GLOBAL PRIORITIES INSTITUTE

Foundational academic research on how to do the most good.

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

The Global Priorities Institute is an interdisciplinary research centre at the University of Oxford.

Our aim is to conduct foundational research that informs the decision-making of individuals and institutions seeking to do as much good as possible. We use the tools of multiple academic disciplines, especially philosophy, economics and psychology, to explore the issues at stake.

We prioritise projects whose contributions are unlikely to be otherwise made by the normal run of academic research, and that speak directly to the most crucial considerations such an actor must confront.

A bargaining-theoretic approach to moral uncertainty – Owen Cotton-Barratt (Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University), Hilary Greaves (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)

This paper explores a new approach to the problem of decision under relevant moral uncertainty. We treat the case of an agent making decisions in the face of moral uncertainty on the model of bargaining theory, as if the decision-making process were one of bargaining among different internal parts of the agent, with different parts committed to different moral theories. The resulting approach contrasts interestingly with the extant “maximise expected choiceworthiness”…

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