About me

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the National University of Singapore. I work in moral philosophy, decision theory, and especially in their intersection: moral decision-making under risk. I’m particularly interested in our obligations towards future generations.

Before joining NUS, I was a Senior Researcher at the University of Fribourg, and before that I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Global Priorities Institute (University of Oxford). (By the way, most of GPI’s research outputs are freely available online, and can be found here.)

I completed my DPhil in Philosophy at St John’s College, Oxford in 2022. My DPhil thesis defended the view in population axiology that outcomes are to be ranked by their total wellbeing. It also defended the analogous view about different-number fission cases. My thesis supervisors were Prof. Hilary Greaves and Dr. Teruji Thomas, both of the Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford.

Before beginning the DPhil, I studied for the BPhil in Philosophy at the University of Oxford, where I was supervised by Prof. Volker Halbach, Prof. Guy Kahane, Prof. Jeff McMahan and Dr. Teruji Thomas. Before that, I studied Mathematics and Philosophy (with specialism in logic and foundations) at the University of Warwick. My undergraduate thesis, which went through some standard results on the equivalence of reflection principles and large cardinal axioms in set theory, was supervised by Prof. Walter Dean and Prof. Adam Epstein. Before that, I went to school. I’m from Northampton, a large town in the East Midlands of England. It’s world-famous for its Shoe Museum and for being the 28th largest town in England in 1377.

I’m currently interested in a wide range of topics, many of which are connected to issues in population ethics. Do send me an email if you’d like to think about some of these things together! My email address is tomi dot francis at nus dot edu dot sg.