Introduction

Onora O’Neill - Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve - is one of the world’s most prominent and distinguished philosophers. Her work has dealt with a very wide range of topics, ranging from the interpretation of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and the elaboration of a distinctly Kantian theory of moral agency, to moral and political philosophy and to the examination of some of the most important moral and political issues of the day. Though she has voiced scepticism toward attempts at applying philosophical theories to practical issues in too simplistic a manner, she has as a philosopher contributed to illuminating a great number of real-world ethical debates in philosophically sophisticated ways that betoken her keen awareness of the problems inherent in attempts at simply ‘applying’ philosophical theories to real-world controversies.1 What is remarkable about O’Neill’s work is that her writings in practical philosophy and even her non-academic interventions in the public sphere are deeply informed by her most general, abstract philosophical commitments. Rigorous philosophical theorizing about rationality and agency, drawing upon, and building upon a range of insights in Kant’s philosophy, has been at the fore of her research and has shaped her approach to, and participation in, various applied philosophical topics and projects. Strangely, perhaps, it is a matter of chance that O’Neill ended up being a philosopher at all. As an undergraduate she originally enrolled to study History with French and Latin at Somerville College, Oxford. The philosopher at her college - Elizabeth Anscombe - recognized O’Neill’s aptitude for, and interest in, matters philosophical and, reportedly, passed on a oneline note to her college tutors - ‘this girl is hungry for philosophy’.2 In those days, student affairs were, it would seem, considerably less burdened by bureaucracy and her enrolment was changed to Philosophy, Psychology and Physiology. Having excelled at her undergraduate studies she gained a scholarship for postgraduate study at Harvard where she eventually ended up doing her doctoral dissertation under the supervision of John Rawls. But it was, arguably, Robert Nozick’s graduate seminar that accentuated her interest in Kant. The seminar was focused on decision theory, but O’Neill found that account of rationality deployed to be overly thin. Kant - whose writings she had encountered as an undergraduate - seemed to offer something richer and more defensible, which led to her requesting Rawls as her doctoral supervisor. Her prize-winning doctoral dissertation was on universalizability, more specifically, on the problem of how to integrate the universality of certain kinds of rational norms - as found in Kant’s categorical imperative - with the particularity of specific actions, without losing the normative dimension to either. A descendant of her doctoral dissertation was published as a monograph: Acting on Principle (Columbia University Press, 1975). After Harvard she took a post at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she remained until the late 1970s, when she returned to the UK, taking a post at the University of Essex. During the 1970s O’Neill published on a wide range of research topics including rationality and agency, Kant’s theory of objective space, global justice, rights theory, and the ethics of rearing and educating children. In the 1980s she continued to work on Kant, the ethics of child rearing and the family, and global ethics, the latter topic receiving a detailed treatment in her monograph Faces of Hunger: An Essay on Poverty, Development and Justice (George Allen and Unwin, 1986). Early in the decade she expanded her research interests into the area of medical ethics - though, as one might expect, O’Neill’s medical ethics is one that is philosophically robust and focused upon ethically relevant aspects of agency. Abstract issues about agency continue as a research theme, with the ethics of consent emerging as a topic of interest, one to which she will repeatedly return over the next two decades. By the end of the decade the themes of Kant, agency, reason, normativity and ethics, all converge in the monograph outlining her distinctive development of Kantian constructivism Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1989). O’Neill argues that a proper interpretation of Kant’s constructivism about practical reasoning and its principles (or maxims) offers us a more defensible, adequate and robust framework for critically engaging with a wide range of ethical problems, including those that might seem to fall within the domain of applied ethics. But unlike some applied ethicists, who offer an ‘off the peg’ application of a sometimes thin understanding of Kant, or Mill, or Aristotle to give a deontological or consequentialist or virtue ethics ‘solution’ to an applied ethical conundrum, O’Neill as a Kant scholar herself, offers a clarified, revised version of Kantianism, at a very deep, sophisticated level. In the 1990s O’Neill continued to develop, and elaborate upon, her research in these areas, in a wide range of articles and books. The start of the decade saw her leave Essex for Newnham College Cambridge, where she was elected Principal in 1992 - the head of the college - and remained so until her retirement in 2006. In terms of her philosophical work, her Kantian constructivism was further developed in Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge University Press, 1996). Here O’Neill offers a thorough critical assessment of the relationship between rights-based theories of ethics and virtue ethics, with once again a focus on reason and agency. Her Kant-inflected critical philosophy is also developed in Bounds of Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Kant (on Religion and Reason) provides the focus of her 1996 Tanner Lectures at Harvard. The end of the 1990s found O’Neill entering a new area of research - bioethics - that might seem to be at some distance from Kant and abstract thinking about reason and agency. Bioethics is a discipline that studies ethical problems that arise from biotechnological developments. Not all bioethics is philosophical, and not all philosophical bioethics exhibits the rigour and analytic subtlety of O’Neill’s work. Her new research interest in bioethical issues coincided with her playing an increasing role in public and policy affairs, some of which are directly concerned with bioethical matters. In the 1990s O’Neill was a member, then chair, of the UK’s Nuffield Council on Bioethics. Later in the decade she was a member (and acting chair) of the UK Human Genetics Advisory Commission. Her contribution to public life in the UK was recognized in the honours system with the award of a CBE - (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire). In 1999, she was appointed a life peer in the UK House of Lords, taking the title Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve. The new millennium saw her continue her research on many of the topics highlighted above, but with a widening of her communication to audiences beyond philosophy and even beyond the academy. In Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics (Cambridge University Press, 2002), based upon her 2001 Gifford lectures, she offers a critical perspective on the way that notions of autonomy (including Kant’s notion of autonomy) are misunderstood and misused in bioethics, together with a neglect of the importance of trust. Philosophical and ethical issues to do with trust and placing trust are at the core of her 2002 Reith Lectures - a prestigious public broadcast lecture series in the UK. These lectures were published as Question of Trust (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Applied philosophical themes, including the critical evaluation of bioethics and a stress on the ethical importance of trust, emerge once more in Rethinking Informed Consent (Cambridge University Press, 2007) (co-authored with Neil C. Manson). Communication and the ethics of communication are central topics in Rethinking Informed Consent. But the ethics of communication has also been an important, if implicit, aspect of many different areas of O’Neill’s work: her constructivism lays great stress on the importance that norms be communicable to others; her work on consent, and on trust, similarly involves a critical focus on normative aspects of, and the normative role of, communication in securing consent or in signalling trustworthiness. In recent years this interest in the ethics of communication has become more explicit with O’Neill’s work on freedom of the press and freedom of speech, data protection regulation, transparency, accountability, and communicative norms more generally. With over 130 articles, and nine books, on a wide range of philosophical topics, any volume on Onora O’Neill’s work, especially one entitled Reading Onora O’Neill, poses its editors with a problem of selection. We could not hope to offer a fully comprehensive critical commentary upon all of O’Neill’s work whilst at the same time doing justice to the rigour and subtlety of her work. We have therefore decided to restrict our focus to some key areas. A recent volume focuses specifically on O’Neill’s Kantian philosophy from the perspective of Kant studies and Kant scholarship, and the present volume does not duplicate that focus. Whilst Kant does feature heavily in many of the critical commentaries below, the collection opens with critical discussion of a topic that has been central to a great deal of O’Neill’s philosophy, sometimes explicitly, sometimes less explicitly, and sometimes indirectly: the nature of reason and agency. As noted above, O’Neill takes Kant’s insights about reason and agency very seriously. But O’Neill has not simply taken Kantian views of reason and agency and applied them to philosophical and ethical problems; she has sought to get to the very heart of the issues about reasoning and agency that were Kant’s concern, and to improve upon Kant’s way of engaging with and resolving those issues. In ‘Moral Worth and Moral Rightness, Maxims and Actions’ Marcia Baron focuses upon a key challenge for O’Neill’s constructivism (and also for Kant), one that is directed at its fundamentals. On O’Neill’s constructivist theory, maxims are of central moral worth. But this poses the challenge of what we say about the moral worth of particular actions. Kant seems to suggest that the connection is found in whether or not the action is done out of duty. But, Baron argues, an action might ‘fit’ with a maxim that passes the test of the categorical imperative but not be done out of duty: does such an action inherit the moral worth of the maxim or not? If it does, how is this so? Baron argues that neither Kant nor O’Neill has offered us an adequate answer here. O’Neill’s distinctive take on Kantian constructivism is also subjected to critical evaluation in Melissa Barry’s ‘Constructivist Practical Reasoning and Objectivity’, which seeks to clarify the scope and ambitions of O’Neill’s constructivism. O’Neill’s work, especially in Towards Justice and Virtue, seems to suggest that she aspires to offer a constructivist account of reasoning and the authority of reasons. Barry argues that this is much more problematic than the more modest project of seeking to offer a constructivist account of ethical norms that rests upon an unanalysed notion of rational authority as its foundation. Thomas Hill’s ‘Varieties of Constructivism’, as the title suggests, also focuses on O’Neill’s constructivism but here seeks to clarify the scope and limits of O’Neill’s constructivism by comparing it with other forms of constructivism, including Kant’s own, and the political constructivism of John Rawls. Like Barry, Hill also seeks to press O’Neill on the question of what, if anything, provides the foundation for the constructivist process. Still with Kant, but with a different focus, Katrin Flikschuh’s ‘Hope as Prudence: Practical Faith in Kant’s Political Thinking’ engages with the topic of O’Neill’s 1996 Tanner Lectures: Kant’s philosophical theology and its implications for the notion of religious hope. Flikschuh argues against what she sees as O’Neill’s overly secular interpretation of Kant.