Bitesize ethics summer 2026

This 8-week online programme provides a short introduction to some of the ethical issues affecting decisions taken around the beginning and end of life of living things, based on current research from academics at the Uehiro Oxford Institute. Prof Dominic Wilkinson provides a general introduction in week one, and the series continues with a different specialist each Wednesday, addressing themes such as conscience and conscientious objection, age-based decision-making, AI and life extension, the ‘badness’ of death, and difficult decisions in healthcare. The series will finish with a wrap-up discussion looking back at the topics covered, led by Dr Jonathan Pugh. 

Registration is free and no prior experience or study is necessary. Each 45-minute class will take place online via Zoom on Wednesday lunchtimes and participation in the informal Q&As and discussion sessions following each week’s presentations is warmly encouraged. 

Programme dates: 24th June - 12th August. Classes will take place 12:35-13:20 online via Zoom and will typically consist of a 30 minute presentation followed by a Q&A. Full details of the programme and registration links can be found below and video recordings will be posted as soon as possible after each session.

Registration

To register, please visit our Bookwhen page.

Date: 01/07/2026 

Tutor: Kat Jennings 

This session will explore the moral limits of age-based exclusion in adolescent decision-making. Liberal societies typically grant adults extensive authority over their own bodies and futures, while restricting similar authority for children and adolescents through age-based rules. But what happens when adolescents appear to possess many of the same decision-making capacities as adults? Are age thresholds a fair way of determining who gets to decide, or do they sometimes unjustly exclude - or even sometimes unjustly include - young people from shaping their own lives? Drawing on debates in both ethics and political philosophy, this session will ask when, if ever, adolescents should be permitted to make major life decisions for themselves and whether there are certain choices where age-based exclusion becomes especially difficult to justify. 

Kat Jennings is a DPhil student at the University of Oxford, studying with Dr Cesar Palacios-Gonzalez.

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Date: 15/07/2026

Tutor: Ryan Kulesa

This session will survey common views about the badness of death and various implications they have.  We’ll address important questions such as (but not only): Is death bad for you? If so, why is it bad? If death is bad, are we badly off prior to our birth?

Ryan Kuselsa is a DPhil student at the University of Oxford, focusing on normative ethics. He is supervised by Alberto Giubilini and Julian Savulescu.
 

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Date: 29/07/2026

Tutor: Kathryn Francis

This session will explore the concept of the moral circle: the range of beings whose interests we deem worthy of moral significance. While most people agree that human lives matter morally, there is far less agreement about where the boundaries of moral concern should lie. Should animals count morally? What about ecosystems and the natural world itself? Drawing on research in moral psychology and ethics, this session will examine how people come to include or exclude different beings from their moral circle and why these boundaries vary across individuals and societies. We will focus on the role of identity, values, and everyday practices such as our dietary habits in shaping our moral concern for animals and nature. By exploring the factors that predict both moral expansion and moral exclusion, the session will consider how we make difficult decisions about whose interests matter and what we owe to the living world around us.

Kathryn Francis is Co-Director of the Design Bioethics Lab in the Department of Psychiatry and Senior Researcher at the Uehiro Oxford Institute.

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Date: 12/08/2026

Tutor: Jonathan Pugh

This session will reflect on some of the key ethical themes and principles that will have emerged over the course of the week, and consider how conflicts between them can give rise to a range of difficult decisions in healthcare. After highlighting some salient examples of this, we will explore how we might navigate these fraught ethical conflicts in practice, and think about how philosophy can help us to reach practical conclusions when we face deep disagreements about what matters.

Jonathan Pugh is Deputy Director of Public Philosophy and a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Institute. 

Register at Bookwhen