Dr Simon Rippon

College lecturer in Philosophy

simon.rippon@philosophy.ox.ac.uk

I returned to Oriel in 2010 to teach the Finals course in Ethics and the Prelims course in Mill. I first came to Oriel not to teach but to begin to study philosophy as an undergraduate, in 1994, so I'm very happy to have come back to my college "home".

In addition to my teaching duties at Oriel, I hold a full time post as Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. I am also a Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College. Before returning to Oxford, I was at Harvard University where I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation in metaethics, concerning how we learn about moral issues and what this can tell us about the nature of morality.

Research Interests

My current research is mainly in normative bioethics, including ethical matters such as the ways in which society might ethically procure more organs for transplant patients. For example, should we allow living people to sell a kidney, and should we presume your consent to donate your organs after your death unless you've explicitly opted out of donating them? One of my major research goals is to show how abstract philosophical thought about the nature of morality may be used to make progress in reflecting on practical moral problems.