How do we make moral decisions? Why do people disagree about what is right and wrong? How are our choices shaped by other people, institutions, and technologies? And how can we study these questions in ways that reflect the complexity of moral life?
The Minds & Morality Network is an interdisciplinary research network based at the University of Oxford. It brings together researchers working across moral psychology, neuroethics, bioethics, philosophy, and related fields to develop new ways of understanding morality.
Why Minds and Morality?
Moral decisions rarely happen in isolation. We make decisions in families, workplaces, healthcare systems and communities, and increasingly in environments shaped by digital technologies and artificial intelligence.
These settings raise difficult questions about moral agency, responsibility, disagreement, and the relationships between people and technologies. At the same time, understanding them requires insights from different disciplines. Empirical research can investigate how people think, feel and behave, while philosophy can help us explore what people ought to do. The Minds and Morality Network creates a space in which these perspectives can meet.
The aim of the network is to develop collaborative approaches to studying morality by identifying shared questions, examining differences in concepts and methods, developing new research tools, and creating the foundations for interdisciplinary research projects. This reflects the network’s broader aim to create sustained interaction between disciplines, promote methodological and theoretical innovation, and establish shared research infrastructure.
What does the Network do?
The Minds & Morality Network supports interdisciplinary collaboration through workshops and collaborative research development. Its activities include opportunities for researchers to explore methods and research questions across disciplines; develop new interdisciplinary collaborations; test early stage research ideas; and engage with practitioners, external partners, and the wider public.
A key part of the network is the DREaM Space (Digital Research in Ethics and Methods Space), a dedicated research space at the Uehiro Oxford Institute for exploring how digital and interactive methods, including Virtual Reality, games, and AI-enabled tools, can be used to investigate ethical and moral questions. The DREaM Space provides shared infrastructure for research, methodological experimentation, training, collaboration, and public engagement.
The programme also includes the annual Oxford Neuroethics Lecture, opportunities for pump-priming new interdisciplinary projects, and a Minds and Morality Conference in 2028/29.
