Hilary Greaves: PPE lecture & Effective Altruism lecture

Longtermism is, very roughly for now, the thesis that most of the value of our actions lies in the far future, so that considerations of the very long run are the primary determinant of which action is optimific, in a wide class of decision situations. If some such claim is true, it has potentially widespread practical significance. In both small-scale and large-scale decision making contexts in both the private and public spheres, the standard practice is to assume (or otherwise believe) that attempting to influence the course of the very long-run future would be intractable, so that we should instead focus on more immediate consequences. In this talk, I will attempt to articulate a plausible longtermist claim, set out as clearly as possible the case for thinking that the claim is true, and examine the extent to which the claim can be defended against various empirical, axiological and decision-theoretic assumptions.

Dr. Hilary Greaves is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and Director of the Global Priorities Institute. Her current research focusses on various issues in ethics. Her interests include: foundational issues in consequentialism ('global' and 'two-level' forms of consequentialism), interpersonal aggregation, population ethics (pure and applied), effective altruism and global prioritisation, the interface between ethics and economics, and formal epistemology.