Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve to give prestigious Ashby Lecture

In her lecture Baroness O’Neill will look at current discussions around the topic of trust. She will suggest how current views should be changed to look more at a person’s trustworthiness rather than their trust.

“Many public and journalistic discussions of trust focus on empirical evidence of attitudes of trust and mistrust, but say almost nothing about trustworthiness. From a practical point of view this is perverse, since it is others’ trustworthiness rather than their trust that we need to judge," said Baroness O’Neill. “If we are to judge whether others say what they mean and will do what they say, we need to judge their reliability, competence and motivation, and to abolish practices of accountability that are unfit for purpose.”

The annual Ashby lecture is named after the former Master of Clare Hall Sir Eric Ashby, later to become Lord Ashby of Brandon. Past lecturers include Sir David King, Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford, and Kirsty Sword-Gusmao, First Lady to the President of the independent nation of East Timor.

Baroness O’Neill is renowned for her writings on ethics and political philosophy. She is particularly interested in questions of international justice, the philosophy of 18th Century German philosopher Immanuel Kant and the topic of bioethics.

She is currently working on practical judgement and normativity, on questions of trust and accountability in public life and on the ethics of communication, including media ethics, while continuing to work on Kant’s philosophy.

Baroness O’Neill was the principal of Newnham College between 1992 and 2006, and she teaches in the Faculty of Philosophy. She is currently President of the British Academy and chairs the Nuffield Foundation. She has been a member of and chaired the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and the Human Genetics Advisory Commission.

She has worked on a number of reports on bio-medical issues, including recently the Kings Fund Inquiry into the Safety of Maternity Services. She was created a Life Peer in 1999, sits as a crossbencher, served on the House of Lords Select Committees on Stem Cell Research, BBC Charter Review and currently Genomic Medicine.

The lecture is being held on Friday 15 May at 6.00pm, Robinson College, Auditorium, Grange Road Cambridge. The Lecture is free and open to all - for your free ticket send a stamped and s.a.e. to Rossella Wilson, Clare Hall, Development Office Herschel Road, Cambridge CB3 9AL or email alumni@clarehall.cam.ac.uk.