Personal Biography

Before joining the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI in 2022 as an Early Career Research Fellow, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Technical University of Munich. I received my PhD in Philosophy from the University of Southampton in 2021. My PhD research was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). During my PhD, I was awarded a visiting PhD fellowship from the Center for Moral and Political Philosophy at Hebrew University Jerusalem. I received my MRes in Philosophy at the University of Reading and my BA in Philosophy and Political Science from the University of Bamberg.

Research and Teaching

My research interests lie in moral and political philosophy, with a focus on the philosophy of harm, future generations, and AI Ethics. In my current work, I explore the morality of affecting the well-being of others through digital technology, and AI and the future of work.

My overarching aim is to bring lessons from deontological ethics to the ethics of Artificial Intelligence. I develop and defend a novel account of harm, the hybrid account, and explore what the deontological moral duty not to harm implies in cases in which the relation between an action and an outcome is complicated: for example, cases in which an action leads to harm only indirectly, or cases in which different agents contribute to a benefit. Such complicated cases arise, for example, in intergenerational ethics, but also in AI Ethics. I am particularly interested in the future of work in an increasingly data-driven world. I teach tutorials in Ethics and AI Ethics.

Publications

Unruh, C. F. (2023). The Constraint Against Doing Harm and Long-Term Consequences. Journal of Moral Philosophy, 20(3-4), 290-310. https://doi.org/10.1163/17455243-20223642

Charlotte Franziska Unruh (2022). “A Hybrid Account of Harm.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, DOI: 10.1080/00048402.2022.2048401

Charlotte Franziska Unruh (2022). “Doing and allowing good.” Analysis, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anac018

Charlotte Franziska Unruh (2021). “Letting Climate Change.” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 7 (3) 368–86, DOI: 10.1017/apa.2020.36.

Charlotte Franziska Unruh (2012). “The Strings Attached to Bringing Future Generations Into Existence.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 38(5), 857-869. https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12532