Onora O'Neill b. 1941

Onora O'Neill is a British philosopher and Crossbench member of the House of Lords, formerly principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, whose work has shaped contemporary Kantian ethics, bioethics, and political philosophy. Constructions of Reason and Towards Justice and Virtue developed a constructivist reading of Kant's practical philosophy in which obligations are derived from principles of action that all rational agents can share, while A Question of Trust applied her ethical framework to the institutions of public communication and journalism. Her influential work in bioethics has shaped policy on consent, experimentation, and the responsibilities of professional bodies.

Onora Sylvia O'Neill, Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve, was born at Aughafatten in County Antrim in August 1941, the daughter of the diplomat Sir Con O'Neill. She took her bachelor's at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1963 and her doctorate at Harvard in 1968 under John Rawls. She taught at Barnard College in New York, moved to the University of Essex in 1977, and from 1992 to 2006 was Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge. She was created a cross-bench life peer in 1999, served as president of the British Academy from 2005 to 2009, and chaired the United Kingdom Equality and Human Rights Commission from 2012 to 2016.

Her books include Faces of Hunger: An Essay on Poverty, Justice and Development (1986), Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant's Practical Philosophy (1989), Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning (1996), Bounds of Justice (2000), the BBC Reith Lectures published as A Question of Trust (2002), Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics (2002), Justice across Boundaries (2016), and From Principles to Practice (2018).

O'Neill has developed a Kantian constructivism on which the principles of practical reason are the principles that any agent could intelligibly will to be shared by all the others on whom her own action depends; she has applied that framework to global hunger, distributive justice, autonomy, informed consent in medicine, and the conditions of trust in public institutions. She is one of the most institutionally influential British moral philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.