Research Programme
Our mission is to conduct and promote philosophical research on how individuals and institutions should allocate scarce resources insofar as they are appropriately guided by the aim of achieving impartially best outcomes. The research programme set out here highlights topics of the kind we currently prioritize and that we hope to address as the research group grows. We focus on issues where we expect members of the group can make significant progress, and on issues that might otherwise turn out to be neglected. We expect this research programme to be updated over time, and we welcome suggestions for revisions that would help better align the research topics we foreground with the group's underlying mission.
The topics we highlight are chosen in light of their perceived importance for the project of ethical prioritisation. There are a wide range of morally significant problems facing the world, making it impossible for any single individual or institution to solve them all. We therefore have to prioritise, both among the problems themselves and among the different means of tackling them. While our work is often highly theoretical, our aim is to contribute to this practical project, and we aspire to produce research with clear, actionable recommendations.
We are especially interested in prioritisation that takes an impartial point of view, assigning no special weight to the interests of any particular individual or group. (This provides one sense in which the research group's focus is ‘global’—another is that impartiality often leads us to focus on topics with the potential for global impact.) This point of view is one that individuals and institutions may be especially likely to take up when thinking about charitable giving, volunteering, activism, career choice, and global governance. We make no assumption that the whole of ethics is a matter of being impartial—only that the impartial perspective represents an important element in our ethical thinking and should inform our priorities.
Learn more about our current research areas: