Hilary Greaves
British philosopher (born 1978)
- 1 min read
- 2 chapters
Related on Lably
Through Philosophy and Ethics
Education
Greaves earned a BA in philosophy and physics from the University of Oxford in 2003, and a PhD in philosophy from Rutgers University in 2008. Her doctoral thesis was titled Spacetime Symmetries and the CPT Theorem and was supervised by Frank Arntzenius. She has held appointments at Merton College and Somerville College and, since 2016, has been a professor of philosophy at Oxford.
Sign in to keep reading
One more chapter is free with a Lably account.
Research
Greaves studies a variety of topics across moral philosophy, including effective altruism, global prioritisation, interpersonal aggregation, formal epistemology, population ethics, and the philosophy of physics, particularly quantum mechanics.
In October 2022, she was featured in Vox's Future Perfect 50 for her work on longtermism. 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.