Harry R. Lloyd

hrl [at] unc [dot] edu

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Research

Publications by topic, click to expand:

Moral uncertainty  ●  AI  ●  Political philosophy: [collapse]  ●  Bioethics  ●  Animal ethics

  • 2025:
     
    • Disagreement, AI alignment, and bargaining. Philosophical Studies, 182.7, 1757-87 [pre-publication pdf | doi]
      • Synopsis: When stakeholders disagree about how an AI should behave, resolving this disagreement through simulated bargaining is better than resolving it through voting or expected value maximisation
         
    • Gentrification: a philosophical analysis and critique. Journal of Urban Affairs, 47.4, 1246-64. [pre-publication pdf | doi]
      • Synopsis: Forms of gentrification that don't displace many land users are still pro tanto morally objectionable insofar as they damage local communities
         
  • 2024:
     
    • Redistribution and selfishness. Analysis, 84.3, 493-503. [pre-publication pdf | doi]
      • Synopsis: Even in a world of completely unselfish people, redistributive taxation would still discourage productive contributions to national wealth
         

Papers by date:

  • Forthcoming:
     
    • Moral uncertainty, expected choiceworthiness, and variance normalization. Canadian Journal of Philosophy. [pre-publication pdf] 
      •  Synopsis: Philosophers of moral uncertainty sometimes suggest that 'statistical normalization' techniques can be used to compare choiceworthiness values across different moral theories; but I argue that these techniques have lots of problems.
         
    • Moral uncertainty, pure justifiers, and agent-centred options. Australasian Journal of Philosophy. [coauthor: Patrick Kaczmarek | pre-publication pdf | doi]
      • Synopsis: The expected choiceworthiness maximising approach to moral uncertainty cannot properly handle agent-centred prerogatives; we propose an alternative that can
         
  • 2025:
     
    • Moral uncertainty and expected truthlikeness. Synthese, 206.265, 1-32. [pre-publication pdf | doi | read-only pdf]
      • Synopsis: Rather than choosing actions that maximise expected choiceworthiness, perhaps we should instead choose theories that maximise expected truthlikeness
      • Won the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress' 2024 Young Ethicist Prize (co-winner; open to any untenured presenters, including tenure-track faculty; $350)
      • Anonymous reviewer: "The first paper in years in the moral uncertainty literature that opens new directions of research."
         
    • Disagreement, AI alignment, and bargaining. Philosophical Studies, 182.7, 1757-87 [pre-publication pdf | doi]
      • Synopsis: When stakeholders disagree about how an AI should behave, resolving this disagreement through simulated bargaining is better than resolving it through voting or expected value maximisation
         
    • Moral uncertainty, proportionality, and bargaining. Ergo, 12.44, 1142-71 [coauthors: Patrick Kaczmarek and Michael Plant | open-access pdf | doi]
      • Synopsis: Bargaining-theoretic approaches to moral uncertainty have several advantages over the expected choiceworthiness maximising approach
      • Real-world application: Helped to inform this online tool for choosing a portfolio of charitable donations
         
    • Gentrification: a philosophical analysis and critique. Journal of Urban Affairs, 47.4, 1246-64. [pre-publication pdf | doi]
      • Synopsis: Forms of gentrification that don't displace many land users are still pro tanto morally objectionable insofar as they damage local communities
         
  • 2024:
     
    • Redistribution and selfishness. Analysis, 84.3, 493-503. [pre-publication pdf | doi]
      • Synopsis: Even in a world of completely unselfish people, redistributive taxation would still discourage productive contributions to national wealth
         
  • 2021:
     
    • Moral status, luck, and modal capacities: debating Shelly Kagan. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 38.2, 273-87. [pre-publication pdf | doi]
      • Synopsis: Those like Kagan who want to argue that animals have a lower moral status than us can achieve extensional adequacy only through theoretical commitments that are difficult to justify
         

Commentaries:

  • Forthcoming:
    • Animals, future generations, and resource-rational contractualism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
       
  • 2024:
    • Better than what?: embryo selection, gene editing, and evaluative counterfactuals. American Journal of Bioethics, 24.8, 55-7. [pre-publication pdf | doi]
       
  • 2023:
    • Large language models and biorisk. American Journal of Bioethics, 23.10, 115-8. [coauthors: William D'Alessandro and Nathaniel Sharadin | pre-publication pdf | doi]
       

Working papers:

  • Moral uncertainty and bargaining. (old title: The property rights approach to moral uncertainty.) Happier Lives Institute, working paper, October 2022. [pdf | hyperlink | email me for a more recent draft]
     
  • Time discounting defended. (old title: Time discounting, consistency, and special obligations: a defence of Robust Temporalism.) Global Priorities Institute, working paper no. 11-2021. [pdf | hyperlink | email me for a more recent draft]

Under review:

  • [A paper on machine ethics]
    • Synopsis: Several AI ethicists have recently suggested a response to stakeholder normative disagreement that is inspired by expected utility theory; but I argue that this response has several problems
       
  • [A paper on animal ethics]
    • Synopsis: We should incorporate animals into our theories of distributive justice on equal footing with human beings
       
  • [A paper on time discounting]
    • Synopsis: Although almost all other philosophers reject the idea that temporal proximity could matter morally, I argue that this view is more defensible than is commonly supposed
       

In preparation:

  • [Monograph on moral uncertainty and bargaining]
     
  • [A paper on personal identity, fission, and fusion]
    • Synopsis: A fissioner survives her operation as a scattered object with Lefty and Righty as her discontiguous parts; her well-being is the average of Lefty's and Righty's; and Bernard Williams' 'body swap' cases might also involve this kind of 'survival through parts'