Research
Key topics
EXISTENTIAL RISK
The end of humanity would be one of the very worst things that could happen. Yet until very recently the academic and policy community has devoted little study to its likelihood, its possible causes, or to the best means of preventing it. We are thus in a very fertile time for this research, with major results being established about relative likelihood of natural versus anthropogenic risk and a deepening understanding of the ethics and economics of the risk of human extinction.
GLOBAL PRIORITY SETTING
There are many ways of helping to improve our world, but they are not created equal. Even just within global health, some approaches are thousands of times more effective than others. If you choose two at random, then on average one is a hundred times better than the other. These differences can get even larger when we set priorities between different fields or between developed and developing nations. This makes it essential to get our global priorities right, so we don't squander most of the value we could have achieved.
Highlights
The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
A book about the risks to humanity’s entire future. It explores the science behind the risks and makes the case that safeguarding humanity’s longterm potential is one of the most pressing global priorities. It is aimed both at experts in the field and the wider public.
Written with my colleagues, Will MacAskill and Krister Bykvist, this is a foundational book for the new field of moral uncertainty: how you should decide when you are uncertain about the moral considerations. For example, if you are unsure which moral theory is correct, or whether animals have rights. Since we always have such uncertainty, understanding how best to make choices in light of it is essential. But there are unique challenges in doing so that don’t arise in familiar cases of uncertainty about descriptive facts. We outline the major approaches, show how we think one should best proceed, and present novel implications for practical moral reasoning.
The moral imperative towards cost-effectiveness in global health
Different health interventions in poor countries have stunningly different cost-effectiveness, with some able to deliver 10,000 times the benefit for a given cost. This essay concisely explains the dramatic ethical consequences that follow.
Global poverty and the demands of morality
Global poverty is one of the most pressing issues of our time, yet many ethical theories are reluctant to take positive action towards the poor seriously. This contrasts with the strong demands of Utilitarianism, Peter Singer’s Principle of Sacrifice, and of some parts of Christian Ethics. Far from being too demanding, this is something that these theories get right, and which all plausible moral theories must emulate.
Introduces and explores the concept of moral trade — where people exchange goods or services such that they both think the world is a better place, or that their moral obligations are better satisfied. The gains from moral trade are potentially vast, and can be realised even when the people involved have very different moral views.
Beyond Action: applying consequentialism to decision-making and motivation
In Western philosophy, there are three great ethical traditions: consequentialism, with its focus on producing the best outcome; deontology, which looks at ethics as a system of rules governing right action; and virtue ethics, which focuses on being a virtuous person. In my doctoral dissertation I show how the best version of consequentialism — global consequentialism — can be applied not just to acts, but to decision making and character, capturing much of what motivates these three traditions and offering some hope of unifying them.
Books
The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, (London: Bloomsbury), 2020.
Moral Uncertainty (with Will MacAskill, and Krister Bykvist), (Oxford: OUP), 2020.
Papers
The Lindy Effect. arXiv:2308.09045 [physics.soc-ph], 2023.
Shaping humanity’s longterm trajectory. In Barrett et al (eds.) Essays on Longtermism, (Oxford: OUP), forthcoming.
The edges of our universe. arXiv:2104.01191 [gr-qc], 2021.
Implications of a search for intergalactic civilizations on prior estimates of human survival and travel speed. arXiv:2106.13348 [astro-ph.CO], 2021.
What should we agree on about the repugnant conclusion? Utilitas 1–5, 2021.
The parliamentary approach to moral uncertainty. Technical Report #2021-2, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford, 2021.
Quality adjusted life years based on health and consumption: a summary wellbeing measure for cross-sectoral economic evaluation. Health Economics 30 70–85, 2021.
Why maximize expected choice-worthiness? Noûs 54 327–53, 2020.
Years of good life based on consumption and health. In Eyal et al (eds.) Measuring the Global Burden of Disease, (Oxford: OUP), 2020.
Statistical normalization methods in interpersonal and intertheoretic comparisons. The Journal of Philosophy 117(2):61–95, 2020.
The moral imperative towards cost-effectiveness in global health. Reprinted in Greaves and Pummer, eds. Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues, (Oxford: OUP), 29–36, 2019.
An upper bound for the background rate of human extinction. Scientific Reports 9:11054, 1–9, 2019.
Giving isn’t demanding. In Woodruff, ed. The Ethics of Giving: Philosophers' Perspectives on Philanthropy, (Oxford: OUP), 178–203, 2018.
Symmetric decomposition of asymmetric games. Scientific Reports 8 1015, 2018.
Universal health coverage and intersectoral action for health. In D Jamison et al (eds.) Disease Control Priorities: Improving Health and Reducing Poverty. Disease Control Priorities, 3rd ed. Volume 9 (Washington DC: World Bank). 3–22, 2018.
Universal health coverage and intersectoral action for health: key messages from Disease Control Priorities, 3rd edition. The Lancet Dec 2017, 3–15, 2017.
Moral uncertainty about population axiology. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 12 135–67, 2017.
Moral trade. Ethics 126 118–38, 2015.
A new counterexample to prioritarianism. Utilitas 27 298–302, 2015.
Bubbles under the wallpaper: healthcare rationing and discrimination. In H Kuhse et al (eds.) Bioethics: an anthology, Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell), 406–12, 2015.
Overpopulation or underpopulation? In I Goldin (ed.) Is the planet full?, (Oxford: OUP), 46–60, 2014.
Making fair choices on the path to universal health coverage. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 92 389, 2014.
Global poverty and the demands of morality. In J Perry (ed.) God, The Good, and Utilitarianism: Perspectives on Peter Singer, (Cambridge: CUP), 177–91, 2014.
Rationing and rationality: the cost of avoiding discrimination. In N Eyal et al (eds.) Inequalities in Health: Concepts, Measures, and Ethics, (Oxford: OUP), 232-9, 2013.
Infectious disease, injury, and reproductive health. In B Lomborg (ed.) Global Problems, Smart Solutions: Costs and Benefits, (Cambridge: CUP), 390–426, 2013.
Probing the improbable: methodological challenges for risks with low probabilities and high stakes. Journal of Risk Research 13 191–205, 2010.
Beyond Action: applying consequentialism to decision making and motivation. DPhil Thesis, University of Oxford, 2009.
Using biased coins as oracles. International Journal of Unconventional Computing 5 253–65, 2009.
The scourge: moral implications of natural embryo loss. American Journal of Bioethics 8 12–9, 2008.
Response to open peer commentaries on “The scourge: moral implications of natural embryo loss”. American Journal of Bioethics 8 W1–W3, 2008.
Ω in number theory. In CS Calude (ed.) Randomness and Complexity, from Leibniz to Chaitin, (Singapore: World Scientific), 161–73, 2007.
The reversal test: eliminating status quo bias in applied ethics. Ethics 116 656–79, 2006.
The many forms of hypercomputation. Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computation 178 142–53, 2006.
Consequentialism and decision procedures, BPhil Thesis, University of Oxford, 2005.
The diagonal method and hypercomputation. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56 147–156, 2005.
On the existence of a new family of Diophantine equations for Ω. Fundamenta Informaticae 56 273–284, 2003.
Exploitation and peacekeeping: introducing more sophisticated interactions to the iterated prisoner's dilemma, World Congress on Computational Intelligence, 2002.
Policy Reports
Toward a declaration on future generations. Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. 2023.
Lessons from the development of the atomic bomb. Centre for the Governance of AI. 2022.
Future Proof: the opportunity to transform the UK’s resilience to extreme risks. The Centre for Long-Term Resilience. 2021.
Proposal for a new ‘three lines of defence’ approach to UK risk management. Extreme risks working paper 2021-1, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford. 2021.
Existential risks to humanity. In P Conceicao (ed.) Human Development Report 2020. (New York: The United Nations Development Programme), 106–11. 2020.
Managing existential risk from emerging technologies. In M Walport (ed.) Annual report of the government chief scientific advisor 2014. Innovation: Managing Risk, Not Avoiding It. Evidence and Case Studies. (London: Government Office for Science), 115–120, 2014.
Making fair choices on the path to universal health coverage. WHO. 2014.
Unprecedented technological risks. Future of Humanity Institute. 2014.
The moral imperative towards cost-effectiveness in global health. (Washington DC: The Centre for Global Development). 2013.
Considering cost-effectiveness: the moral perspective. In A Glassman and K Chalkidou (eds.) Priority setting in health: building institutions for smarter public spending, (Washington DC: The Centre for Global Development), 15–19, 2012.
Manuscripts
On ranking alternatives with different populations
Predicting unprecedented events
Why I'm not a negative utilitarian
How to be a consequentialist about everything
Past performance is no guarantee of future success
How to simulate everything (all at once)
Degrees of truth, degrees of falsity