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]
In October 2022, she was featured in Vox'sFuture 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. ISBN9780192578303
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])