Hilary Greaves

Hilary Greaves
Hilary Greaves
	Greaves in 2015
Born	1978 (age 45–46); Cardiff, Wales
Education	University of Oxford (BA, 2003); Rutgers University (PhD, 2008);
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
Institutions	Merton College, Oxford; Somerville College, Oxford;
Thesis	Spacetime Symmetries and the CPT Theorem (2008)
Doctoral advisor	Frank Arntzenius
Main interests	Effective altruism; moral philosophy; formal epistemology;
Website	users.ox.ac.uk/~mert2255/

Hilary Greaves (born 1978) is a British philosopher, currently serving as professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford.^[1] From 2017 to 2022, she was the founding director of the Global Priorities Institute, a research centre for effective altruism at the university supported by the Open Philanthropy Project.^[2]^[3]

Education

Greaves earned a BA in philosophy and physics from the University of Oxford in 2003, and a PhD in philosophy from Rutgers in 2008.^[4] Her doctoral thesis was titled Spacetime Symmetries and the CPT Theorem and was supervised by Frank Arntzenius.^[5] She has held appointments at Merton College and Somerville College and, since 2016, has been a professor of philosophy at Oxford.^[4]

Research

Greaves' current work is on issues related to effective altruism, particularly in connection to global prioritisation. Her research interests include moral philosophy (including foundational issues in consequentialism, interpersonal aggregation, population ethics,^[6] and moral uncertainty), formal epistemology, and the philosophy of physics,^[7] particularly quantum mechanics.^[8]^[9]

In October 2022, she was featured in Vox's Future Perfect 50 for her work on longtermism.^[10] She has argued that, just as geographical distance should make no difference to how important it is to alleviate a person's suffering (to the extent that one is able to), temporal distance is likewise morally irrelevant. Greaves has defended her longtermist position in terms of both utilitarian outcomes and intergenerational justice.^[11]

Selected publications

Books

Greaves, Hilary, and Theron Pummer (eds). Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues. Oxford University Press, 2019. ISBN 9780192578303

Peer-reviewed articles

Greaves, Hilary. 2013. "Epistemic Decision Theory". Mind. 122, no. 488: 915-952.
Greaves, Hilary, and David Wallace. 2006. "Justifying conditionalization: Conditionalization maximizes expected epistemic utility". Mind. 115, no. 459: 607-631.
Greaves, Hilary. 2010. "Towards a Geometrical Understanding of the CPT Theorem". The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 61, no. 1: 27–50. (Winner of the James T. Cushing Memorial Prize in History and Philosophy of Physics.^[12])