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.
Papers
Against Willing Servitude: Autonomy in the Ethics of Advanced Artificial Intelligence – Adam Bales (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Some people believe that advanced artificial intelligence systems (AIs) might, in the future, come to have moral status. Further, humans might be tempted to design such AIs that they serve us, carrying out tasks that make our lives better. This raises the question of whether designing AIs with moral status to be willing servants would problematically violate their autonomy. In this paper, I argue that it would in fact do so.
Read MoreEthical Consumerism – Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute and Department of Economics, University of Oxford)
I study a static production economy in which consumers have not only preferences over their own consumption but also external, or “ethical”, preferences over the supply of each good. Though existing work on the implications of external preferences assumes price-taking, I show that ethical consumers generically prefer not to act even approximately as price-takers. I therefore introduce a near-Nash equilibrium concept that generalizes the near-Nash equilibria found in literature on strategic foundations of general equilibrium…
Read MoreAggregating Small Risks of Serious Harms – Tomi Francis (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
According to Partial Aggregation, a serious harm can be outweighed by a large number of somewhat less serious harms, but can outweigh any number of trivial harms. In this paper, I address the question of how we should extend Partial Aggregation to cases of risk, and especially to cases involving small risks of serious harms. I argue that, contrary to the most popular versions of the ex ante and ex post views, we should sometimes prevent a small risk that a large number of people will suffer serious harms rather than prevent…
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