Elliott Thornley

Dados Biográficos

ID4631779
NOMEElliott Thornley
PRENOMESElliott
SOBRENOMEThornley
ASSINATURATHORNLEY E
AFILIAÇÕESUniversity of Oxford
ORCID0000-0002-6665-5267
VERIFICADOSim
TOTAL DE OBRAS6
TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES2
TOTAL COMO AUTOR6
TOTAL COMO EDITOR0
PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO2021
ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO2026
ÍNDICE H1

  • A Fission Problem for Person-Affecting Views

    Open AccessElliott ThornleyARTICLEErgo an Open Access Journal of…2026

    On person-affecting views in population ethics, the moral import of a person’s welfare depends on that person’s temporal or modal status. These views typically imply that—all else equal—we’re never required to create extra people, or to act in ways that increase the probability of extra people coming into existence. In this paper, I use Parfit-style fission cases to construct a dilemma for person-affecting views: either they forfeit their seeming…

  • Critical-Set Views, Biographical Identity, and the Long Term

    Open AccessElliott ThornleyARTICLEAustralasian Journal of Philosophy2025

    Critical-set views avoid the Repugnant Conclusion by subtracting some constant from the welfare score of each life in a population. These views are thus sensitive to facts about biographical identity: identity between lives. In this paper, I argue that questions of biographical identity give us reason to reject critical-set views and embrace the total view. I end with a practical implication. If we shift our credences towards the total view, we s…

  • The shutdown problem

    Open AccessElliott ThornleyARTICLEPhilosophical Studies2025Citada por: 2Referências: 22

    I explain and motivate the shutdown problem: the problem of designing artificial agents that (1) shut down when a shutdown button is pressed, (2) don’t try to prevent or cause the pressing of the shutdown button, and (3) otherwise pursue goals competently. I prove three theorems that make the difficulty precise. These theorems suggest that agents satisfying some innocuous-seeming conditions will often try to prevent or cause the pressing of the s…

  • A dilemma for lexical and Archimedean views in population axiology

    Open AccessElliott ThornleyARTICLEEconomics and Philosophy2022

    Lexical views in population axiology can avoid the Repugnant Conclusion without violating Transitivity or Separability. However, they imply a dilemma: either some good life is better than any number of slightly worse lives, or else the ‘at least as good as’ relation on populations is radically incomplete. In this paper, I argue that Archimedean views face an analogous dilemma. I thus conclude that the lexical dilemma gives us little reason to pre…

  • Critical Levels, Critical Ranges, and Imprecise Exchange Rates in Population Axiology

    Open AccessElliott ThornleyARTICLEJournal of Ethics and Social…2022

    According to critical-level views in population axiology, an extra life improves a population if and only if that life’s welfare level exceeds some fixed “critical level.” An extra life at the critical level leaves the new population equally good as the original. According to critical-range views, an extra life improves a population if and only if that life’s welfare level exceeds some fixed “critical range.” An extra life within the critical ran…

  • The impossibility of a satisfactory population prospect axiology (independently of Finite Fine-Grainedness)

    Open AccessElliott ThornleyARTICLEPhilosophical Studies2021

    Arrhenius’s impossibility theorems purport to demonstrate that no population axiology can satisfy each of a small number of intuitively compelling adequacy conditions. However, it has recently been pointed out that each theorem depends on a dubious assumption: Finite Fine-Grainedness. This assumption states that there exists a finite sequence of slight welfare differences between any two welfare levels. Denying Finite Fine-Grainedness makes room …