Baroness Onora O’Neill has been named the winner of the 2017 Berggruen Prize, which is awarded annually to a thinker whose ideas ‘have profoundly shaped human self-understanding and advancement in a rapidly changing world’.
The Philosophy Professor, a former Principal of Newnham and now an Honorary Fellow of the College and a crossbench member of the House of Lords, will be awarded the $1 million prize at a ceremony in New York City in December.
The prize was inaugurated last year by the Berggruen Institute, a research organisation based in Los Angeles which is dedicated to improving governance and mutual understanding across cultures, with particular emphasis on intellectual exchange between the West and Asia.
O’Neill was Principal of Newnham College, University of Cambridge, from 1992 until 2006. She studied philosophy, psychology and physiology at the University of Oxford before she received her PhD from Harvard University in 1969. In 1970 she became Assistant Professor at Barnard College, the women’s college at Columbia University. In 1977 she returned to Britain and took up a post at the University of Essex, where she became full Professor of Philosophy in 1987.
She was created a life peer as Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve in 1999 and has served as a crossbench member of the House of Lords since 2000. She has won a number of awards, and was appointed a Commander of the British Empire in 1995 and a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 2014. In 2015 she was awarded the prestigious International Kant Prize. Earlier this year she won The Holberg Prize – worth around £430,000 – for ‘shedding light on pressing and intellectual and ethical questions of our time’.
She has combined writing on political philosophy and ethics with a range of public activities, and her work has influenced generations of scholars, policy makers and practitioners alike. She has written extensively on political philosophy and ethics, bioethics and international justice, and is highly regarded as a specialist on human rights. She has applied a rigorous philosophical thinking when discussing major contemporary issues and her scholarship has had an immeasurable impact on the wider public sphere.
Her contribution to our understanding of Immanuel Kant is regarded as transformative and has led to a renewed interest in his work. In particular, O’Neill has explored the requirements of public reason and how they relate to international justice and to the roles of trust and accountability in public life.
The prize jury, which was led by the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, praised her for providing insight on ‘the central questions of our time, from the tension between universal rights and national sovereignty to the role of interpersonal trust in enabling autonomy to the moral obligation to take action across borders to relieve famine’.
Trust has been a major theme of O’Neill’s work, elaborated in scholarly works like Justice, Trust and Accountability (2005), as well as in a 2013 TED Talk called What We Don’t Understand About Trust which challenged the frequent call to ‘rebuild trust’ across society.
In her Ted Talk, she said: “Frankly, I think that’s a stupid aim. I would aim to have more trust in the trustworthy but not in the untrustworthy. In fact, I aim positively to try not to trust the untrustworthy.”
The call to rebuild trust, she said, ‘gets things backwards’.
Newnham College is organising a TedxNewnham in 2018 and O’Neill’s talk will be screened during the day.
Photo caption: Baroness Onora O’Neill, former Principal, pictured with Professor Dame Carol Black, current Principal.