Global Priorities Institute (GPI)
The Global Priorities Institute (GPI) was an interdisciplinary research center at the University of Oxford that operated from 2018 to July 2025. Its mission was to address deeply unresolved questions crucial for people seeking to do as much good as possible, understood in impartial terms. GPI prioritized topics that were important, neglected, and tractable, using tools from philosophy, economics, and psychology. Key research areas included longtermism, population ethics, moral uncertainty, AI risk, animal welfare, and philanthropic decision-making. The institute was co-founded by philosopher Hilary Greaves and Will MacAskill, and hosted 20 academic workshops, the Derek Parfit Memorial Lectures, and the Tony Atkinson Memorial Lectures over its seven-year existence.
Funding Details
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- Fiscal Sponsor
- University of Oxford
Theory of Change
GPI believed that rigorous academic research on global priorities could shift how the most effective philanthropists, institutions, and individuals allocate limited resources. By resolving foundational questions in ethics (such as population ethics, moral uncertainty, and longtermism) and economics (such as how to measure and compare welfare across causes), GPI aimed to provide intellectual grounding that would raise the quality of cause prioritization across the effective altruism and broader philanthropic community. Academic credibility was central to this model: peer-reviewed publications and partnerships with elite universities could bring global priorities thinking into mainstream academia, training future researchers and influencing policymakers. The institute saw its role as upstream of direct interventions — improving the conceptual tools and empirical evidence used to decide what to prioritize in the first place.
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Details
- Last Updated
- Apr 2, 2026, 9:58 PM UTC
- Created
- Mar 19, 2026, 10:31 PM UTC