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]
Hilary Greaves
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Greaves in 2015
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| Born | 1978 (age 45–46) |
| Education |
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| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
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| Thesis | Spacetime Symmetries and the CPT Theorem (2008) |
| Doctoral advisor | Frank Arntzenius |
Main interests |
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| Website | users |
Greaves earned a BAinphilosophy 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]
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]