2023 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics (3/3)

Series title: Knowledge and Achievement: Their Value, Nature, and Public Policy Role

Friday 20 October 2023, 4.30 - 6.30pm

Booking is now open for in-person attendance and the registration links are listed below.

We aim to video record all three lectures and will make the recordings available on our YouTube channel as soon as we can after each talk. Further details on this to follow.

All are welcome to attend these free, public lectures - we hope you will be able to join us!

Lecture 3: Knowledge and Achievement as Public Policy Goals

Date and time: Week 2 Friday 20 October, 4.30 – 6.30pm

Registration: https://bookwhen.com/uehiro/e/ev-suwk-20231020163000

Lecture 1 Lecture 2

Professor Tom Hurka

Photograph of Thomas Hurka

Professor Thomas Hurka is currently Chancellor Henry N. R. Jackman Distinguished Professor of Philosophical Studies at the University of Toronto. He gained a B.Phil. and D.Phil. in Philosophy at University of Oxford University, after a B.A. at the University of Toronto.

Hurka has published on a number of topics, however his main area of research and teaching is moral and political philosophy, especially normative ethical theory. His writings focus on perfectionist moral theories: authored books include Perfectionism (OUP)  and Virtue, Vice, and Value (OUP). He has also discussed the justification of punishment, population ethics, nationalism, friendship, and the morality of war. 

In 2011, Professor Hurka published a non-academic book The Best Things in Life (OUP), about the many things – pleasure, knowledge, achievement, virtue, personal love – that can make life desirable. Later, in 2014, he published British Ethical Theorists From Sidgwick to Ewing (OUP), the first full historical study of an important strand in the development of modern moral philosophy. The book follows a series of British ethical theorists from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, who shared key assumptions that made them a unified and distinctive school.