This collection of essays celebrates more than five decades of philosophical work from one of the most influential and important moral philosophers of our time. The volume is composed of thirteen chapters organized into four sections. The first twelve chapters come from well-known contributors, most of whom presented versions of their essays at the 2009 conference, ‘Ethics and Politics Beyond Borders: The Work of Onora O’Neill’, convened by three of the four editors (Archard, Deveaux and Weinstock) at the British Academy. The final chapter is a response from O’Neill. Reading Onora O’Neill showcases the impressive breadth of O’Neill’s philosophical career. The essays address topics ranging from Kant’s practical philosophy and constructivism in ethics to global justice, informed consent, procreative ethics and trust. As O’Neill herself observes in the opening lines of the final chapter, ‘Reading the finished versions [of the contributors’ essays] has confirmed my suspicion that I have cast my net rather wide; probably dangerously wide’ (p. 219). Dangerous or not, O’Neill’s wide net has certainly been philosophically fruitful. While the contributors readily acknowledge their debts to O’Neill, many also challenge her conclusions. The essays are, for the most part, fairly critical of O’Neill’s work. Given restrictions on space, most of what follows will be limited to summary.

Part one, Kant on action and reason, includes essays from Marcia Baron, Melissa Barry, Thomas E. Hill, Jr., and Katrin Flikschuh. In her narrowly focused chapter, ‘Moral Worth and Moral Rightness, Maxims and Actions’, Baron challenges a view endorsed by O’Neill in her very influential 1985 essay, ‘Consistency in Action’. According to O’Neill, the moral distinction that Kant’s universality test draws is a distinction between acts that have moral worth and those that lack moral worth. Baron argues that this view is not a plausible interpretation given that Kant’s view in Groundwork, I, is that an action has moral worth only if it is done from the motive of duty. Baron invites O’Neill to explain the view that the universality test is a test of moral worth rather than mere permissibility; unfortunately, no such explanation is forthcoming in O’Neill’s response to Baron.

In her contribution to the volume, ‘Constructivist Practical Reasoning and Objectivity’, Melissa Barry takes on O’Neill’s constructivist account of practical reasoning, arguing that this account is best understood as a form of limited constructivism rather than a complete constructivism, in virtue of the fact that it relies on the substantive Kantian ideal of respect for rational agency that is not fully vindicated by constructivist reasoning. Barry contends that Christine Korsgaard’s constructivist account of practical reasoning similarly relies on ‘a distinctly Kantian ideal of agency’. According to Barry, the similarity between these two accounts ‘suggests that the problem lies not with the details of the accounts but with the project of trying to give a constructivist vindication of practical reasoning itself’ (p. 17). O’Neill resists this conclusion in her response. She maintains that the Kantian approach takes the circumstances of reasoning as its starting point and that this approach yields more than Barry acknowledges.

Thomas Hill’s essay, ‘Varieties of Constructivism’, also examines O’Neill’s work in constructivism, this time with the intention ‘to explore the contrasts, real and apparent, between the constructivisms of O’Neill and Rawls’ (p. 38). Hill’s contribution to the volume, unlike most of the others, examines O’Neill’s work over nearly the entirety of her career. Hill’s chapter reveals how O’Neill’s later writing is informed by her earlier work interpreting Kant’s practical philosophy. The essay culminates in an examination of some of O’Neill’s primary objections to Rawls’s political constructivism. Hill’s analysis aims to separate minor disagreements from fundamental ones, gently suggesting that the standards that motivate many of O’Neill’s critiques may in fact be too high. O’Neill’s response in the final chapter recounts some of her agreements and disagreements with Rawls, particularly with regard to the nature and scope of public reason.

The final essay in this section is from Katrin Flikschuh, who endeavours to articulate a plausible notion of practical faith in relation to Kant’s political morality. In doing so, she challenges what she takes to be the secular reading of Kantian practical faith found in O’Neill’s 1996 Tanner Lectures, Kant on Reason and Religion. Flikschuh’s account of practical faith in the political realm is grounded in the notion of existential prudence, which she understands as prudence that is connected with theoretical unknowability. Observing that the peculiar problem of a political order for Kant is that it must be headed by a fallible human being unequal to the task of stewardship of the Right of mankind, Flikschuh argues that ‘In the absence of existential prudence it is not clear … that the moral politician can acknowledge the demands of his office’ (p. 73). In her response, O’Neill disputes Flikschuh’s characterization of her interpretation of Kantian practical faith as a form of radical secularism.

Part two is devoted to O’Neill’s work on agency and individual autonomy. Neil Manson’s contribution, ‘Informed Consent and Referential Opacity’, seeks to demonstrate that referential opacity is in fact much broader than the technical problem discussed by logicians and philosophers of language. Manson does not challenge O’Neill’s work, but rather seeks to demonstrate its richness and importance. Manson observes that ‘O’Neill’s talk of referential opacity is a way of directing us toward an unavoidable and very general structural feature of agency and rational deliberation’ (p. 84). Our rational engagement with the world is necessarily mediated through particular conceptions or descriptions of how the world is. Referential opacity is simply a feature of our rational finitude and cannot be overcome by additional information. In light of this, Manson argues that we must rethink the normative work that consent can and cannot do. In her response, O’Neill suggests that the remedy for problems like referential opacity ‘is to give more explicit and thorough attention to the complex normative requirements on adequate communication or interaction’ (p. 228), a theme that recurs in O’Neill’s chapter.

Suzanne Uniacke’s ‘Respect for Autonomy in Medical Ethics’ engages with O’Neill’s 2002 Gifford Lectures. Uniacke challenges O’Neill’s claim that the standard of respect for patient autonomy in medicine frequently operates unproblematically with only a minimalist conception of personal autonomy. She endeavours to show ‘that a relatively robust conception of individual autonomy has a greater and more fundamental role in medical decision-making in contexts of serious illness or injury than O’Neill suggests’ (p. 97). Of particular interest to Uniacke are advance directives. O’Neill’s response emphasizes the wide range of interpretations of individual autonomy and the need to balance respect for autonomy with other morally relevant considerations.

In the third and final essay in this section, ‘Independence, Dependence, and the Liberal Subject’, Marilyn Friedman draws on O’Neill’s work in order to respond to one variant of the feminist critique of independence, namely, that independence is not humanly possible. Following O’Neill, Friedman maintains that independence understood as a relative and comparative notion (independence from something or other, to some degree, and within some specific sphere of activity) is neither myth nor fiction but rather a meaningful prudential ideal. In the latter half of her chapter, Friedman turns her attention to the practice, common to liberal-democratic theorizing, of relying on an idealized conception of citizens as independent. In particular, she considers the problem that ‘The severely cognitively disabled are simply ignored by traditional theories of liberal legitimacy’ (p. 120). Friedman contends that, even in O’Neill’s expanded conception of citizenry, there is still no room to take account of the cognitively impaired and proposes a two-pronged approach to establishing political legitimacy, where consent by those able to consent is supplemented by proxy consent for those who are not. O’Neill argues in her response that this approach is not necessary.

One of the distinguishing features of O’Neill’s long career is her commitment to addressing philosophical questions in both theoretical and practical ethics. Part three of Reading Onora O’Neill contains a pair of essays that critically examine O’Neill’s work on two applied topics. Simon Caney’s ‘Agents of Global Justice’ engages with O’Neill’s distinctive perspective on global justice, focusing on her account of agents of justice, that is, ‘those actors whose job it is to build and maintain a fairer world’ (p. 134). Caney proposes a more comprehensive framework for thinking about who can be a primary or secondary agent of justice, what sorts of responsibilities they have, what sorts of powers they may use in discharging these responsibilities and what sorts of norms should govern their decisions. Caney argues that many different bodies can be agents of justice (e.g. states, international institutions, transnational companies, nongovernmental organizations, victims of injustice). O’Neill is quick to concur with this expansion of her work.

In ‘Procreative Rights and Procreative Duties’, David Archard revisits O’Neill’s view that the right to procreate is contingent upon ensuring that one’s child has a minimally adequate standard of upbringing, a view which she originally articulated in her 1979 essay ‘Begetting, Bearing, and Rearing’ and returned to in her 2002 Gifford Lectures. Archard takes up the question of how this standard of procreative responsibility might be justified, arguing that an appeal to a harm principle will not ground the constraints on procreative autonomy that O’Neill defends. He concludes by suggesting that a more promising strategy is to appeal to something like Joel Feinberg’s notion of a birthright. In her response, O’Neill concedes that she has said too little on the subject while registering her scepticism with regard to the recent focus on reproductive autonomy.

In part four, Trust and trustworthiness, Annette Baier, Karen Jones and Daniel Weinstock engage with O’Neill’s later work on trust, including her 2002 Reith Lectures, her 2002 Gifford Lectures and her 2005 paper ‘Justice, Trust and Accountability’. In ‘What is Trust?’, Annette Baier argues that O’Neill has confused trust with reliance and that she has in fact failed to provide an account of trust. Baier insists that her own understanding of trust as acceptance of vulnerability is broad enough to cover a variety of cases including trust in professionals and institutions. In her response, O’Neill emphasizes that her philosophical interest in trust lies in distinguishing when trust is and is not well-placed, and Baier’s account of trust is not helpful in this regard.

In ‘Distrusting and Trustworthiness’, Karen Jones challenges O’Neill’s rejection of attitudinal accounts of trust. Focusing on the problem of misplaced distrust, Jones endeavours to defend affective attitude accounts, arguing that ‘unless we recognize the affective component of trust we will not be able to fully appreciate trust’s pathologies, including its susceptibility to being undermined by isolated but dramatic breaches of trust and its vulnerability to prejudice and stereotype’ (p. 187). O’Neill replies to Jones by clarifying that she is not committed to denying that trust has an affective component, but rather emphasizes judgement and choice as partial remedies for the pathologies of trust.

Finally, Daniel Weinstock’s ‘Trust in Institutions’ is a response to O’Neill’s complaint that ‘core social institutions in modern liberal democracies do not at present function so as to warrant the conferral by citizens of trust’ (p. 200). Weinstock outlines the complexities that accompany any decision to confer trust on an institution, arguing that these complexities, along with the costs of not trusting and the non-substitutability of relying on certain kinds of agents for the realization of our interests, explain why individuals often decide to trust institutions that they consider to lack trustworthiness. Weinstock encourages us to see institutions as collective agents that have characters and maxims that are accessible to the public through constitutions, legislation, institutional rules and regulations as well as monitoring devices, which he argues can increase the capacity of citizens to confer trust wisely. O’Neill concurs with much of Weinstock’s analysis, again insisting that in order to identify effective remedies to the problem of misplaced trust (and distrust) ‘we need to think more capaciously about the ethics of communication’ (p. 241).

This is an excellent collection of essays celebrating a generous and gifted philosopher. The volume is likely to have broad appeal, being of interest to those working in Kant scholarship as well as those working in normative and applied ethics more broadly. The contributors aptly demonstrate that O’Neill has made substantial contributions to the philosophical landscape and will be read for many years to come.