Professor Onora O'Neill

Chair, Inquiry into the safety of maternity services

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Onora O'Neill writes on ethics and political philosophy, with particular interests in questions of international justice, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and bioethics. Her books include Faces of Hunger: An essay on poverty, development and justice (1986), Constructions of Reason: Exploration of Kant’s practical philosophy (1989), Towards Justice and Virtue (1996), Bounds of Justice (2000), Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics (2002) and A Question of Trust (the 2002 Reith Lectures). She is currently working on questions of trust and accountability in public life; the ethics of communication (including media ethics); and the concept of informed consent, especially in medical practice and research on human subjects. Some of this work will appear under the title Rethinking Informed Consent, written jointly with Neil Manson, to be published in Spring 2007.

Onora is President of the British Academy, chairs the Nuffield Foundation and is Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University. She has been a member of and chaired the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and the Human Genetics Advisory Commission, and was closely involved in work on a number of reports on biomedical issues. She was created a life peer in 1999, sits as a crossbencher, and has served on House of Lords select committees looking at stem cell research and the BBC Charter Review.