Professor Thomas Douglas
Tom Douglas is Professor of Applied Philosophy and Director of Research at the Oxford Uehiro Institute. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford and one of the directors of the Oxford Martin Programme on Decarceration.
Tom initially qualified as a medical doctor at the University of Otago (New Zealand) before taking up a Rhodes Scholarship in Oxford, where he received his BA in Philosophy, Politics & Economics in 2005, and his DPhil in Philosophy in 2010. From 2010-13 he held a Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship in the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and a Junior Research Fellowship at Balliol College; from 2013-19 he led the project 'Neurointerventions in Crime Prevention: An Ethical Analysis’, funded by an Investigator Award from the Wellcome Trust; from 2015-19 he was Lead Researcher on the Oxford Martin Programme on Collective Responsibility for Infectious Disease; and from 2020-2025 he was Principal Investigator on the project 'Protecting Minds: The Right to Mental Integrity and the Ethics of Arational Influence', funded by a Consolidator Award from the European Research Council.
Tom’s research lies mainly in practical and normative ethics. His work currently focuses on the ethics of bodily, mental and behavioural influence/interference and the ethics of behavioural prediction. Previously, he has written on the the nature and moral status of moral improvement; tensions between special obligations and requirements of fairness; slippery slope arguments; reproductive ethics; and the dual-use dilemma, among other topics. More information is available on his personal website here and research programme website here.
Featured publications
Douglas T, Protecting Minds: The Right Against Mental Interference (Oxford University Press, 2026).
Douglas T, 'What Does It Take to Trespass on a Person’s Body?' forthcoming in Analysis.
Douglas T, 'An Intuitive, Abductive Argument for a Right Against Mental Interference’, Journal of Ethics 2024; 29: 133-155.
De Marco G*, Simons J*, Forsberg L, Douglas T, ‘What Makes a Medical Intervention Invasive?’, Journal of Medical Ethics 2024; 50: 226–233, (* joint first authors).
De Marco G, Douglas T, 'Nudge Transparency Is Not Required for Nudge Resistibility', Ergo, 2023; 10(5): doi:10.3998/ergo.4635.
Douglas T, ‘Is Moral Status Good for You?’, forthcoming in Clarke S, Zohny H, Savulescu J (eds), Rethinking Moral Status (Oxford University Press).
Douglas T, Devolder K, 'Gene Editing, Identity and Benefit', Philosophical Quarterly 2022; 72(2): 305-325.
Douglas T, ‘Punishing Wrongs from the Distant Past’, Law and Philosophy 2019; 38(4): 335-358.
Douglas T, ‘Parental Partiality and Future Children’, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 2019; 15(1): 1-18.
Birks D, Douglas T, Treatment for Crime: Philosophical Essays on Neurointerventions in Criminal Justice (Oxford University Press, 2018).
