Onora O'Neill
Biographic Data
| ID | 4536549 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Onora O'Neill |
| GIVEN NAMES | Onora |
| FAMILY NAME | O'Neill |
| SIGNATURE | NEILL O O |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Essex |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 54 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 131 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 54 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
A Philosopher Looks at Digital Communication
Communication is complicated, and so is the ethics of communication. We communicate about innumerable topics, to varied audiences, using a gamut of technologies. The ethics of communication, therefore, has to address a wide range of technical, ethical and epistemic requirements. In this book, Onora O'Neill shows how digital technologies have made communication more demanding: they can support communication with huge numbers of distant and dispers…
Philosopher Looks at Communication
From Principles to Practice
Knowledge aims to fit the world, and action to change it. In this collection of essays, Onora O'Neill explores the relationship between these concepts and shows that principles are not enough for ethical thought or action: we also need to understand how practical judgement identifies ways of enacting them and of changing the way things are. Both ethical and technical judgement are supported, she contends, by bringing to bear multiple consideratio…
From Principles to Practice
Knowledge aims to fit the world, and action to change it. In this collection of essays, Onora O'Neill explores the relationship between these concepts and shows that principles are not enough for ethical thought or action: we also need to understand how practical judgement identifies ways of enacting them and of changing the way things are. Both ethical and technical judgement are supported, she contends, by bringing to bear multiple consideratio…
Integrity and Quality in Universities
The essay focuses on the tension between the integrity of a university’s ideal or mission (academic freedom, innovation, excellence in research and teaching) and approaches to accountability that are used to monitor performance and to establish criteria for university funding. The paper examines evaluation systems and the distorting effects of the incentives some of them create, especially when different metrics are combined in order to rank acad…
Constructing Authorities
This collection of essays brings together the central lines of thought in Onora O'Neill's work on Kant's philosophy, developed over many years. Challenging the claim that Kant's attempt to provide a critique of reason fails because it collapses into a dogmatic argument from authority, O'Neill shows why Kant held that we must construct, rather than assume, the authority of reason, and how this can be done by ensuring that anything we offer as reas…
Autonomia, pluralidade e razão pública
Pretendo oferecer uma leitura da concepção kantiana de autonomia, distingui-la de algumas outras concepções que recebem o nome de autonomia e propor algumas razões para pensar que a autonomia no sentido que Kant atribui ao termo é decerto tanto uma concepção de razão prática como também fundamental para a moralidade. A linha de pensamento que seguirei é, espero, compatível com as afirmações queSchneewind faz sobre a posição de Kant e, ao mesmo te…
Science, Reasons and Normativity
Science is often seen as empirical inquiry that aims at proof or explanation, but eschews normative considerations. This, I shall argue, is inadequate. Scientific thinking and practice also depend on additional standards, including a range of norms that are not and cannot be established by empirical methods. It follows that science cannot and should not aspire to be value free
Global Poverty and the Limits of Academic Expertise
Academics are not a natural kind. They have varied expertise and aims, and most have no expertise that is particularly relevant to problems of poverty and development. This presumably is why the essay in this issue by Thomas Pogge and Louis Cabrera—a virtual “manifesto” of the newly formed Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP)—shifts to and fro between addressing “academics” and addressing “poverty-focused academics.” Even those academics whose …
How Might We Live? Global Ethics in the New Century
This volume looks outward to the twenty-first century and to the dynamics of this first truly global age. It asks the fundamental question: how might human societies live? In contrast to the orthodoxies of academic Philosophy and International Relations in much of the twentieth century, which marginalised or rejected the study of ethics, the contributors here believe that there is nothing more political than ethics, and therefore deserving of sch…
Rethinking Informed Consent in Bioethics
Informed consent is a central topic in contemporary biomedical ethics. Yet attempts to set defensible and feasible standards for consenting have led to persistent difficulties. In Rethinking Informed Consent in Bioethics, first published in 2007, Neil Manson and Onora O'Neill set debates about informed consent in medicine and research in a fresh light. They show why informed consent cannot be fully specific or fully explicit, and why more specifi…
Normativity and Practical Judgement
Norms are apt for reasoning because they have propositional structure and content; they are practical because they aim to guide action, rather than to describe aspects of the world. These two features hold equally of norms construed sociologically as the norms of specific social groups, and of norms conceived abstractly as principles of action. On either view, norms are indeterminate while acts are particular and determinate. Consequently norms c…
Tony Blair's ‘Media’ Speech
Tony Blair's speech challenged the media over its standards in his valedictory lecture. Many of his charges about the absence of balance, attacks on motive and a pack mentality stand up, even if some are exaggerated and also applied well before his arrival in 10 Downing Street. Mr Blair's solutions did ot match his critique. What is required is a more self‐questioning media, being held to account on the internet and on specialist blogging sites. …
The dark side of human rights
Journal Article The dark side of human rights Get access ONORA O'NEILL ONORA O'NEILL Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 81, Issue 2, March 2005, Pages 427–439, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2346.2005.00459.x Published: 01 April 2005
Global justice
Many respected and prominent accounts of justice have cosmopolitan aspirations yet provide a poor basis for thinking about the demands of justice in a globalizing world, and especially for thinking about economic justice. Typically they endorse some account of cosmopolitan principles of justice, then assume without argument, or without sufficient argument, that the primary agents of justice must be states. Other agents and agencies are seen as se…
Consequences for Non-consequentialists
Both consequentialist and non-consequentialist ethical reasoning have difficulties in accounting for the value of consequences. Taken neat, consequentialism is too fierce in its emphasis on success and disregard of luck, while non-consequentialism seemingly over-values inner states and undervalues actual results. In Uneasy Virtue Julia Driver proposes a form of objective consequentialism which claims that characters are good if they typically (bu…
Can You Trust Autonomy
Ethical Foreign Policy
Constructivism VS. Contractualism
Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics
Why has autonomy been a leading idea in philosophical writing on bioethics, and why has trust been marginal? In this important book, Onora O'Neill suggests that the conceptions of individual autonomy so widely relied on in bioethics are philosophically and ethically inadequate, and that they undermine rather than support relations of trust. She shows how Kant's non-individualistic view of autonomy provides a stronger basis for an approach to medi…
Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (§§ 7–8, 30–41)
Public Health or Clinical Ethics
Most work in medical ethics across the last twenty-five years has centered on the ethics of clinical medicine. Even work on health and justice has, in the main, been concerned with the just distribution of (access to) clinical care for individual patients. By contrast, the ethics of public health has been widely neglected. This neglect is surprising, given that public health interventions are often the most effective (and most cost-effective) mea…
Agents of Justice
Accounts of international or global justice often focus primarily on the rights or goods to be enjoyed by all human beings, rather than on the obligations that will realise and secure those rights and goods, or on the agents and agencies for whose action obligations of justice are to be prescriptive. In the background of these approaches to international or global justice there are often implicit assumptions that the primary agents of justice are…
Kant's Conception of Public Reason
Practical Principles & Practical Judgment
Those who deny that general principles are important for moral deliberation have mostly misunderstood how principles work. Principles do not give us algorithms for living. They identify broad requirements we must live up to, but they do not actually tell us what to do. We are left instead to craft responses that honor our general commitments using the materials of the case at hand
Towards Justice and Virtue
Towards Justice and Virtue challenges the rivalry between those who advocate only abstract, universal principles of justice and those who commend only the particularities of virtuous lives. Onora O'Neill traces this impasse to defects in underlying conceptions of reasoning about action. She proposes and vindicates a modest account of ethical reasoning and a reasoned way of answering the question 'who counts?', then uses these to construct linked …
Justice, Gender and International Boundaries
Discussions of international and of gender justice both legitimately demand that principles of justice abstract from differences between cases and that judgements of justice respond to differences between them. Abstraction and sensitivity to context are often treated as incompatible: abstraction is taken to endorse idealized models of individual and state; sensitivity to human differences is identified with relativism. Neither identification is c…
The dark side of human rights
Journal Article The dark side of human rights Get access ONORA O'NEILL ONORA O'NEILL Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 81, Issue 2, March 2005, Pages 427–439, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2346.2005.00459.x Published: 01 April 2005
Constructivism VS. Contractualism
I. The Public use of Reason
Liberals often think that diversity of belief and its expression should be tolerated if we are to respect either individuals or reason and truth themselves. Because they are “agnostic about the good for man”, they hold that liberty for each to pursue his or her conception of the good in “self-regarding” matters is required, and that practices of toleration are important aspects of this liberty. They also often advocate practices of toleration as …
Public Health or Clinical Ethics
Most work in medical ethics across the last twenty-five years has centered on the ethics of clinical medicine. Even work on health and justice has, in the main, been concerned with the just distribution of (access to) clinical care for individual patients. By contrast, the ethics of public health has been widely neglected. This neglect is surprising, given that public health interventions are often the most effective (and most cost-effective) mea…
Informed Consent and Genetic Information
Constructions of Reason
Children's Rights and Children's Lives
CHILDREN'S RIGHTS AND CHILDREN'S LIVES Get access ONORA O'NEILL ONORA O'NEILL ** This article first appeared in Ethics, vol 98 (April, 1988), 445–63 and is reprinted with the permission of the University of Chicago Press. In that context the author thanked the readers for Ethics, Hilled Steiner, Bob Goodin, Sara Ruddick, Richard Lindley, and especially Sheldon Leader, for helpful and discerning comments. Search for other works by this author on: …
Bounded and cosmopolitan justice
Since antiquity justice has been thought of as a political or civic virtue, more recently as belonging in a ‘bounded society’,John Rawls relies on the idea of a bounded society throughout his work. References to Rawls's writings cited here may be abbreviated in subsequent footnotes: A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); ‘Themes in Kant's Moral Philosophy’ (1989), in Collected Papers, Samuel Freeman (ed.), (Cambridge…
I. Kant after Virtue 1
Maclntyre's refurbishing of Aristotelian ethics aims to restore both intelligibility and rationality to moral discourse. In After Virtue he concentrates on showing how intelligible action requires that lives be led within institutional and cultural traditions. But he does not offer a developed account of practical reason which could provide grounds for seeking some rather than other intelligible continuations of lives and traditions. Despite Macl…
Global Poverty and the Limits of Academic Expertise
Academics are not a natural kind. They have varied expertise and aims, and most have no expertise that is particularly relevant to problems of poverty and development. This presumably is why the essay in this issue by Thomas Pogge and Louis Cabrera—a virtual “manifesto” of the newly formed Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP)—shifts to and fro between addressing “academics” and addressing “poverty-focused academics.” Even those academics whose …
Consequences for Non-consequentialists
Both consequentialist and non-consequentialist ethical reasoning have difficulties in accounting for the value of consequences. Taken neat, consequentialism is too fierce in its emphasis on success and disregard of luck, while non-consequentialism seemingly over-values inner states and undervalues actual results. In Uneasy Virtue Julia Driver proposes a form of objective consequentialism which claims that characters are good if they typically (bu…
II. Nozick's entitlements
This article examines Nozick's claim (in Anarchy, State and Utopia) to have shown that a commitment to individual liberties requires acceptance of full capitalist property rights. The main gap in Nozick's argument is that he fails to show how individuals can become entitled to full control over previously unheld resources. Nozick draws on Locke's view that title is acquired by 'mixing one's labour'. But he excises certain (dubious) premisses on w…
Having Children
IV—The Most Extensive Liberty
IV—The Most Extensive Liberty Get access Onora O'Neill Onora O'Neill Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 80, Issue 1, 1 June 1980, Pages 45–60, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/80.1.45 Published: 08 September 2015
Having Children
In a Starving World, What's the Moral Minimum
Book reviewed in this article: Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy. By Henry Shue Morality and Population Policy. By Michael D. Bayles
Moral Life
Having Children
I. Kant after Virtue 1
Maclntyre's refurbishing of Aristotelian ethics aims to restore both intelligibility and rationality to moral discourse. In After Virtue he concentrates on showing how intelligible action requires that lives be led within institutional and cultural traditions. But he does not offer a developed account of practical reason which could provide grounds for seeking some rather than other intelligible continuations of lives and traditions. Despite Macl…
I. The Public use of Reason
Liberals often think that diversity of belief and its expression should be tolerated if we are to respect either individuals or reason and truth themselves. Because they are “agnostic about the good for man”, they hold that liberty for each to pursue his or her conception of the good in “self-regarding” matters is required, and that practices of toleration are important aspects of this liberty. They also often advocate practices of toleration as …
Rights to Compensation
Rights to compensation are much invoked and much disputed in recent liberal debates. The disputes are generally about supposed fundamental (natural, human or moral) rights to compensation, whose recognition and legal enactment would transform some lives. For example, special treatment in education or employment are claimed as compensation for past denials of equal opportunity; special consideration for Third World countries in aid and trade terms…
Abstraction, Idealization and Ideology in Ethics
Although Burke, Bentham, Hegel and Marx do not often agree, all criticized certain ethical theories, in particular theories of rights, for being too abstract . The complaint is still popular. It was common in Existentialist and in Wittgensteinian writing that stressed the importance of cases and examples rather than principles for the moral life; it has been prominent in recent Hegelian and Aristotelian flavoured writing, which stresses the impor…
Ethical Reasoning and Ideological Pluralism
Constructions of Reason
Two centuries after they were published, Kant's ethical writings are as much admired and imitated as they have ever been, yet serious and long-standing accusations of internal incoherence remain unresolved. Onora O'Neill traces the alleged incoherences to attempt to assimilate Kant's ethical writings to modern conceptions of rationality, action and rights. When the temptation to assimilate is resisted, a strikingly different and more cohesive acc…
Justice, Gender and International Boundaries
Discussions of international and of gender justice both legitimately demand that principles of justice abstract from differences between cases and that judgements of justice respond to differences between them. Abstraction and sensitivity to context are often treated as incompatible: abstraction is taken to endorse idealized models of individual and state; sensitivity to human differences is identified with relativism. Neither identification is c…
Constructions of Reason
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy. By Onora O’neill. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xii + 249. Price £27.50 h/bk £9.95 p/bk.) Daniel M. Farrell Daniel M. Farrell The Ohio State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 41, Issue 164, July 1991, Pages 372–374, https://doi.org/10…
Plural and Conflicting Values
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Plural and Conflicting Values. By Michael Stocker. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Pp. xiii + 360. Price £35.00.) Onora O’Neill Onora O’Neill University of Essex Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 41, Issue 164, July 1991, Pages 370–372, https://doi.org/10.2307/2220048 Published: 01 July 1991
Vindicating reason
Whatever else a critique of reason attempts, it must surely criticize reason. Further, if it is not to point toward nihilism, a critique of reason cannot have only a negative or destructive outcome, but must vindicate at least some standards or principles as authorities on which thinking and doing may rely, and by which they may (in part) be judged. Critics of "the Enlightenment project" from Pascal to Horkheimer to contemporary communitarians an…
Children's Rights and Children's Lives
CHILDREN'S RIGHTS AND CHILDREN'S LIVES Get access ONORA O'NEILL ONORA O'NEILL ** This article first appeared in Ethics, vol 98 (April, 1988), 445–63 and is reprinted with the permission of the University of Chicago Press. In that context the author thanked the readers for Ethics, Hilled Steiner, Bob Goodin, Sara Ruddick, Richard Lindley, and especially Sheldon Leader, for helpful and discerning comments. Search for other works by this author on: …
Constructions of Reason
Justice, Capabilities, and Vulnerabilities
O’Neill investigates the relationship between capability and vulnerability in forms of dependence and victimization, arguing that the satisfaction of preferences ought not to be taken as a normative criterion in political economy. Defending the capabilities approach by connecting it to a strand of Kantianism, O’Neill contends that Kant's categorical imperative continues to be a valuable test in social policy and supplies a powerful safeguard agai…
Towards Justice and Virtue
Towards Justice and Virtue challenges the rivalry between those who advocate only abstract, universal principles of justice and those who commend only the particularities of virtuous lives. Onora O'Neill traces this impasse to defects in underlying conceptions of reasoning about action. She proposes and vindicates a modest account of ethical reasoning and a reasoned way of answering the question 'who counts?', then uses these to construct linked …
The Sources of Normativity
Ethical concepts are, or purport to be, normative. They make claims on us: they command, oblige, recommend, or guide. Or at least when we invoke them, we make claims on one another; but where does their authority over us - or ours over one another - come from? Christine Korsgaard identifies four accounts of the source of normativity that have been advocated by modern moral philosophers: voluntarism, realism, reflective endorsement, and the appeal…
Reclaiming the History of Ethics
The essays in this volume offer an approach to the history of moral and political philosophy that takes its inspiration from John Rawls. All the contributors are philosophers who have studied with Rawls and they offer this collection in his honour. The distinctive feature of this approach is to address substantive normative questions in moral and political philosophy through an analysis of the texts and theories of major figures in the history of…
Political Liberalism and Public Reason
ions (taken strictly) omit or bracket certain predicates true of the matter from which they abstract. Rather the idea of closed society is an idealization that assumes predicates which are false of all existing human societies. Idealizations can of course be of great help in theory building. But they have to be handled with care. In particular, they have to handled with care in practical reasoning, whose aspiration is to fit the world (to some de…
Kant's Virtues
Political science (36 works) · Philosophy (34 works) · Law (30 works) · Sociology (28 works) · Epistemology (27 works) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (21 works) · Law and economics (15 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Philosophical Ethics and Theory (12 works) · Politics (12 works)