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For several years, members of the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics have been engaged in research on the scope and limits of responsibility, with a particular focus on conditions that seem to subvert responsibility, such as addiction. This research has had a significant impact on public policy—most notably through Dr Hanna Pickard's invitation by the Department of Health and the Ministry of Justice to develop a module for prison staff training, but also through a report of the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee in which evidence given by Dr Bennett Foddy was cited and through a document prepared for the Technical Development Group of the World Health Organisation, in which work by Dr Bennett Foddy and Julian Savulescu was cited. The research has also generated active blog discussions with members of the public.
Prof. Galen Strawson has developed ideas challenging our central conceptions of the self, freedom, agency, responsibility, and the nature of mental life. The impact of his research at the University of Reading has been a continuing one on cultural life and civil society, helping to shape the views of people outside the academy on these most important aspects of our thought about ourselves. Very unusually for an academic philosopher, Strawson has made significant contributions to popular debate on philosophy of mind, in particular free will and consciousness, and its implications for ethical thinking. This impact includes contributions on national and international radio, television, newspapers and blogs. Through these means, Strawson's radical thinking about subjectivity, the mind, personal identity, free will, and moral responsibility has had a direct impact on non-academic opinion and stimulated lively debate as a result.
For over a decade, Professor Julian Savulescu has produced a body of work on the enhancement of human beings and its ethical implications, including work on the ethics of genetic selection and on the ethics of using technology to enhance human capacities. This work has had an influence on public policy, in particular by influencing government bodies in Norway, the United States, and Australia, and on business and industry. It has also been used in teaching material for secondary school pupils by the Wellcome Collection. Furthermore, through the many prestigious public lectures that Professor Savulescu has given and the seminars that he has led, through the television and radio interviews that he has given, and through the extensive discussion of his ideas in the press and online, he has both contributed to the public awareness of and stimulated lively debate around such issues as what distinguishes the use of doping in sport from seemingly acceptable forms of enhancement, and what if anything is wrong with designer babies.
Vierkant has produced a distinctive body of work that explores the implications of contemporary neuroscience for the notions of free will and moral responsibility. As a result of this research, he was invited by the Church of Scotland to participate in their Society, Religion and Technology working group, which had, as part of its remit, the role of producing the Church's official position on these issues. Vierkant played a key role in formulating the group's recommendations in this regard, which in 2012 were put before the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. These recommendations were approved and have now become part of the `Blue Book' that contains the official laws and policies of the Church of Scotland. In particular, the Church changed its official stance on the implications of contemporary neuroscience with regard to free will and moral responsibility as a direct result of Vierkant's research-led recommendations in the working group report. Vierkant's research has thus led to a demonstrable and significant impact on the policy making of an important non-academic public body.
Through our very successful schools outreach programme, Philosophy in the City, several members of staff have brought their research ideas to school students and teachers, with considerable influence both on the students themselves and on the way in which philosophy is taught and thought of within those schools. This activity has formed an important part of our civic engagement with Sheffield and its region, in enabling our research work to be understood beyond the academy, while drawing school pupils into the subject and influencing their attitude both to the issues we deal with and to higher education more generally.
For about a decade, Professor Nick Bostrom and others have been pursuing research on what he calls `existential risk': this research deals with basic threats both to the quality of our future life and indeed to our having any future life at all. This work has had considerable impact on policy. Professor Bostrom has been invited to play a large number of advisory and consultation roles, to government departments and major insurance companies among many others. His work has also attracted a huge amount of attention among the wider public. He has been invited to give prestigious public lectures, and he has given many interviews on his ideas to the media - thereby contributing to the public awareness of the huge risks at stake.
Chappell's recent work developing an anti-systematic philosophical ethics, and in particular his work on the notions of personhood and second-personality, has had an impact on (1) provision of public and health services, (2) policy-making, and (3) cultural life. He has presented work on ethics and persons to public audiences in Northampton, Mexico City, Oxford, St Andrews, Leeds, Milan, and Sydney. Besides a general intellectual-cultural impact on these public audiences, he has had specific impacts on thinking and practice (1) in paediatrics at The Northampton General Hospital and (2) in religious and educational constituencies in Britain and Australia.
More than a decade's research at the University of Leeds has focused on a cohesive set of issues bearing directly and indirectly on ethics in the workplace: reasons for action, moral psychology, good judgement, character and integrity. The impact of this work covers: consultancy on organisational ethics; development and delivery of CPD for engineers; use of web-based and online materials to engage professionals in ethical reasoning; applied research and engagement with practitioners on integrity at work; a submission to the Leveson enquiry; and an ethics template for the National Nuclear Laboratory. Its significance and reach in embedding ethics in professional life is demonstrated by the range of these activities and the size of the organisations involved.
Prof. Jonathan Dancy has over several decades developed the theory of ethical particularism, culminating in seminal publications dating from his time at the University of Reading, most notably his magnum opus Ethics Without Principles (2004). Particularism has had an impact within the legal profession, not just among legal scholars but on practitioners themselves, even to the extent of its being applied in judicial decision-making. It has also, partly through serendipitous means capitalised upon by Dancy himself, found its way into public ethical debate — directly contributing to the enrichment of civil society and stimulation of cultural life by introducing non-academics to a powerful and provocative new view of morality.
Professor John Broome's research on the ethics of climate change and on our associated responsibility to future generations has had a significant impact on those involved in policy decisions concerning climate change. Most notably, Professor Broome is serving as Lead Author for Working Group III of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC), which is a unit of the United Nations and the leading international body for the assessment of climate change: its work is directed by, and approved by, governments. He is also a member of the IPCC's Synthesis Report. In addition, he has raised public awareness of the ethical issues with which he has grappled through a series of publications and lectures.