One of the conference's keynote speakers is Tim Mulgan, Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Auckland and Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the
University of St Andrews.
 |
| Prof Tim Mulgan |
The title of Tim's keynote address -- scheduled for Thursday, 9 July at 6pm (Owen G Glenn Building, Level 0, Case Room 2) -- is
How should utilitarians think about the future?
Utilitarians are committed to temporal impartiality. Future people matter as much as present people. And many contemporary moral issues require collective responses to avoid possible future harms. So utilitarians must think collectively about the future. But current formulations of rule utilitarianism do not cope well with the distant future. Drawing on my recent books Future People and Ethics for a Broken World, I defend a new formulation of rule utilitarianism, where the central ethical question is: What moral code should we teach the next generation? I argue that this new theory both honours utilitarianism’s past and provides the flexibility to adapt to the full range of credible futures – from futures broken by climate change to the digital, virtual, and predictable futures produced by various possible technologies.
Tim Mulgan is the author of
The Demands of Consequentialism (Oxford 2001),
Future People (Oxford 2006),
Understanding Utilitarianism (Acumen 2007),
Ethics for a Broken World (Acumen/McGill-Queens University Press 2011), and
Purpose in the Universe: the moral and metaphysical case for ananthropocentric purposivism (Oxford 2015)
- - -
The second keynote speech will be given by Hilary Greaves, Associate Professor in Philosophy at
Somerville College, University of Oxford.
 |
| Dr Hilary Greaves |
On Saturday, 11 July at 6pm (Old Government House), Hilary will talk about
Doublethink in global prioritisation:
Responsible decisions about how best to direct financial and political resources to improve the world require prioritisation: beyond observing that each of a long list of proposed intervention would do *good* in the world, we further need to address the crucial question of which would do the *most* good, and should therefore be prioritised over others. Two frequently-touted “top picks” in the prioritisation discussion are (1) interventions to reduce the child mortality rate, and (2) increased provision of family planning services. Accepting both of these suggestions, however, raises a worry: to a first approximation, and in one clear sense, the main effect of one such intervention is precisely to reverse the main effect of the other.
This suggests that we can only simultaneously conclude that child-mortality reduction and family planning provision are both “top picks” if we are engaging in a subtle form of ‘doublethink’: if, that is, we are implicitly making assumptions, in evaluating the first intervention, that are subtly inconsistent with the assumptions we make when evaluating the second intervention. Examining the details of the cases, I will argue, bears out this worry: we should prioritise child-mortality reduction if neo-Malthusian concerns about population growth are insignificant compared with the immediate value of individual human lives, and we should prioritise family planning interventions if the reverse is the case, but it is extremely difficult to argue for the simultaneous prioritisation of both. I attribute the failure to recognise this point to a lack of clarity over (1) the distinction between the context of global prioritisation and other, smaller-scale decision-making contexts, and (2) widespread confusion about matters of population axiology. The failure must be corrected: it may be wasting the global community billions of dollars annually.
Hilary's current research focusses on various issues in ethics, including foundational problems in consequentialism ('global' and 'two-level' forms of consequentialism), the debate between consequentialists and contractualists, aggregation (utilitarianism, prioritarianism and egalitarianism), moral psychology and selective debunking arguments, population ethics, the interface between ethics and economics, and the analogies between ethics and epistemology.
