This seminar is hosted by the Institute for Science and Ethics and the Future of Humanity Institute

Speaker: Dr Joanna Burch Brown, Research Fellow, Oxford Institute for Science and Ethics; Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics (Faculty of Philosophy)

Respondent: Helen de Cruz, Visiting Fellow, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and Postdoctoral Fellow, Research Foundation Flanders, University of Leuven

Abstract: Consequentialists hold that morality should be grounded in the project of bringing about better states of affairs. The purpose of moral guidance should be to help us discern which ways to act in order to make the world a better place. Different consequentialists give different accounts of exactly how this intuition should be fleshed out.

Biography: Dr Joanna Burch Brown, was prior to coming to Oxford, she was at the University of Cambridge (King's College), pursuing a PhD in philosophy at the History and Philosophy of Science Department. She has a B.A. from Oberlin College, and an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge. She has worked as a researcher at the Institute for Public Policy Research, and has been a Shackle Scholar at St. Edmund's College, Cambridge. In 2003 she received a Compton Fellowship ($40,000) to set up a community gardening project working with refugees and asylum seekers in East London, supported by the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture.