Ethics in Your World with Mathias Risse

Date: 

Friday, October 9, 2020, 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Location: 

Harvard Book Store Virtual Events

Cover of On Justice

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics welcome MATHIAS RISSE—Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Philosophy and Public Administration and Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University—for a discussion of his latest book, On Justice: Philosophy, History, Foundations. He will be joined in conversation by ERIC BEERBOHM, Professor of Government and Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University and author of In Our Name: The Ethics of Democracy. 

Click here to register for the book talk.

About On Justice

Though much attention has been paid to different principles of justice, far less has been done reflecting on what the larger concern behind the notion is. In this work, Mathias Risse proposes that the perennial quest for justice is about ensuring that each individual has an appropriate place in what our uniquely human capacities permit us to build, produce, and maintain, and is appropriately respected for the capacity to hold such a place to begin with. Risse begins by investigating the role of political philosophers and exploring how to think about the global context where philosophical inquiry occurs. Next, he offers a quasi-historical narrative about how the notion of distributive justice identifies a genuinely human concern that arises independently of cultural context and has developed into the one we should adopt now. Finally, he investigates the core terms of this view, including stringency, moral value, ground and duties of justice.

The “Ethics in Your World” series, presented with Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, features leading thinkers taking on tough problems that matter to us all.