Winners of the 2020 Undergraduate Thesis Prize

We are pleased to announce that the winners of the 2020 Forethought Foundation Undergraduate Thesis Prize have now been selected! We received many promising submissions, but these essays stood out to us for their ability to produce and communicate insights relevant to the problem of global priority-setting.

Award Winners (£2,000)

This thesis makes a significant advance over previous models of quadratic voting, making it important for work on electoral reform, a critical area of global priorities research.

This thesis argues that culture is just as important a driver of long-term economic growth as institutions, thereby making a contribution to an area of crucial importance for longtermism.

This thesis explores the combination of two views in population ethics, the Asymmetry and critical-level theories, thereby making an important contribution to our understanding of longtermism.

This thesis introduces a new problem for population axiologies (the ‘animal repugnant conclusion’) and argues that critical-level utilitarianism may be uniquely well-equipped to avoid both this and the original repugnant conclusion. Population axiology is crucial for figuring out the implications of longtermism, a central topic in global priorities research. 

 

Commendation Prize Winners (£200)

Aidan Mackenzie, Rejecting Hedonic-Experientialism

Anton Leicht, Decision Theory and Global Cause Prioritisation

Gilgallon Georgiana, Human Extinction and Our Obligations

Hengyu Yan, Ethnic Diversity and Economic Development

Karri Heikkinen, Can Generic Standpoints Help Contractualists Solve the Non-Identity Problem?

Lily Lu-Lerner, How Well Can We Measure Well-Being? 

Matthew Wiseman, Axiological Strong Longtermism

Michael Bennett, Consumer Preferences and Animal Welfare 

Pedro Adami Oliboni, On the Relative Long-Term Importance of Investments in Economic Growth and Global Catastrophic Risk Reduction

Silvana Hultsch, Avoiding Moral Wrongs under Normative Uncertainty: Biases Involved in Maximizing Expected Choice-Worthiness

Tomas Petr, Effect of Global Poverty Reduction on Wild Animal Welfare