Research

GPI's research agenda

The central focus of GPI is what we call 'global priorities research': research into issues that arise in response to the question, 'What should we do with a given amount of limited resources if our aim is to do the most good?'. This question naturally draws upon central themes in the fields of economics, philosophy and psychology. Browse through GPI's research agenda to find out more.

GPI's research agenda

Our papers

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The cross-sectional implications of the social discount rate – Maya Eden (Brandeis University)

How should policy discount future returns? The standard approach to this normative question is to ask how much society should care about future generations relative to people alive today. This paper establishes an alternative approach, based on the social desirability of redistributing from the current old to the current young. …

Time discounting, consistency and special obligations: a defence of Robust Temporalism – Harry R. Lloyd (Yale University)

This paper defends the claim that mere temporal proximity always and without exception strengthens certain moral duties, including the duty to save – call this view Robust Temporalism. Although almost all other moral philosophers dismiss Robust Temporalism out of hand, I argue that it is prima facie intuitively plausible, and that it is analogous to a view about special obligations that many philosophers already accept…

Calibration dilemmas in the ethics of distribution – Jacob M. Nebel (University of Southern California) and H. Orri Stefánsson (Stockholm University and Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study)

This paper presents a new kind of problem in the ethics of distribution. The problem takes the form of several “calibration dilemmas,” in which intuitively reasonable aversion to small-stakes inequalities requires leading theories of distribution to recommend intuitively unreasonable aversion to large-stakes inequalities—e.g., inequalities in which half the population would gain an arbitrarily large quantity of well-being or resources…