Lara Buchak

Lara Buchak is a Professor in the Philosophy Department at Princeton University. Her research interests include decision theory, social choice theory, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. Her book Risk and Rationality (2013) concerns how an individual ought to take risk into account when making decisions. Her research following the book has focused on applications of her view to ethics, arguing that we ought to defer to individuals’ risk-attitudes in biomedical research; that we ought to weight worse scenarios very heavily in setting climate policy; and that we ought to care a great deal about the interests of the worse-off when acting ethically.

Other topics she has written on include the nature and rationality of faith; group decision-making; the relationship between assigning probability to a hypothesis and believing that hypothesis outright; and the nature of free will. Professor Buchak received her Ph.D. from Princeton in 2009. She spent 12 years in the Philosophy Department at UC Berkeley before returning to Princeton.