Tanner Lectures on Human Values
vol.22

Edited by Grethe B. Peterson

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, founded July 1, 1978, at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, was established by the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner. Lectureships are awarded to outstanding scholars or leaders in broadly defined fields of human values, and transcend ethnic, national, religious, or ideological distinctions.

From Judith Jarvis Thomson, "Goodness and Advice": "Which events are good and which bad? A familiar idea says that an event is good just in case it consists in someone’s feeling pleased, and bad just in case it consists in someone’s feeling pain. . . . I will call this idea about which events are good or bad, and about how good or bad they are, Hedonism About Goodness. Many people have found it a very attractive idea."

CONTENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS:

Jared Diamond, UCLA, Ecological Collapses of Pre-industrial Societies

Geoffrey Hill, Boston University, Rhetorics of Value

Michael Ignatieff, London, Human Rights as Politics

Jonathan Lear, University of Chicago, Happiness

Wolf Lepenies, School for Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, The End of German Culture

Judith Jarvis Thomson, M.I.T., Goodness and Advice

Charles Rosen, New York, Tradition Without Convention: The Impossible Nineteenth-Century Project

Helen Vendler, Harvard, Poetry and the Mediation of Value: Whitman on Lincoln

Marina Warner, London, Spirit Visions

Grethe Peterson is director of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values. She lives in Park City, Utah.