2018-2019 Lecture Series | Tanner Lectures

Arthur Ripstein

Professor of Law and Philosophy, and University Professor
University of Toronto

Rules for Wrongdoers

Lecture I: Rules for Wrongdoers
Tuesday, April 9, 2019
4:10 p.m. – 6:15 p.m., Toll Room, Alumni House
with commentary by Christopher Kutz

Lecture II: Combatants and Civilians
Wednesday, April 10, 2019
4:10 p.m. – 6:15 p.m., Toll Room, Alumni House
with commentary by Oona Hathaway and Jeff McMahan

Seminar and Discussion with the commentators
Thursday, April 11, 2019
4:10 p.m. – 6:15 p.m., Toll Room, Alumni House
with commentary by Christopher Kutz, Oona Hathaway, and Jeff McMahan

The lectures and the seminar are free and open to the public. No tickets are required

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About Arthur Ripstein

Arthur Ripstein is Professor of Law and Philosophy and University Professor at the University of Toronto, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1987. He teaches and writes about legal and political philosophy and torts. Ripstein has been at the forefront of renewed interest in Immanuel Kant’s legal and political philosophy. He is the author of Private Wrongs (2016), Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (2009), and Equality, Responsibility and the Law (1999). He is currently writing a book on Kant’s account of the law and morality of war, for which he was awarded a Killam Fellowship from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Ripstein has been an Associate Editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs since 2005; he was formerly an Associate Editor of Ethics and the Canadian Journal of Philosophy. His popular work has appeared on Ideas on CBC Radio One. He received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh, a master’s degree in law from Yale, and an undergraduate degree in philosophy from the University of Manitoba.

About the Lectures

In his lectures, Arthur Ripstein will argue that the very thing that makes war wrongful – the fact that which side prevails does not depend on who is in the right – also provides the moral standard for evaluating the conduct of war, both the grounds for going to war and the ways in which wars are fought.

About the Commentators

Christopher Kutz

C. William Maxeiner Distinguished Professor of Law
Jurisprudence & Social Policy Program
Berkeley Law

Christopher Kutz is a moral, legal, and political philosopher with special interests in criminal law and international law, known especially for his work on the normative implications of collective action. His work focusses on questions of rights and responsibility, both individual and collective, and questions of justice, peace, and democratic politics. A member of the Jurisprudence & Social Policy Program at Berkeley Law School, and an affiliate of both the Philosophy and Political Science Departments, he teaches courses to undergraduate, graduate and law students on crime, criminal law, and punishment, contemporary moral, legal and political theory, and the ethics and law of war.

Kutz is the C. William Maxeiner Distinguished Professor of Law at U.C. Berkeley, where he has taught since 1998; he has also held visiting appointments at Columbia, Stanford, and Sciences-Po, Paris. A graduate of Yale College with a B.A. in Philosophy, Kutz received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from U.C. Berkeley in 1996 and his law degree from Yale in 1997.

Oona A. Hathaway

Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law
Yale Law School

Oona A. Hathaway is a leading scholar of international law, foreign relations law, and national security law. She is the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, Professor of International Law and Area Studies at the Yale University MacMillan Center, Professor of the Yale University Department of Political Science, and Director of the Yale Law School Center for Global Legal Challenges.

Hathaway is Vice President of the American Society of International Law and member of the Advisory Committee on International Law for the Legal Adviser at the United States Department of State. She is the Director of the Yale Cyber Leadership Forum and was a principal investigator on a Hewlett Foundation grant to study cyber conflict. In 2014-15, Hathaway took leave to serve as Special Counsel to the General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense, where she was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence. Hathaway earned her B.A. summa cum laude at Harvard University in 1994 and her J.D. at Yale Law School, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal, in 1997. She served as a Law Clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and for D.C. Circuit Judge Patricia Wald.

Hathaway has published more than twenty-five law review articles, and The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (with Scott Shapiro, 2017).

Jeff McMahan

White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy
University of Oxford

Jeff McMahan works in moral philosophy, political philosophy, legal theory, and metaphysics. Most of his writing has been on issues concerning harming, killing, and saving, such as self-defense and defense of others, war, torture, abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, the moral status of animals, the metaphysics of personal identity, the metaphysics and evaluation of death, causing people to exist, and philanthropy.

McMahan is White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford. After receiving a B.A. degree in English literature from the University of the South (Sewanee), he went as a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford where he studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics for two years and then began work on his doctorate, which he later completed at the University of Cambridge. Before taking his current appointment at Oxford, he was professor of philosophy at Rutgers University.

McMahan is the author of The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (2002) and Killing in War (2009). A collection of his essays, The Values of Lives, is forthcoming and he is currently writing a book in which he argues that understanding certain intractable problems in “population ethics” is essential for resolving many of the most important issues in practical ethics.