Interview
#46 - Prof Hilary Greaves on moral cluelessness & tackling crucial questions in academia
- GPI aims to establish a rigorous academic field for global priorities by hiring a head of research operations on a four-year contract (£40,000–£49,000) with applications closing November 19, 2019, while also launching a summer 2019 visitor program for early-career economists (applications close November 30) and planning to advertise postdoctoral and senior fellowships for philosophers and economists starting in September.
- The institute intends to balance its composition between philosophy and economics over the next few years, with a specific need for donations to fund additional economic hires given Oxford's requirement for institutions to secure full contract funding in advance; hiring will proceed when fundraising confidence allows for attracting a suitable candidate pool.
- Long-term strategic goals include expanding research coverage to psychology and political science, maintaining the annual summer visitor program (hosting ~12 students in May/June), offering DPhil scholarships to match US program security, and providing an advisory list of supervisors for non-Oxford researchers.
- Initial research focus for the next six to eight months centers on the "long-termism paradigm" and the rigorous examination of premature human extinction risks, with a stated intent to prioritize topics capable of producing academic articles that advance effective altruist thought.
- GPI plans to steer internal discussion away from questions of "moral obligation" toward "internal effective altruist" questions, employing operations staff to manage administrative complexity so researchers can focus on content, while selecting hires based on willingness to let research importance guide their work regardless of intrinsic motivation.
- Current theoretical work by the speaker includes three papers on moral uncertainty, extinction risk mitigation, and cost-benefit analysis methodology, with a broader expectation that abstract theoretical research in formal epistemology will yield surprising practical insights over the next 10 to 30 years.
- The speaker anticipates significant academic resistance and structural barriers to interdisciplinary work due to prestige incentives, predicting that economic norms regarding publication pressure make the field more cutthroat than philosophy and that students often lack exposure to these topics in standard university syllabuses.
- A range of specific philosophical and economic challenges are identified, including the "repugnant conclusion" in population ethics, the "psychopath button" problem in decision theory, and "cluelessness" regarding long-term effects, with the expectation that risk aversion regarding total value favors extinction risk mitigation.
- Future influence is expected to derive from direct government consultation and the indirect shaping of world leaders, with the goal of eventually integrating global priorities research into undergraduate and graduate curricula.
- Risks to the program include the difficulty of resolving cross-cause comparisons under "cluelessness," the lack of existing academic literature on effective altruism, and the potential for "excessive sacrifice" arguments to be dismissed if moral demands are not properly constrained, alongside the challenge of building a sustainable pipeline of researchers in a field where positions may not grow in proportion to interest.