yet, when the point of raising facts is to orient others to moral concerns, how can we communicate these concerns without resorting on blaming and shaming those who resist?... |
| 2019-Oct-17 • 64 minutes 2019 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics (2/3): Improving Political Discourse (1): Re-learning how to talk about facts across group identities Lies, propaganda, and fake news have hijacked political discourse, distracting the electorate from engaging with the global problems we face. These Uehiro Lectures suggest a pathway for democratic institutions to devise solutions to the problems we face t I argue that citizen science and local deliberation within internally diverse micro-publics offer models of how political discourse can be re-oriented toward accuracy-oriented factual claims relevant to constructive policy solutions. Enabling such discour... |
| 2019-Oct-17 • 55 minutes 2019 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics (1/3): What Has Gone Wrong? Populist politics and the mobilization of fear and resentment Lies, propaganda, and fake news have hijacked political discourse, distracting the electorate from engaging with the global problems we face. These Uehiro Lectures suggest a pathway for democratic institutions to devise solutions to the problems we face. I diagnose the deterioration of public discourse regarding basic facts to the rise of populist politics, which is powered by the activation of identity-based fear and resentment of other groups. Populist politics 'hears' the factual claims of other groups ... |
| 2018-Jun-05 • 64 minutes 2018 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics (3/3): Illness and Attitude Lecture 3 of 3.Who we are depends in part on the social world in which we live. In these lectures I look at some consequences for three mental health problems, broadly construed: dementia, addiction, and psychosomatic illness. Many illnesses have been thought—controversially—to have a psychosomatic component. How should we understand this? Sometimes a contrast is made between organic illness and mental illness: psychosomatic illnesses are the latter masquerading as the former. But if the mental is physical,... |
| 2018-Jun-05 • 53 minutes 2018 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics (2/3): Addiction, Desire and the Polluted Environment Lecture 2 of 3. Who we are depends in part on the social world in which we live. In these lectures I look at some consequences for three mental health problems, broadly construed: dementia, addiction, and psychosomatic illness. Much recent work on addiction has stressed the importance of cues for the triggering of desire. These cues are frequently social. We have a plausible theory of this triggering at the neurophysiological level. But what are the ethical implications? One concerns the authority of desire... |
| 2018-Jun-05 • 60 minutes 2018 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics (1/3): Dementia and the Social Scaffold of Memory Lecture 1 of 3. Who we are depends in part on the social world in which we live. In these lectures I look at some consequences for three mental health problems, broadly construed: dementia, addiction, and psychosomatic illness. Loss of memory is a central feature of dementia. On a Lockean picture of personal identity, as memory is lost, so is the person. But the initial effect of dementia is not the simple destruction of memory. Many memories can be recognized with suitable prompting and scaffolding, someth... |
| 2017-Nov-13 • 58 minutes 2017 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics (3/3) Obligations to the Needy: Some Empirical Worries and Uncomfortable Philosophical Possibilities In this final lecture, Professor Temkin considers possible negative impacts of global efforts to aid the needy, and reviews the main claims and arguments of all three Lectures In this third Uehiro Lecture, I consider a number of worries about the possible impact of global efforts to aid the needy. Among the worries I address are possible unintended negative consequences that may occur elsewhere in a society when aid agencies hire highly qualified local people to promote their agendas; the possibility that h... |
| 2017-Nov-13 • 61 minutes 2017 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics (2/3) Obligations to the Needy: Singer’s Pond Example versus Supporting International Aid Organizations—Some Disanalogies and Their Normative Significance In this second lecture, Professor Temkin considers some disanalogies between saving a drowning child and giving to an aid organization, and discusses the issues of corruption and poor governance. Peter Singer famously argued that just as we have compelling moral reason to save a drowning child, so we have compelling moral reason to aid the world’s needy. In this Lecture, I raise a number of worries about the relevance of Singer’s Pond Example to whether we should be donating money to international aid organ... |
| 2017-Nov-13 • 53 minutes 2017 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics (1/3) Obligations to the Needy: Effective Altruism, Pluralism, and Singer’s Pond Example In this first lecture, Larry Temkin explores different philosophical approaches to aiding the needy, and how they may fit with Peter Singer's famous Pond Example thought experiment. The world is filled with people who are badly off. Each day, many die from hunger or disease, much of which seems easily preventable. Yet the world is also filled with many who are well off, some extraordinarily so. This vast inequality, between the world’s well off and the world’s worst off, gives rise to an age-old question. ... |
| 2017-Nov-06 • 61 minutes 2015 Uehiro Lectures: Reasons to Worry The second of the three 2015 Annual Uehiro Lectures 'Why Worry About Future Generations'. Why should we care about what happens to human beings in the future, after we ourselves are long gone? In this lecture I argue that, quite apart from considerations of beneficence, we have reasons of at least four different kinds to try to ensure the survival and flourishing of our successors: reasons of love, reasons of interest, reasons of value, and reasons of reciprocity. |
| 2017-Nov-06 • 60 minutes 2015 Uehiro Lectures: Conservatism, Temporal Bias, and Future Generations The last of the three 2015 Annual Uehiro Lectures 'Why Worry About Future Generations'. Why should we care about what happens to human beings in the future, after we ourselves are long gone? The reasons discussed in the previous lecture all depend in one way or another on our existing values and attachments and our conservative disposition to preserve and sustain the things that we value. The idea that our reasons for caring about the fate of future generations depend on an essentially conservative dispos... |
| 2017-Nov-06 • 60 minutes 2015 Uehiro Lectures: Temporal Parochialism and Its Discontents The first of the three 2015 Annual Uehiro Lectures 'Why Worry About Future Generations'. Why should we care about what happens to human beings in the future, after we ourselves are long gone? Most of us who live in contemporary liberal societies lack a rich set of evaluative resources for thinking about the human beings who will come after us. We do not possess a highly developed set of ideas about the value of human continuity, or about the values we hope will be realized in the future, or about the valu... |
| 2017-Nov-06 • 56 minutes 2016 Annual Uehiro Lecture 1: Consequentialism for Cows Professor Shelly Kagan delivers the first of three Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics, ‘How to Count Animals, More or Less’ Much contemporary writing on animal ethics is "egalitarian" in the sense that otherwise similar harms (or goods) for people and nonhuman animals are thought to count equally. In this sense, animals and people can be said to have the same moral status ("pain is pain"). In these lectures, however, I will explore an alternative, hierarchical approach, according to which animals ... |
| 2017-Nov-06 • 60 minutes 2016 Annual Uehiro Lecture 2: Deontology for Dogs Professor Shelly Kagan delivers the second of three Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics, ‘How to Count Animals, More or Less’ Much contemporary writing on animal ethics is "egalitarian" in the sense that otherwise similar harms (or goods) for people and nonhuman animals are thought to count equally. In this sense, animals and people can be said to have the same moral status ("pain is pain"). In these lectures, however, I will explore an alternative, hierarchical approach, according to which animals... |
| 2017-Nov-06 • 59 minutes 2016 Annual Uehiro Lecture 3: Foundation for Frogs Professor Shelly Kagan delivers the final of three Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics, ‘How to Count Animals, More or Less’ Much contemporary writing on animal ethics is "egalitarian" in the sense that otherwise similar harms (or goods) for people and nonhuman animals are thought to count equally. In this sense, animals and people can be said to have the same moral status ("pain is pain"). In these lectures, however, I will explore an alternative, hierarchical approach, according to which animals ... |
| 2017-Aug-24 • 57 minutes 2014 Uehiro Lecture (3): The Question of Legal Rights for Animals In these lectures I will raise some fundamental questions about the moral and legal standing of the other animals: the basis of our moral obligations to them, and whether it makes sense to think that animals might have legal rights. The instability in human attitudes about the moral standing of animals is reflected in our laws. Animal welfare laws offer animals some legal protections, but those protections do not take the form of animal rights. Partly as a consequence, these laws are often ineffective. Org... |
| 2017-Aug-24 • 57 minutes 2014 Uehiro Lecture (2): The Moral Standing of Animals In these lectures I will raise some fundamental questions about the moral and legal standing of the other animals: the basis of our moral obligations to them, and whether it makes sense to think that animals might have legal rights. Human attitudes towards the other animals exhibit a curious instability. Nearly everyone thinks we have some obligations with respect to the other animals – that whenever possible, we should treat them “humanely.” Yet human beings have traditionally regarded nearly any reason w... |
| 2017-Aug-24 • 55 minutes 2014 Uehiro Lecture (1): Animals, Human Beings, and Persons In these lectures I will raise some fundamental questions about the moral and legal standing of the other animals: the basis of our moral obligations to them, and whether it makes sense to think that animals might have legal rights. Legitimate differences in the ways we treat animals, human beings, and other entities that have moral or legal rights – legal persons – must be based on the differences between them. Philosophers have traditionally cited a variety of factors – rationality, sentience, having inte... |
| 2017-Aug-24 • 119 minutes 2013 Annual Uehiro Lecture (3): Equal Opportunity Third and final lecture from Professor Tim Scanlon in which he talks about the philosophical justifications for equalitiy of opportunity. Includes a roundtable discussion with Professors John Broome, Janet Radcliffe Richards and David Miller Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/... |
| 2017-Aug-24 • 52 minutes 2013 Annual Uehiro Lecture (2): Equal Status In the second of three podcasts, Professor Tim Scanlon (Harvard University) delivers the second 2013 Annual Uehiro Lecture in the lecture series "When Does Equality Matter?" Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/... |
| 2017-Aug-24 • 52 minutes 2013 Annual Uehiro Lecture (1): Equal Treatment In the first of three podcasts, Professor Tim Scanlon (Harvard University) delivers the first 2013 Annual Uehiro Lecture in the lecture series "When Does Equality Matter?" |
| 2017-Aug-24 • 59 minutes Sex in a Shifting Landscape Lecture Three: Oxford Uehiro Lectures 2012 Third and final lecture from the 2012 Oxford Uehiro lectures in Practical Philosophy given be Professor Janet Radcliffe-Richards. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/... |
| 2017-Aug-24 • 50 minutes Sex in a Shifting Landscape Lecture Two:Oxford Uehiro Lectures 2012 Second lecture in the 2012 Uehiro Lecture series 'Sex in A Shifting Landscape'. After a hundred and fifty years of feminism, we are still struggling to achieve a satisfactory legal and social framework for managing the relations of the sexes. This is partly, of course, because so many men have been unwilling to give up their traditional privileges, and the original feminist project is still far from finished. But more fundamentally than that, we have no clear conception of what a fair arrangement would be. ... |
| 2017-Aug-24 • 49 minutes Sex in a Shifting Landscape Lecture One: Oxford Uehiro Lectures 2012 Professor Janet Radcliffe-Richards gives (OUC Distinguished Research Fellow) gives the first of three lectures on feminism for the Uehiro Practical Ethics lecture series. After a hundred and fifty years of feminism, we are still struggling to achieve a satisfactory legal and social framework for managing the relations of the sexes. This is partly, of course, because so many men have been unwilling to give up their traditional privileges, and the original feminist project is still far from finished. But more... |
| 2017-Aug-24 • 67 minutes Making Good 3: Virtues, laws and consequentialism Third of three lectures by in the 2011 Annual Uehiro Lecture Series "Making Good: The Challenge of Robustly Demanding Values". Delivered by Philip Pettit, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University. The debate between consequentialism and opposing doctrines turns on whether doing right always means doing good: that is, promoting expected value. How is that debate going to develop once we see that we are required to be virtuous, not just to act virtuousl... |
| 2017-Aug-24 • 64 minutes Making Good 2: Robust Demands and the Need for Law Second of three lectures by in the 2011 Annual Uehiro Lecture Series "Making Good: The Challenge of Robustly Demanding Values". Delivered by Philip Pettit, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University. The common subjection to law means in any community that we give each other certain legal rights robustly, not just actually or probably. The freedom, respect and dignity that you thereby enjoy come about as a result of how we others are legally constrained... |
| 2017-Aug-24 • 60 minutes Making Good 1: Robust Demands and the Need for Virtue First of three lectures in the 2011 Annual Uehiro Lecture Series "Making Good: The Challenge of Robustly Demanding Values". Delivered by Philip Pettit, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University. My loyalty or fidelity or honesty means that I can be relied upon to display a concern for your interests across a range of possible scenarios, not just in actual or probable circumstances. But the good constituted by this robust concern materializes as a resul... |