# Global Priorities Institute The **Global Priorities Institute (GPI)** is an **interdisciplinary research center at the University of Oxford**, founded in 2018 to conduct academically rigorous research on the question: *what should we prioritize if we want to do the most good?* GPI is housed within Oxford's Faculty of Philosophy, draws faculty from philosophy and economics, and is directed by philosopher **Hilary Greaves**. The institute is substantially funded through [[Open Philanthropy]] grants and individual donors within the Effective Altruism community. GPI is the **academic-research counterpart** to [[Centre for Effective Altruism]] — where CEA operates as a movement-building organization, GPI operates as a scholarly research center producing peer-reviewed philosophy and economics on EA-adjacent questions. GPI matters for the KB for three reasons. First, it is the **principal mechanism by which longtermist philosophy has been legitimated within mainstream academic philosophy** — GPI's faculty publish in top philosophy journals (*Philosophical Review*, *Journal of Philosophy*, *Mind*), teach graduate students, advise doctoral work, and place academic alumni in other university departments. The institute's research output is the academic infrastructure through which the longtermist intellectual framework has acquired the institutional weight of Oxford's philosophy department. Second, GPI is — along with the now-closed [[Future of Humanity Institute]] — one of the **two principal Oxford institutional bases for the [[TESCREAL]] intellectual cluster**, making Oxford specifically a geographic hub for the movement's academic side. Third, GPI's **Forethought Foundation** (a graduate-student and early-career-researcher funding program that GPI has operated and that has subsequently spun out under other names) is the pipeline through which the movement's academic talent stream is seeded — by funding doctoral and early-career work on longtermist questions at Oxford and other top-ranked philosophy departments. ## Founding (2018) GPI was founded in 2018 through a combination of academic leadership from Oxford's Faculty of Philosophy (principally Hilary Greaves) and substantial external funding from [[Open Philanthropy]] and individual EA donors. The founding logic was the diagnosis that **global priorities research** — the study of how to allocate finite resources across radically different causes, timeframes, and beneficiary populations — was undersupplied within academic philosophy and economics. The [[Future of Humanity Institute]], founded in 2005 by [[Nick Bostrom]], had pursued related questions but with a particular focus on existential risk and transhumanist-adjacent topics; GPI was designed to pursue a broader research agenda with more direct integration into mainstream academic structures (top-journal publication, doctoral training, departmental integration). The institute's location within Oxford's Faculty of Philosophy — rather than as a standalone research center like FHI — was a deliberate architectural choice. GPI faculty hold conventional Oxford academic appointments and supervise Oxford doctoral students through standard university procedures. ## Research Agenda GPI's published research covers several broad areas: - **Longtermist population ethics**: Questions about how to aggregate moral value across future people, how to compare benefits to different populations across long time horizons, and how to handle the numerical scale problems that longtermist arguments generate - **Existential risk analysis**: Philosophical and decision-theoretic work on how to reason about low-probability high-stakes risks, related to but distinct from the empirical existential-risk work that FHI pursued - **Cause prioritization**: Comparative analysis of different cause areas (global health, animal welfare, AI safety, climate) using structured frameworks for cross-cause comparison - **Moral uncertainty**: How agents should make decisions when they are uncertain not just about empirical facts but about the correct moral framework to apply - **Epistemics of cause prioritization**: How to reason about claims where evidence is sparse, theoretical frameworks are contested, and decisions must be made anyway The research has resulted in peer-reviewed publication in top philosophy journals, edited volumes (notably *The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Economics*), and the occasional mainstream-press engagement (particularly around MacAskill's 2022 book *What We Owe the Future*, which drew substantially on GPI-adjacent research). ## Key Faculty and Affiliates GPI's faculty and research fellow roster includes many of the most visible figures in contemporary longtermist philosophy: - **Hilary Greaves** (Director): Oxford philosopher specializing in population ethics, decision theory, and longtermist philosophy - **William MacAskill**: Co-founder of the Centre for Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours; GPI research fellow; author of *What We Owe the Future* - **Toby Ord**: GPI senior research fellow; author of *The Precipice*; continuing academic affiliation after FHI's 2024 closure - **Teruji Thomas**, **Andreas Mogensen**, **Christian Tarsney**: GPI-affiliated philosophers whose work appears across the population-ethics and decision-theory literature - **Philip Trammell**: Economics-side researcher whose work on intertemporal resource allocation has been influential within the institute The institute also maintains visiting-fellow programs, academic-conference hosting, and doctoral-student supervision pipelines. ## The Forethought Foundation GPI has operated the **Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research** (later restructured and renamed) as a funding vehicle for graduate students and early-career researchers working on global priorities research at Oxford and other universities. Forethought funded doctoral dissertations, postdoctoral research positions, and early-career fellowships on longtermist-adjacent questions. Forethought's graduate-student funding is one of the structural mechanisms by which the longtermist research program has scaled within academic philosophy: by providing dedicated funding for doctoral work in this area, the program ensures that every year new Oxford (and increasingly other-university) PhDs emerge with established expertise in longtermist philosophy, seeking academic placements. ## Connection to FHI's Closure The April 2024 closure of the [[Future of Humanity Institute]] — ended after an extended period of tension between FHI and Oxford's Faculty of Philosophy over governance, hiring practices, and the faculty's discomfort with FHI's broader relationship to the EA/longtermist movement — has made GPI Oxford's single remaining institutional base for this research tradition. FHI senior staff, including Ord, have moved primary affiliation to GPI or to post-Oxford positions. Whether GPI's more conventional integration within the Faculty of Philosophy (compared to FHI's standalone-research-center structure) will prove more durable over the coming decade is a live question. ## Critical Commentary GPI has been the subject of the same broad critical literature that surrounds EA and longtermism more generally: - **Émile P. Torres** and **[[Timnit Gebru]]** have named GPI in the TESCREAL critique as one of the principal Oxford institutional bases for the legitimation of longtermist philosophy - **Critics within mainstream philosophy** have argued that GPI's research program presupposes a substantive moral framework (aggregative consequentialism weighted across long time horizons) that is not itself subjected to the kind of scrutiny the institute applies to empirical questions - **Post-FTX governance reviews** at Oxford and externally have raised questions about the concentration of external funding from EA-aligned donors (particularly Open Philanthropy) in a single academic research center, and whether that concentration shapes research priorities in ways that pure academic-peer-review processes would not ## Connection to the KB Ecosystem - **[[Effective Altruism]] / [[Longtermism]]**: GPI is the principal academic research center producing peer-reviewed scholarship on longtermist questions. - **[[TESCREAL]]**: Named in the TESCREAL critique as part of the Oxford institutional infrastructure. - **[[Future of Humanity Institute]]**: The older Oxford research center; GPI absorbed significant FHI personnel and research direction after FHI's 2024 closure. - **[[Centre for Effective Altruism]]**: Sister organization; CEA operates the movement-building side, GPI operates the academic-research side. - **[[Toby Ord]] / [[William MacAskill]]**: Principal research fellows; their published academic work is the most visible GPI output. - **[[Open Philanthropy]]**: Principal funder of the institute's operations and of its graduate-student / early-career funding pipelines. - **[[Dustin Moskovitz]]**: Through Open Philanthropy, the structural funder of the research program. - **Academic legitimation**: GPI is the mechanism through which longtermist philosophy acquires the scholarly weight of Oxford's Faculty of Philosophy — a legitimation process with substantive consequences for how the framework is received in policy settings. ## See Also - [[Future of Humanity Institute]] - [[Centre for Effective Altruism]] - [[Giving What We Can]] - [[80,000 Hours]] - [[Open Philanthropy]] - [[Toby Ord]] - [[William MacAskill]] - [[Nick Bostrom]] - [[Dustin Moskovitz]] - [[Effective Altruism]] - [[Longtermism]] - [[TESCREAL]]