2026 Lockwood Lecture with Prof David Boonin. The event is followed by a drinks reception.
Thursday, 25 June 2026, 5pm to 6.30pm
Title: Is Ethical Divestment Possible?
A common justification for ethical divestment rests on the claim that your owning stock in an immoral company makes you complicit in the company’s immoral behavior. But there’s something puzzling about this view. Suppose you own such stock. Ethical divestment requires you to sell it. If you sell it to someone, then they’ll own it. If it’s wrong to own the stock, then they’ll be doing something wrong. So if you sell someone the stock you own in an immoral company, you’ll be helping them do something wrong. And it seems wrong to help someone do something wrong. This seems to make it wrong for you to sell the stock to them. How, then, can a company’s immoral behavior make it wrong for you to own stock in the company but not make it wrong for you to get rid of the stock by selling it to someone else? How, in short, can ethical divestment be possible? I will discuss a variety of answers that have been offered to this puzzling question and propose an alternative response.
Professor Boonin’s interests lie in the areas of applied ethics, ethical theory, and the history of ethics. He is the author of Thomas Hobbes and the Science of Moral Virtue (Cambridge University Press 1994), A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge University Press, 2003), The Problem of Punishment (Cambridge University Press, 2008) Should Race Matter? (Cambridge University Press, 2011), The Non-Identity Problem and the Ethics of Future People (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Beyond Roe: Why Abortion Should be Legal Even if the Fetus is a Person (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Dead Wrong: The Ethics of Posthumous Harm (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Sexual Ethics and Problematic Consent (Oxford University Press, 2024), as well as a number of articles on such subjects as animal rights, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and our moral obligations to future generations.
Series: Lockwood Memorial Lecture
Venue:
Rewley House - Lecture Theatre
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Lecture Theatre Rewley House 1-7 Wellington Square Oxford Oxfordshire OX1 2JA United Kingdom
Department: The Uehiro Oxford Institute (Department)
Organiser: Uehiro Oxford Institute
Host: Dr César Palacios-González
Register here: https://bookwhen.com/uehiro/e/ev-s1jvn-20260625170000
More info:
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