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Brenda Margaret Almond (; 19 September 1937 – 14 January 2023) was a British philosopher, known for her work on philosophy of education and applied ethics. She was an elected member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Almond also organised and reported on academic conferences on the issue including one held at Surrey University in 1986 focussing on medical confidentiality and discriminationTimes Higher Education Supplement | 1986 | “AIDS: A Question of Ethics” and the Third International Conference on AIDS in Washington in 1987.“War of the Worlds” | July 3, 1987 | Times Higher Education Supplement
In later years, Almond moved on to issues such as biotechnologies and even debates about who and what constituted a “legitimate target” during a war.“The ethics of virtue vs the ethics of justice” | By Brenda Almond | The Independent | 14 May 1999 In an opinion piece for the magazine Philosophy Now
| Summer 1999
Almond was later a professor emeritus at Hull University.
Almond argued that ultimately the freedom to opt out of the education system altogether must be protected, as well as the freedom to choose a religious education in a secular state, or a secular education in a religious state in Education and the Individual, (written when she was in her thirties, under her married name), and went on to write Moral Concerns, The Philosophical Quest and Exploring Ethics: A Traveller's Tale and The Fragmenting Family. As part of a personal profile of Almond, the Times Higher Education Supplement says "she argues that the family is about more than stability in the present: it is about the past and the future" and notes that the book emphasises G. K. Chesterton's description of the family as "this frail cord, flung from the forgotten hills of yesterday to the invisible mountains of tomorrow".
As well as being a philosophy professor, Almond sought to present her particular view of individual rights to a wider public. She argued regularly for maintenance of the “welfare of the child provision” when legislation was crafted to reflect the changing technologies of birthGreat Britain Parliament House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (2025). 9780215023230, The Stationery Office. . ISBN 9780215023230 and raised ethical issues surrounding the use of human embryos.
Ailsa Stevens wrote in an article that appeared in BioNews that Almond, "felt that anxieties over hybrid embryo research had been fuelled by confusion over the definition of an embryo".
Almond died in Sussex on 14 January 2023, at the age of 85. In an appreciation published by The Guardian, her son Martin Cohen noted that her "authentic voice" was to be found in her best-known title, The Philosophical Quest (1990), a mix of conventional, essentially educational, summaries of the core themes of philosophy, alongside more fluid, creative passages in which the narrator records receiving philosophical letters from a mysterious correspondent called Sophia, even as her later writing centred on defence of the "traditional family" from both social and technological changes.
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