Adam Byfield is a Principal Technical Assurance Specialist at NHS England. After his previous appearance on the podcast, discussing providing ethical assurance for AI applications in healthcare, we were keen to get him back to dive into some more specific issues. We chose bias and accessibility, two related issues that are clearly central for anyone concerned with AI, including in healthcare applications. We talked about different forms of bias, how bias can affect accessibility and what forms of bias, if any, might be acceptable.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Professor Lisa Bortolotti is a philosopher at the University of Birmingham, who has been working on a fascinating interdisciplinary project looking at what happens when young people experiencing mental health difficulties talk to clinicians about those difficulties. The project has involved closely examining hours of audio and video material of these encounters, as well as talking to the young people themselves, in the hope of gaining insights which can help clinicians improve their practice. Emerging from the work has been a focus on agency and the agential stance. We discuss what that means and why it's important, drawing on some examples from the project.

Links to further reading:

Agency project page on the McPin Foundation website: https://mcpin.org/project/agency/ (has a lot of open access resources)

Three relevant open access papers:

• L Bortolotti (2025). Agential Epistemic Injustice in Clinical Interactions Is Bad for Medicine. Philosophy of Medicine 6 (1), 1-19.
• C Bergen, L Bortolotti, R Temple, et al. (2023). Implying implausibility and undermining versus accepting peoples’ experiences of suicidal ideation and self-harm in Emergency Department psychosocial assessments. Frontiers in Psychiatry 14.
• C Bergen, L Bortolotti, K Tallent, et al. (2022). Communication in youth health clinical encounters: Introducing the agential stance. Theory & Psychology 32 (5), 667-690.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Tim Watkin is a journalist and media manager. He works as executive editor for audio at Radio New Zealand, but is currently on sabbatical at the University of Glasgow, studying how to rebuild trust in journalism as part of a project on Epistemic Autonomy. In this interview we discuss the nature of trust, why it's important, why journalists seem to be losing the public's trust, whose fault this is, and what might be done about it.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Joe Fogarty has spent over 30 years working in national security and law enforcement, in the UK and elsewhere. He's currently working on cyber-security risks and organised crime for the UK's central government, as the Head of the Government's Cyber Resilience Centre. Recently, he's been looking at security and law enforcement through a philosophical lens, through studying for a Masters in Applied and Professional Ethics at IDEA, the Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. One of the big questions for these areas of work is how to balance privacy concerns against the public good, and we discuss that question, among others, in this interview.

Some extra reading suggested by Joe:

Omand, D. 2023. Examining the Ethics of Spying: A Practitioner’s View. Criminal Law and Philosophy. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s11572-023-09704-5). [Online]. Available from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11572-023-09704-5.

Omand, D. and Phythian, M. 2023. Principled Spying - The Ethics of Secret Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/principled-spying-the-ethics-of-secret-intelligence-david-omand/3583190.

Fabre, C. 2022. Spying Through A Glass Darkly. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Spying-Through-Glass-Darkly-Counter-Intelligence/dp/019891217X.

And if listeners are interested in a view from the top of the domestic national security establishment, there is an excellent Reith Lecture by former Head of MI5 Eliza Manningham-Buller here, which echoes some of the themes in the podcast:

BBC Radio 4. 2011. Eliza Manningham-Buller - Securing Freedom: Security. [Online]. Available from http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/2011_reith4.pdf.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Luke Ulas from the University of Sheffield and Josh Hobbs from the University of Leeds are both interested in cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is a name used for a few different political ideas, but the core thought, according to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, is "the idea that all human beings, regardless of their political affiliation, are (or can and should be) citizens in a single community." One might think it's an idea that's in retreat, at least in some countries, today. That's one of the issues we discuss, as well as whether there's a crisis of motivation of cosmopolitanism, what that means and what one might do about it.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

This episode is part of what's becoming a bit of an informal series of Ethics Untangled episodes, on ethical issues relating to artificial intelligence applications. The particular application we're looking at this time comes from a healthcare setting, and is called a Patient Preference Predictor. It's a proposed way of using an algorithmic system to predict what a patient's preferences would be concerning their healthcare, in situations where they're incapacitated and unable to tell us what their preferences are. Ethicists have raised concerns about these systems, and these concerns are worth taking seriously, but Dr Nick Makins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Leeds, thinks they can be answered, and that the use of these systems can be justified, at least in some circumstances.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Relationship anarchy is a radical approach to relationships that goes beyond just rejecting traditional monogamy. Relationship anarchists believe that relationships should never involve having power over each other, in the form of holding each other to obligations. So, for example, relationship anarchists reject the idea of restricting one's partner from entering into any form of intimacy with anyone, even with mutual friends. They also reject any hierarchy of relationships - for example having a central relationship with one person whose agreement is needed for you to have relationships with other people. For relationship anarchists, all relationships should be approached individually and no relationship should involve placing restrictions on any partner. Natasha McKeever, and Luke Brunning, all based at the IDEA Centre, have been looking critically at the ethics of relationship anarchy, and I spoke to them in a wide-ranging conversation about this fascinating topic.

Some links to further reading:

An article by Luke in The Conversation about relationship anarchy.

An ABC article about relationship anarchy.

A new book about relationship anarchy.

A 'Short Instructional Manifesto for Relationship Anarchy'

An article by Aleksander Sørlie, Ole Martin Moen on The Ethics of Relationship Anarchy.

A book about relationship anarchy by by Juan-Carlos Pérez-Cortés.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Drag is a type of performance which uses clothing and makeup to imitate and often exaggerate female gender signifiers and gender roles. It's an activity with a long and varied history, and continues to be a very popular form of entertainment, as attested by TV shows such as Ru Paul's Drag Race. It's also distinctive in having faced criticism from several different political directions, including conservative, transgender and feminist perspectives. In this conversation with Simon Kirchin, who is Professor of Applied Ethics, Director of IDEA, The Ethics Centre and someone who has experience as a drag performer himself, we mainly focused on the feminist critique. The problem is that drag typically involves men (a relatively advantaged group) imitating women (a relatively disadvantaged group), in a way that plays on often offensive stereotypes about women, for entertainment. Described in that way, it seems uncomfortably similar to blackface, a form of entertainment which follows a very similar dynamic, at least superficially, on racial lines. Professor Kirchin thinks a moral difference between these two activities can be identified, though, and in the conversation he explains why.

You can read Simon's article on the topic here.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/