Christian Tarsney

I’m a philosopher working mainly in ethics and decision theory. My research spans formal and applied ethics, with an emphasis on teasing out the implications of abstract normative principles for important real-world problems. I'm interested in questions like how much weight we should give to tiny probabilities of extreme outcomes, how to deal with uncertainty about basic moral principles, and how to make chocies that affect (or might affect) the size of the future population. I've also recently started thinking about philosophical questions related to artificial intelligence.
 

I'm currently a senior research fellow with the Population Wellbeing Initiative at UT Austin. I’m also a senior research affiliate with the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford University, where I was previously a research fellow and assistant director for philosophy. Before that, I was a postdoc in the Centre for Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Groningen, and did my PhD in philosophy at the University of Maryland. In July 2025, I'll be joining the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto as an assistant professor.

You can reach me at christian.tarsney (at) utexas.edu.