We are delighted to announce that Professor Richard Pettigrew has been awarded a Leverhulme Grant for a project entitled ‘Foundations of Longtermism’. The project will run for 3 years from Spring 2024.

The project abstract is as follows:  Longtermism is a radical view about what morality requires. If you can either (i) reduce the probability of human extinction this century by one in a billion; or (ii) prevent the deaths of 1,000 people for sure, longtermism argues you should choose (i) because it produces the greatest goodness in expectation.

In this project, I challenge this argument by asking how our attitudes to risk, and the attitudes of those our choice affects, should figure in moral decision-making, where an individual's attitudes to risk determine how much weight they give to worse outcomes and how much to better ones.