Ethics and Values Insights with Dr Jonathan Pugh
Dr Jonathan Pugh is Parfit-Radcliffe Richards Senior Research Fellow and Manager of Visitors Programmes for the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford. He is also an Official Fellow of Reuben College within its Ethics and Values theme. His research interests lie primarily in issues concerning personal autonomy in practical ethics, particularly topics pertaining to informed consent. He has also written on the ethics of human embryonic stem cell research, criminal justice, human enhancement, and gene-editing.
Dr Pugh took time out of his schedule to take part in the following Q&A.
Briefly, please explain your academic background from school onwards and how your journey has led you to be where you are now?
I chose to do an undergraduate degree in Philosophy, at the University of Edinburgh when I left school. At that point, I wasn’t particularly sure which direction that degree would take me in; but I knew that philosophical questions interested me, and I didn’t feel particularly called to any other vocation.
Over the course of my degree, I became increasingly interested in questions in applied ethics, and I felt that I had some original ideas on some topics in that area that I hadn’t read in the literature. Fortunately, I was offered a scholarship by the University to pursue some of these ideas in a 1-year Research Master's degree, investigating the ethics of embryonic stem cell research. I took up the opportunity to continue studying with the Master's degree, but I must say that the transition from undergraduate student to a solo research student was one of the most difficult periods of my academic career.
When I was coming to the end of the Master's project, it became clear that I would not be able to continue on to a PhD at Edinburgh, as my Master's degree supervisor had a period of sabbatical leave approaching. By that point, I was ‘hooked’ by the idea of doing my own independent research, and so applied to continue my work at Oxford. One reason I chose Oxford is that the Faculty had one of the most prominent researchers in the topic that I was writing on at that time – namely, Reuben Fellow Katrien Devolder!
I was lucky enough to be accepted on to the DPhil and to receive some funding, so I moved to Oxford to do my DPhil at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. I had two excellent supervisors who encouraged me to broaden my research interests in applied ethics, and to publish on a diverse range of topics alongside writing my DPhil. As a result, when I came to the end of my DPhil, I was well-placed to compete for some advertised postgraduate positions. Luckily, around that time, some positions were advertised at the Uehiro Centre, and I was able to continue my work here in Oxford. Having served as a fellow on other people’s projects, I have also been able to win some of my own funding– most recently, I have been appointed as a core tutor on our Master's programme at the Uehiro Centre in combination with continuing with my own research.
I have chosen to stay in Oxford for a combination of personal and professional reasons. I have a lot of friends and family who live nearby, and, in my particular field, Oxford has been one of the leading institutions in the world for a long time. It has been a privilege to be able to investigate the questions that have interested me alongside some of the best researchers in my field for so long.
How would you explain what ‘Ethics and Values’ mean to an extra-terrestrial life form?
I would say that the key questions that ultimately define the ethics and values themes are: ‘how ought we to live?’; ‘what makes life good?’; and ‘how should I balance my interests against the competing interests of others’. Of course, aliens might well give us a very different and perhaps unusual answers to those questions, but any answer that they gave would be grounded by an ethical or evaluative judgment.
Your work lies in the area of applied ethics and I was intrigued by the interview you did for the BBC News Magazine in 2016 concerning the ethics of eradicating mosquitoes! I know you’ve recently led a Wellcome Trust funded project "The Ethics of Novel Therapeutic Applications of Deep Brain Stimulation", please could you tell me a little bit more about that project?
Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is a neurosurgical procedure that allows electrical stimulation to be precisely delivered to areas of the brain that are implicated in certain diseases. It has been a highly successful treatment in movement disorders for decades. In recent years, researchers have become increasingly interested in experimental applications of DBS, particularly in the context of psychiatric disorders. This development raises some important ethical questions, not least because, in the psychiatric context, we are talking about using DBS to more or less directly alter a patient’s motivational or emotional states, states which the patient may well identify as a crucial part of their personality or identity. So, we have to think very carefully about how we can appropriately protect this vulnerable patient population without preventing otherwise intractable patients from accessing an intervention that holds some considerable promise for ameliorating their symptoms. During the project, I was looking at these sorts of issues in close collaboration with psychiatrists and neurosurgeons working in Oxford.
What might a typical week in your work life look like?
A lot of my work includes individual research – reading the latest publications in the relevant fields, making notes, and developing new ideas. That typically will involve being sat with a confused look on my face in front of a laptop or a book, either in my office, library, or a coffee shop somewhere. That can be quite a lonely existence if that takes up your whole working week, and it was something that I struggled with when I first moved in to independent research. The best way I have found to solve it is to punctuate your working days and weeks with other events that put you into contact with other researchers who are interested in the same things. That might be attending workshops, seminars, journal clubs etc. This is one of the things that Oxford excels at – you could fill your day just going to talks and lectures that are going on, so the challenge is to be picky. Of course, I also do a fair bit of teaching, so quite a bit of the week will involve meeting with students to discuss essays, and preparing lectures as well.
Perhaps you could tell me about some of the graduate programmes of study relating to Ethics at the University of Oxford. I assuming you there are both opportunities for taught and research programmes?
Yes – and there are lots of different avenues into the study of ethics at the University. I do the vast majority of my teaching on the MSt course in Practical Ethics, a part-time taught course run by jointly by the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and the Department for Continuing Education. Many of the other Ethics and Values Fellows at Reuben also give guest sessions on this course. The BPhil course in Philosophy also offers a different avenue for studying Ethics in a full time taught masters programme; on this course, students will also have to take modules in other areas of Philosophy.
There are also a number of different avenues for research programmes in Ethics. You could follow the route that I took and do a DPhil in Philosophy, specialising on a topic in applied ethics. However, it is possible to address ethical issues through different disciplinary lenses, and you could feasibly pursue a DPhil project in applied ethics in a number of different fields; for instance, I have helped supervise DPhil projects in Psychiatry and Law to give two examples. Nina Hallowell, another Reuben Fellow is a member of the Ethox centre and she addresses ethical questions from a sociological background.
What advice would you give to any student considering graduate study in this area and what do you perceive to be the salient benefits of graduate study at Oxford University.
I think anyone who works in applied ethics has to be engaged in some degree of interdisciplinarity. So, in preparation for graduate study in this area, I would advise familiarising yourself with how other disciplines in the area work; for instance, if you are a philosopher, try and learn how to read a medical paper. Today, I spend a lot of my time reading medical papers as well as philosophy books!
You’ve recently joined Reuben College, Oxford University’s newest and 39th College, as Fellow within its Ethics and Values theme. What attracted to joining Reuben as one of its inaugural Fellows and what are your immediate plans for your work there?
The emphasis on interdisciplinarity was key for me – it is a huge part of the way I try and do research, and I loved the idea of having Ethics and Values as a core theme in such a forward -looking college. In the near term, I am excited to learn more about what other people at the college are doing in their research, and to be there as a sounding board for discussions about the ethical and social implications of their findings.
