Welcome to the Centre of Study on Global Ethics and the Department of Philosophy at the University
of Birmingham. Shall we start by just if you can give us a brief introduction of who you
are and where youre from.
Yes, thank you very much. So thank you very much for having me, first of all. I am Agomoni
and I am a Chancellors Fellow in Bio-Ethics in the Legal and Bio-Ethical aspects of Bio-Medicine
at the University of Edinburgh. Im based at the Law School there. And Im also Co-Director
of the [Mason - 0:00:34] Institute which is a research institute where researchers work
at the intersection between medicine, life sciences and the humanities and social sciences.
OK. And what aspects of global ethics do you mainly work on?
So Im mostly interested in global health and I work on specific kinds of applied topics
within global health. So Ive written a little bit on the ethical aspects of sex selection
for non-medical purposes, Ive written on global surrogacy, especially global, commercial
surrogacy, and Ive recently also become increasingly interested in global health emergencies
and the ethical aspects of those.
OK, great, thats really interesting. So could you maybe elaborate on some problems
like in one or two of those areas that youre most interested in at the moment?
I think theres a sort of common theme across all these areas that Im particularly interested
in and thats the aspect of structural and gender justice. So these come across in any
of these applied topics that I work on and Im also interested in conceptual analysis
in ethics, so I do a little bit of work on concepts of exploitation and vulnerability,
as applied to the topics that I was telling you about earlier.
And so do you think those kinds of topics coercion and exploitation and vulnerability
are pressing problems in these debates?
Absolutely. I think especially the structural approach to these problems I think is something
that still needs quite a bit of attention, probably more than it currently gets when
talking about these issues.
OK and whats the next big project that you would like to work on, or a kind of philosophical
or legal problem that you can see that youd like to work on a bit more?
So the topics that Im going to be working on in the coming years, also as part of a
Welcome Trust project, is on its entitled Vulnerability and Justice in Global Health
Emergencies, Developing Future Ethical Models. So what we would like to do as part of this
project is to really highlight the justice aspects, the justice concerns, of global health
emergencies and their connection with vulnerability, with structural injustice, with epistemic
injustice, and then see how we can take lessons learned from prior global health emergencies
to understand how to better develop responses for future emergencies that are more responsive
to concerns of justice.
And that leads me nicely onto the final question which is if you could make just one recommendation
to policy or practice, based on you research, what would that be?
That would be not to treat something that we do a lot in Bio-Ethics is to treat
each applied issue as a contained problem, be it surrogacy, be it health emergency and
so on, but rather to take a broader, global and structural view of how to approach these
problems. I think policy needs that, definitely.
Thank you.
