Hilary Greaves is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Her research interests range fairly widely across moral philosophy, though with some skew towards more formal ethics and (relatedly) that which intersects more closely with economics. Hilary's existing publications in ethics include work on foundational issues in consequentialism ('global' and 'two-level' forms of consequentialism), "cluelessness", interpersonal comparisons of well-being, interpersonal aggregation (utilitarianism/prioritarianism/egalitarianism/etc.), population ethics (pure and applied), moral uncertainty, healthcare prioritisation, climate change and existential risk.
Course description: These lectures will be an introduction to core topics in formal epistemology, decision theory and formal ethics. In formal epistemology, we will introduce the notion of degrees of belief, and the Bayesian account according to which rational degrees of belief (i) obey the probability calculus at any given time and (ii) are updated by conditionalization when new evidence is acquired. In decision theory, we will introduce the idea that rational decision making under uncertainty is a matter of maximising expected utility, and we will show how this account can be grounded in a representation theorem that begins with preferences over gambles and works “inwards” from there to arrive at probabilities and utilities. In formal ethics, we will show how rival accounts of the good – particularly, utilitarianism, prioritarianism and egalitarianism – can be represented using real-valued functions, and we will see how the utilitarian account can arguably be justified via Harsanyi’s celebrated aggregation theorem.
