[Hac-announce] Conversations, Saturday, October 01 at 2:30p.m.

[L.M.C. Harvey]

                        You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the mailing list of

                     the  Humanist  Association of Connecticut.  To unsubscribe click on the link below. 
___________________________________________________________________________ 
  
About Conversations                                                                       October 01, 2011   
    

FYI Note!  From Humanist Institute site,  Robert Tapp, Dean Emeritus,   9/29/11 
                                                                                                                                                                 ;        
“A consistent theme is the centrality of ethics, for both individuals and for societies. Humans are responsible for their destinies in an evolutionary universe. Our ethical choices stem from our genetic structures as well as from the cultures that we have created.  Reason and critical intelligence are the best guides in these choices, and the sciences are our best source of knowledge. 
 
Hello Everyone,      I am sending this note as a brief introduction to Saturday's Conversations topic Professor Michael Sandel's  provoking question is it necessary to reason about the good life in order to decide what rights people have?   We'll continue to wrestle with some of these questions and some extensions from them such as whether a good life (in Socrates sense) and be lived in one's private sphere or whether an engagement with the moral perplexities of the wider world is a necessary component to such a good life. 
  
            Michael Sandel at Harvard U. teaches a class, Justice, which considers the moral reasoning required to determine what is just.  Ideas about what is due to each individual and how society determines what is due.  The course has been so popular year after year and was considered so potentially influential that the lectures have been made available to the public on line.  Some episodes may be seen on WGBH.org.  Sandel has been interviewed and spoken in a number of venues outside the university.  We'll take a look at some of these and discuss as our interests take us.  
  
            We've previously viewed the first lecture, Doing the Right Thing which introduced the idea of  a moral dilemma choosing whether to sacrifice one person in order to save five others  and episode 12, The Good Life and Debating Same-Sex Marriage.                
  
            We first encountered Sandel's ideas in the HAC Book Discussion in May, 2010.    The book, Justice, that grew out of the Harvard lectures. You may watch the lectures at your leisure and in any order at the following site.    http://www.justiceharvard.org/ 
  
Cynthia Harvey 
  
  
  
  
Note:  Questions and suggestions may be sent to  Conversations at cthumanist.org. 
____________________________________________________________________________________ 
To unsubscribe go to:   http://lists.cthumanist.org/mailman/listinfo/hac-announce 
                                       and follow the instructions at the bottom. 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.cthumanist.org/pipermail/hac-announce/attachments/20110930/77d83a7b/attachment.html>