Program

Main Speaker
Baroness Onora O’Neill (Cambridge University, UK)

Commentators
Prof. Dr. Stefan Gosepath (Freie Universität Berlin, DE)
Prof. Laura Valentini (Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, DE)
Prof. Jeremy Waldron (New York University, School of Law, US)

Location
Online (Zoom) 

Tuesday, May 25, 2021

Lecture 1: Duties and Rights in the Twentieth Century

Since antiquity European discussions of justice, and more broadly of ethics, have mainly addressed the broad agent’s question ‘What ought we do?’ and focussed on a wide range of duties of differing types. However, from the early C20 this traditional emphasis on duties was quite widely questioned and set aside. Since mid-century many approaches to ethical questions have addressed the narrower question ‘What is each person entitled to?’, and have focused on respect for human rights and the limited range of duties they require.
Human rights matter, but also raise difficult issues. Currently the most discussed and disputed set of issues is about their justification. In the second decade of C21 disagreements whether rights are ‘moral’ or ‘political’—based on robust justifications or on political fiat— have not faded, but rather grown more intense (Moy, Etinson, Biggar). However, a second range of important problems is much less discussed. These arise because the interpretation and application of human rights relies on ethical and epistemic requirements that do not lie within the canonical lists of human rights. Theories of human rights cannot stand alone.

Lecture 2: Duties and Rights in a Digital Age

The shift from treating duties as fundamental to treating rights as fundamental has led to a narrowing of ethical discussion. This is well illustrated by the ethics of communication, including digital communication. A very wide range of duties bears on communication, ranging from honesty to promise-keeping, from attentiveness to civility. Some of these duties have counterpart rights, but most do not.
The two human rights that bear most evidently on communication are rights to freedom of expression and to privacy. Even in combination, they offer a limited perspective on the ethics of communication —despite energetic promotion of inflated conceptions of freedom of expression and strenuous efforts to find effective ways to protect online privacy. Human rights do not offer a sufficient basis for the ethics of communication, or specifically for the ethics of digital communication.

Thursday, May 27, 2021

Lecture 3: Duties and Rights: Would More Be Better?

What should we do if the human rights set out in UDHR and ECHR cannot stand alone? One quite popular suggestion is that we should conclude that there are more rights. But would extending the list of rights serve us better? Or would expanding the list create problems? Is there a definitive list of rights?
Rights are specified by principles of action that are unavoidably indeterminate, and require both interpretation and mutual qualification. The same is true of duties, including those duties that lack counterpart rights. Appeals to human rights—however they are listed— therefore cannot offer a complete account of ethical or political requirements, since action will always also be shaped by the wider range of technical, ethical, and epistemic norms and standards on which interpretation relies. Rights matter, but they do not offer a complete view of requirements of justice, let alone of wider ethical issues.