This event is brought to you by the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford.
In person audience tickets are sold out for this event.
The White's Professor of Moral Philosophy event will be also be livestreamed here.
Join us to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy.
Population ethics is concerned with how we should reason about what we ought to do when our choices will make a difference to how many individuals, and which individuals, will exist. Beginning with questions about the morality of procreation, Professor Jeff McMahan (White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy) will introduce some of the problems and paradoxes in population ethics and provide an overview of a range of issues in practical ethics to which population ethics is relevant, such as climate change, causing animals to exist in order to eat them, and existential risk. Following Professor McMahan’s introduction there will be a panel debate followed by audience questions.
The event chair will be Alison Hills (Professor of Philosophy; Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, St John's College).
Panellists are: Jeff McMahan (White's Professor of Moral Philosophy; Professorial Fellow, Corpus Christi College), John Broome (Emeritus White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy; Emeritus Fellow, Corpus Christi College), and Hilary Greaves (Professor of Philosophy; Supernumerary Fellow, Merton College).
Speaker biographies
Professor Jeff McMahan
White's Professor of Moral Philosophy; Professorial Fellow, Corpus Christi College
Jeff McMahan is White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is the author of The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford University Press, 2002) and Killing in War (OUP, 2009). At present he is writing a book, The Ethics of Creating, Preserving, and Ending Lives (OUP) about the relevance of population ethics to various issues in practical ethics.
Professor Alison Hills
Professor of Philosophy; Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, St John's College
Alison Hills is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and has been a tutorial fellow at St John’s College, Oxford since 2006. She has broad interests within moral philosophy, across metaethics, normative ethics, and practical ethics. She has further interests in aesthetics and in epistemology, and she has particularly explored how these latter areas intersect with moral philosophy.
Professor John Broome
Emeritus White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy; Emeritus Fellow, Corpus Christi College
John Broome is Emeritus White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Honorary Professor at the Australian National University. He works on normativity, rationality and reasoning, and also on the ethics of climate change. He was Lead Author of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. His most recent books are Normativity, Rationality and Reasoning: Selected Essays (2021), Rationality Through Reasoning (2013) and Climate Matters (2012).
Professor Hilary Greaves
Professor of Philosophy; Supernumerary Fellow, Merton College
Hilary Greaves is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Director of the Global Priorities Institute. Greaves’ current work is on issues related to global priorities research. Her research interests include moral philosophy (including foundational issues in consequentialism, interpersonal aggregation, population ethics, and moral uncertainty), formal epistemology, and the philosophy of physics.
Supported by the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.
