thomas.douglas@philosophy.ox.ac.uk
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
Tom Douglas is a Senior Research Fellow in the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. He is also Principal Investigator on the Wellcome Trust-funded project ‘Neurointerventions in Crime Prevention: An Ethical Analysis’ and Lead Researcher in the Oxford Martin Programme on Collective Responsibility for Infectious Disease. He initially qualified as a medical doctor at the University of Otago (New Zealand) before taking up a Rhodes Scholarship in Oxford, where he received his BA in Philosophy, Politics & Economics in 2005, and his DPhil in Philosophy in 2010. From 2010-2013 he was a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in the Uehiro Centre and a Junior Research Fellow at Balliol College.
Tom’s research lies mainly in practical and normative ethics. In practical ethics, his work focuses on the ethics of using medical technologies for ‘non-medical’ purposes, such as crime prevention and behaviour change. In normative ethics he is primarily interested in the nature of moral improvement and in tensions between special obligations and requirements of fairness. Previously, he has written on slippery slope arguments, organ donation policy, the philosophical foundations of injury compensation law, and the dual-use dilemma.