Harry R. Lloyd

harry [dot] lloyd [at] yale [dot] edu

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Research

Publications by topic, click to expand:

Moral uncertainty  ●  AI  ●  Political philosophy  ●  Bioethics  ●  Animal ethics

Papers by date:

  • Forthcoming:
     
    • Disagreement, AI alignment, and bargaining. Philosophical Studies. [pre-publication pdf]
      • 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
         
    • Redistribution and selfishness. Analysis. [pre-publication pdf | doi]
      • Synopsis: Even in a world of completely unselfish people, redistributive taxation would still discourage productive contributions to national wealth
         
    • Moral uncertainty, pure justifiers, and agent-centred options. Australasian Journal of Philosophy. [coauthor: Patrick Kaczmarek | pre-publication pdf]
      • Synopsis: The expected chocieworthiness maximising approach to moral uncertainty cannot properly handle agent-centred prerogatives; we propose an alternative that can
         
    • Moral uncertainty, proportionality, and bargaining. Ergo. [coauthors: Patrick Kaczmarek and Michael Plant | pre-publication pdf]
      • 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. [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
         
  • 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:

  • 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 defendend. (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]
    • 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
    • Won the Oxford Global Priorities Institute's 2021 Essay Prize for Global Priorities Research (£1000)
    • Summarised and discussed on David Thorstad's Reflective Altruism blog: 'Papers I learned from (Part 1: Time discounting, consistency, and special obligations)'
       

Under review:

  • [A paper on moral uncertainty]
    • Synopsis: Rather than choosing the 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)
       
  • [Another paper on moral uncertainty]
    • Synopsis: Philosophers of moral uncertainty often 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.
       
  • [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
       

In preparation:

  • [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.'
       
  • [Dissertation monograph on moral uncertainty and bargaining]