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83The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of HumanityBloomsbury. 2020.Humanity stands at a precipice. Our species could survive for millions of generations — enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice; to reach new heights of flourishing. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, gaining the power to destroy ourselves, without the wisdom to ensure we won’t. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pandemics and unaligned artificial intelligence. If we do not ac…Read more
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1380What Should We Agree on about the Repugnant Conclusion?Utilitas 33 (4): 379-383. 2021.The Repugnant Conclusion served an important purpose in catalyzing and inspiring the pioneering stage of population ethics research. We believe, however, that the Repugnant Conclusion now receives too much focus. Avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion should no longer be the central goal driving population ethics research, despite its importance to the fundamental accomplishments of the existing literature.
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Beyond Action: Applying Consequentialism to Decision Making and MotivationDissertation, University of Oxford. 2009.It is often said that there are three great traditions of normative ethics: consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics. Each is based around a compelling intuition about the nature of ethics: that what is ultimately important is that we produce the best possible outcome, that ethics is a system of rules which govern our behaviour, and that ethics is about living a life that instantiates the virtues, such as honesty, compassion and loyalty. This essay is about how best to interpret consequent…Read more
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2Bubbles under the Wallpaper: Healthcare Rationing and DiscriminationIn Helga Kuhse, Udo Schüklenk & Peter Singer (eds.), Bioethics: An Anthology, 3rd Edition, Wiley. pp. 406-412. 2016.It is common to allocate scarce health care resources by maximizing QALYs per dollar. This approach has been attacked by disability-rights advocates, policy-makers, and ethicists on the grounds that it unjustly discriminates against the disabled. The main complaint is that the QALY-maximizing approach implies a seemingly unsatisfactory conclusion: other things being equal, we should direct life-saving treatment to the healthy rather than the disabled. This argument pays insufficient attention to…Read more
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70Moral UncertaintyOxford University Press. 2020.How should we make decisions when we're uncertain about what we ought, morally, to do? Decision-making in the face of fundamental moral uncertainty is underexplored terrain: MacAskill, Bykvist, and Ord argue that there are distinctive norms by which it is governed, and which depend on the nature of one's moral beliefs.
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133Statistical Normalization Methods in Interpersonal and Intertheoretic ComparisonsJournal of Philosophy 117 (2): 61-95. 2020.A major problem for interpersonal aggregation is how to compare utility across individuals; a major problem for decision-making under normative uncertainty is the formally analogous problem of how to compare choice-worthiness across theories. We introduce and study a class of methods, which we call statistical normalization methods, for making interpersonal comparisons of utility and intertheoretic comparisons of choice-worthiness. We argue against the statistical normalization methods that have…Read more
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56The many forms of hypercomputationJournal of Applied Mathematics and Computation 178 142-153This paper surveys a wide range of proposed hypermachines, examining the resources that they require and the capabilities that they possess. 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved
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83Moral Uncertainty About Population AxiologyJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 12 (2): 135-167. 2017.Given the deep disagreement surrounding population axiology, one should remain uncertain about which theory is best. However, this uncertainty need not leave one neutral about which acts are better or worse. We show that, as the number of lives at stake grows, the Expected Moral Value approach to axiological uncertainty systematically pushes one toward choosing the option preferred by the Total View and critical-level views, even if one’s credence in those theories is low.
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1108Cómo tomar decisiones justas en el camino hacia la cobertura universal de saludPan-American Health Organization (PAHO). 2015.La cobertura universal de salud está en el centro de la acción actual para fortalecer los sistemas de salud y mejorar el nivel y la distribución de la salud y los servicios de salud. Este documento es el informe fi nal del Grupo Consultivo de la OMS sobre la Equidad y Cobertura Universal de Salud. Aquí se abordan los temas clave de la justicia (fairness) y la equidad que surgen en el camino hacia la cobertura universal de salud. Por lo tanto, el informe es pertinente para cada agente que infl uy…Read more
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253The reversal test: Eliminating status quo bias in applied ethicsEthics 116 (4): 656-679. 2006.Suppose that we develop a medically safe and affordable means of enhancing human intelligence. For concreteness, we shall assume that the technology is genetic engineering (either somatic or germ line), although the argument we will present does not depend on the technological implementation. For simplicity, we shall speak of enhancing “intelligence” or “cognitive capacity,” but we do not presuppose that intelligence is best conceived of as a unitary attribute. Our considerations could be applie…Read more
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1217Moral uncertainty about population ethicsJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy. forthcoming.Given the deep disagreement surrounding population axiology, one should remain uncertain about which theory is best. However, this uncertainty need not leave one neutral about which acts are better or worse. We show that as the number of lives at stake grows, the Expected Moral Value approach to axiological uncertainty systematically pushes one towards choosing the option preferred by the Total and Critical Level views, even if one’s credence in those theories is low.
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1566Making Fair Choices on the Path to Universal Health CoverageWorld Health Organisation. 2014.This report by the WHO Consultative Group on Equity and Universal Health Coverage addresses how countries can make fair progress towards the goal of universal coverage. It explains the relevant tradeoffs between different desirable ends and offers guidance on how to make these tradeoffs.
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1365Faire Des Choix Justes Pour Une Couverture Sanitaire UniverselleWorld Health Organization. 2015.This report from the WHO Consultative Group on Equity and Universal Health Coverage offers advice on how to make progress fairly towards universal health coverage.
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272Why Maximize Expected Choice‐Worthiness?1Noûs 54 (2): 327-353. 2018.This paper argues in favor of a particular account of decision‐making under normative uncertainty: that, when it is possible to do so, one should maximize expected choice‐worthiness. Though this position has been often suggested in the literature and is often taken to be the ‘default’ view, it has so far received little in the way of positive argument in its favor. After dealing with some preliminaries and giving the basic motivation for taking normative uncertainty into account in our decision‐…Read more
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11The scourge: Moral implications of natural embryo loss (plaga. Moralne konsekwencje naturalnej utraty embrionu)Archeus. Studia Z Bioetyki I Antropologii Filozoficznej 10 63-79. 2009.
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88Moral TradeEthics 126 (1): 118-138. 2015.If people have different resources, tastes, or needs, they may be able to exchange goods or services such that they each feel they have been made better off. This is trade. If people have different moral views, then there is another type of trade that is possible: they can exchange goods or services such that both parties feel that the world is a better place or that their moral obligations are better satisfied. We can call this moral trade. I introduce the idea of moral trade and explore severa…Read more
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84Response to Open Peer Commentaries on “The Scourge: Moral Implications of Natural Embryo Loss”American Journal of Bioethics 8 (7). 2008.Many of the commentaries have made similar points regarding the nature of full moral status, so I shall begin by addressing these together. They argue that my representation of the Claim is stronger than many proponents of full moral status would accept (Ord 2008). Robert Card (2008) says that I assume that it is equally bad to lose human life at all stages. Russell DiSilvestro (2008) says that I assume a flawed principle that he calls (M). Marianne Burda (2008) says that I assume that life must…Read more
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64Exploitation and peacekeeping: introducing more sophisticated interactions to the iterated prisoner's dilemmaWorld Congress on Computational Intelligence 1-6. 2002.– We present a new paradigm extending the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma to multiple players. Our model is unique in granting players information about past interactions between all pairs of players – allowing for much more sophisticated social behaviour. We provide an overview of preliminary results and discuss the implications in terms of the evolutionary dynamics of strategies
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43On the existence of a new family of diophantine equations for ΩFundamenta Informaticae 56 273-284. 2003.We show how to determine the k-th bit of Chaitin’s algorithmically random real number Ω by solving k instances of the halting problem. From this we then reduce the problem of determining the k-th bit of Ω to determining whether a certain Diophantine equation with two parameters, k and N , has solutions for an odd or an even number of values of N . We also demonstrate two further examples of Ω in number theory: an exponential Diophantine equation with a parameter k which has an odd number of solu…Read more
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181The diagonal method and hypercomputationBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56 (1): 147-156. 2005.The diagonal method is often used to show that Turing machines cannot solve their own halting problem. There have been several recent attempts to show that this method also exposes either contradiction or arbitrariness in other theoretical models of computation which claim to be able to solve the halting problem for Turing machines. We show that such arguments are flawed—a contradiction only occurs if a type of machine can compute its own diagonal function. We then demonstrate why such a situati…Read more
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94Hypercomputation: Computing more than the Turing machineDissertation, University of Melbourne. 2002.In this report I provide an introduction to the burgeoning field of hypercomputation – the study of machines that can compute more than Turing machines. I take an extensive survey of many of the key concepts in the field, tying together the disparate ideas and presenting them in a structure which allows comparisons of the many approaches and results. To this I add several new results and draw out some interesting consequences of hypercomputation for several different disciplines.
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71Probing the improbable: Methodological challenges for risks with low probabilities and high stakesJournal of Risk Research 13 191-205. 2010.Some risks have extremely high stakes. For example, a worldwide pandemic or asteroid impact could potentially kill more than a billion people. Comfortingly, scientific calculations often put very low probabilities on the occurrence of such catastrophes. In this paper, we argue that there are important new methodological problems which arise when assessing global catastrophic risks and we focus on a problem regarding probability estimation. When an expert provides a calculation of the probability…Read more
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111A New Counterexample to PrioritarianismUtilitas 27 (3): 298-302. 2015.Prioritarianism is the moral view that a fixed improvement in someone's well-being matters more the worse off they are. Its supporters argue that it best captures our intuitions about unequal distributions of well-being. I show that prioritarianism sometimes recommends acts that will make things more unequal while simultaneously lowering the total well-being and making things worse for everyone ex ante. Intuitively, there is little to recommend such acts and I take this to be a serious counterex…Read more
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283The scourge: Moral implications of natural embryo lossAmerican Journal of Bioethics 8 (7). 2008.It is often claimed that from the moment of conception embryos have the same moral status as adult humans. This claim plays a central role in many arguments against abortion, in vitro fertilization, and stem cell research. In what follows, I show that this claim leads directly to an unexpected and unwelcome conclusion: that natural embryo loss is one of the greatest problems of our time and that we must do almost everything in our power to prevent it. I examine the responses available to those w…Read more
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253Over the last few decades, there has been an increasing interest in global consequentialism. Where act-consequentialism assesses acts in terms of their consequences, global consequentialism goes much further, assessing acts, rules, motives — and everything else — in terms of the relevant consequences. Compared to act-consequentialism it offers a number of advantages: it is more expressive, it is a simpler theory, and it captures some of the benefits of ruleconsequentialism without the correspond…Read more
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39Ω in number theoryIn Christian Calude (ed.), Randomness & Complexity, from Leibniz to Chaitin, World Scientific Pub Co. pp. 161-173. 2007.We present a new method for expressing Chaitin’s random real, Ω, through Diophantine equations. Where Chaitin’s method causes a particular quantity to express the bits of Ω by fluctuating between finite and infinite values, in our method this quantity is always finite and the bits of Ω are expressed in its fluctuations between odd and even values, allowing for some interesting developments. We then use exponential Diophantine equations to simplify this result and finally show how both methods can also…Read more
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225Consequentialism and Decision ProceduresDissertation, University of Oxford. 2005.Consequentialism is often charged with being self-defeating, for if a person attempts to apply it, she may quite predictably produce worse outcomes than if she applied some other moral theory. Many consequentialists have replied that this criticism rests on a false assumption, confusing consequentialism’s criterion of the rightness of an act with its position on decision procedures. Consequentialism, on this view, does not dictate that we should be always calculating which of the available acts …Read more
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43Using biased coins as oraclesInternational Journal of Unconventional Computing 5 253-265. 2009.While it is well known that a Turing machine equipped with the ability to flip a fair coin cannot compute more than a standard Turing machine, we show that this is not true for a biased coin. Indeed, any oracle set X may be coded as a probability pX such that if a Turing machine is given a coin which lands heads with probability pX it can compute any function recursive in X with arbitrarily high probability. We also show how the assumption of a non-recursive bias can be weakened by using a..
Oxford, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
Applied Ethics |
Effective Altruism |
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Effective Altruism |