This year's Tanner Lectures will be delivered by Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. Her lecture series, entitled, Beyond the Social Contract: Toward Global Justice will explore the limitations of the social contract tradition in addressing some of the world's most pressing problems and the possibilities present in the 'capabilities approach' which she has long championed.

The social contract tradition has great strengths in thinking about justice, Professor Nussbaum will argue. Its conception of justice as the outcome of a bargain among rational independent adults rightly emphasizes the worth of human dignity and of values of mutual respect and reciprocity. Nonetheless, such theories prove unable to provide satisfactory approaches to three of the most urgent problems of justice in today's world. In this series of lectures Professor Nussbaum argues that a version of the "capabilities approach," an approach that emphasizes the diversity of human abilities and the worth of opportunities for fully human functioning, can take us further.

At the heart of Professor Nussbaum's liberal theory of justice and human rights is her elaboration of the concept of capabilities developed by Amartya Sen, Master of Trinity College. Sen introduced these ideas as a way of addressing questions of justice and human development, and his approach has been extremely influential in shaping the work of major international institutions such as the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank.

Timetable

WEDNESDAY 5TH MARCH
5pm Lady Mitchell Hall
Capabilities and the Mentally Disabled

THURSDAY 6TH MARCH
4.00pm Lady Mitchell Hall
Human Capabilities across National Boundaries
5.45pm Lady Mitchell Hall
Capabilities and the World of Nature

FRIDAY 7 MARCH
10am

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