Baroness Onora O’Neill was born in Northern Ireland in 1941. She studied philosophy, psychology and physiology at Oxford, and went on to complete a doctorate at Harvard. In 1999 she was made a life peer as Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve. Until last year Baroness O’Neill was President of the British Academy and was made an honorary Fellow of the Royal Society in 2007. She is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and chairs the Nuffield Foundation. She has written widely on political philosophy and ethics, international justice and bioethics.
Two Cultures Fifty Years on
The humanities and science were once seen as entirely different cultures. Now that we appreciate their similarities, how will looking at the world through two lenses influence our future?
In his 1959 Rede lecture The Two Cultures C.P. Snow contrasted what he called ‘the traditional culture’ of literary study with the culture of natural science, and judged them wholly different in approach and achievements. The scientific culture, as he saw it, was rigorous and productive; the literary culture was neither. However, a wider look at inquiry in the humanities and the natural sciences reveals a very large overlap in approach. In both domains inquiry relies on interpretation and inference, aims at empirical truth claims and relies on normative assumptions, in variable proportions.
2010 Aronui Lecture Baroness Onora O’Neill ‘Two Cultures Fifty Years On’ from Royal Society of New Zealand on Vimeo.
Read the transcript of the lecture Lecture Notes – Two Cultures Fifty Years On
(PDF, 89 kB)
Grasping Freedom of Speech
With the advent of globalisation, how can we navigate the new roads of communication and understand what is being said?
We live in an era with rich and wide possibilities for communication that reflect developments in information technology, supported by and enabling more deliberative forms of democracy and aspects of cultural globalisation. Yet, curiously, discussion of ethical issues that bear on speech, including speech rights, is now far less concerned with communication than one might expect. In particular, contemporary construal of press freedom as ‘freedom of expression’ focus not on acts of communication but on the dissemination of content. Self expression is not disrupted even when the other party can grasp neither what is being said nor what is being done; effective communication is possible only when there are means to judge both. Communicating is not merely a matter of having a shared language that renders the content of others’ utterances intelligible, but of gaining enough of a grasp of others’ speech acts to judge which sorts of assessment are pertinent.
Read the transcript of the lecture Lecture Notes – Grasping Freedom of Speech (PDF, 107 kB)
Perverting Trust
‘Without trust we cannot stand’ O’Neill 2002. Are we placing trust in trustworthy sources?
Many public and academic discussions of trust focus on empirical evidence of attitudes of trust and mistrust, but say very little about trustworthiness. From a practical point of view this is perverse. We don’t need to assess how trusting others are. We do need to judge whether others say what they mean and will do what they say. A more serious and practical approach to trust would address problems about judging trustworthiness first. Trust is basically a response to trustworthiness, and we cannot work out how to place the first intelligently without judging the second. Unfortunately while systems of accountability may support trustworthiness, they do not always support the intelligent placing and refusal of trust.
Read a transcript of the lecture Lecture Notes – Perverting Trust (PDF, 80 kB)
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