News & Media

July 2025. We are thrilled for Dr. Kathryn Francis to join the lab. Kathryn has been appointed as a Senior Researcher in Design Bioethics and Moral Psychology with NEUROSEC in the department of Psychiatry and a Senior Researcher at UOI.
June-July, 2025. It's conference season! It was wonderful to head over to Cornell to present our research on the moral duty to respect the wishes of the dead at the Society for Philosophy & Psychology with Prof Matt Lindauer, and then to head over to the European Experimental Philosophy Conference at UEA, where Joanna presented on the wishes of the dead, Maryam gave a talk on perceptions of AI art, and Faisal gave a poster on privacy concerns with conscious AI.
May, 2025. This month we launched https://www.projectlazy.co.uk in collaboration with UOI's Prof. Katrien Devolder. Stay tuned for more community-informed insights into the ethics and moral psychology of what it means to be lazy...
May 5th, 2025. The lab is delighted to welcome PhD student Christian Rodriguez Perez, who will be visiting us until December while working on the ethics of animal research.
March 24, 2025. Congratulations to Pei on having a paper accepted and published 🎉 ‘‘If ChatGPT can do it, where is my creativity?’’ Generative AI boosts performance but diminishes experience in a creative writing task
October, 2024. The lab is delighted to welcome Asst Prof Carme Isern-Mas as an academic visitor for the term!
September 18, 2024. We hosted a workshop entitled "Women’s Autonomy and Consent: Interdisciplinary Approaches” here in Oxford to launch Joanna's British Academy Project. We were joined by collaborators and colleagues April Bailey, Carme Isern-Mas, Rebecca Brown, and Jonathan Pugh, plus senior advisory board members Prof. Clare Chambers, Prof. Jonas Kunst, Hermine Hayes-Klein (lawyer and advocate for legal protection of women’s autonomous decision-making rights) and Birthrights (a UK-based charity and advocacy group dedicated to protecting women’s decision-making rights in pregnancy and childbirth).
April 1, 2024. Joanna Demaree-Cotton was awarded a British Academic Knowledge Frontiers Grant for her project “Gendered Conceptions of Autonomous Consent”. Co-Investigators on the project include Asst Prof. Brian Earp, Asst Prof. April Bailey, Asst Prof. Carme Isern-Mas, and Dr. Jonathan Pugh.
14 -16 September, 2023. Joanna Demaree-Cotton gave a keynote talk at the 3rd European Experimental Philosophy Conference in Zurich, titled “Experimental Methods & The Ethics of Consent”
June 23- 27, 2023. Joanna Demaree-Cotton gave a keynote talk at the Yale-Oxford-Jagiellonian BioXPhi Conference, titled “Experimental Methods and the Ethics of Consent"
May 30, 2023. Joanna Demaree-Cotton participated as an invited speaker in the Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy (SSNAP) at Duke University, with a talk entitled "Cognitive (Neuro)Science and the Epistemology of Moral Dilemmas”.
February 22, 2023. Joanna Demaree-Cotton and Ben Phillips gave a talk on their ongoing project to the UK Experimental Philosophy Workshop, entitled "Dehumanization, the moral self, and distinct types of condemnation"
September 2022. The lab is delighted to welcome Prof Joshua Rottman as a visitor for this academic year!
March 29, 2022. Paper in Nature Communications, "How Social Relationships Shape Moral Wrongness Judgments," listed among the top-25 most downloaded articles in social sciences and human behaviour for 2021. Read the announcement here.
June 29 - July 1, 2022. Lab co-hosts 2nd International Oxford-Yale Experimental Bioethics (BioXPhi) Conference at University of Oxford. See schedule and speakers here.

Relational Moral Psychology

https://www.youtube.com/embed/LJ55V7jf53k

Link: https://youtu.be/LJ55V7jf53k

Talk given to the Experimental Psychology Department, University of Oxford, by Dr Brian Earp (19 October 2022)

Most recent work in moral psychology has focused on judgments concerning strangers in strange situations (for example, the ubiquitous 'trolley' dilemma). But many moral judgments in real life concern people with whom we stand in some kind of social relationship: friends, family, teachers, students, bosses, employees, romantic partners, acquaintances, and so forth. In this talk, I'll share recent and forthcoming work on how we can explain and predict everyday human moral judgments in rich socio-relational contexts, based on an underlying framework that captures that cooperative functions that different relationships are normatively expected to serve in a given society.