The annual public Uehiro Lecture Series captures the ethos of the Uehiro Centre, which is to bring the best scholarship in analytic philosophy to bear on the most significant problems of our time, and to make progress in the analysis and resolution of these issues to the highest academic standard, in a manner that is also accessible to the general public. Philosophy should not only create knowledge, it should make people’s lives better.
http://www.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/lectures/uehiro_lectures_and_book_series
Making Good 2: Robust Demands and the Need for Law
Second of three lectures by in the 2011 Annual Uehiro Lecture Series "Making Good: The Challenge of Robustly Demanding Values". Delivered by Philip Pettit, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University. The common subjection to law means in any community that we give each other certain legal rights robustly, not just actually or probably. The freedom, respect and dignity that you thereby enjoy come about as a result of how we others are legally constrained; they do not materialize just as a result of what we do, or even, unlike virtue-based goods, as a result of what we are disposed to do. And so law is a distinct way of making good, not just an aid or prompt to doing good; it too creates value in its own right.