Nicholas Wolterstorff
In the Western tradition there are two fundamentally different ways of
thinking about justice; I call them "the right order conception" and
"the inherent rights conception." After explaining the distinction and
arguing in favor of the latter conception, I will then explore the
concept of rights, and argue against the prevalent idea that natural
rights are guarantees of autonomy and in favor of the idea that one's
natural right to being treated a certain way is what is required by due
respect for one's worth or dignity.
Nicholas Wolterstorff
The dominant theme in almost two millennia of discussions in the West
about the relation between love and justice is the theme of tension or
incompatibility: if one treats someone as one does because justice
requires it, one is not acting out of love, and if one acts out of love
toward someone, one is not treating them as one does because justice
requires it. I will point to the paradoxes that this view yields, and
then present a way of understanding love (and justice) such that love
incorporates justice rather than being in tension with it, while also
often going beyond what justice requires.
Melissa Williams
The popular movements that have erupted around the globe, from Tahrir
Square to the demonstrations in the Eurozone to the Occupy movements,
are simultaneously movements for social justice and movements for
democratic reform. Popular protest has stimulated a renewed – and now,
more than ever, a truly global - public sphere that consciously links
failures of democratic legitimacy on the national scale with failures of
economic justice on the global scale. At the same time, the global
economic crisis hastens the unraveling of the social welfare state whose
stability has been the presupposition of our most powerful theories of
social justice. Those theories, though enriched and deepened through the
critiques from difference that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, may rest
on Westphalian assumptions about the boundaries of justice that are
difficult to sustain in the context of neoliberal globalization. Looking
to the practices and rhetoric of those who are acting on behalf of
"globalization from below," the lecture will explore alternative
political imaginaries for linking aspirations to justice and claims for
democratic rights in our dynamic and interconnected world.
