Confucian Role Ethics:
A Moral Foundation for Human Rights
10:00 a.m., Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2007
Cornell Auditorium in Plaster Hall
Admission: free

Although more than 150 nations have ratified the U.N. International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights, the United States has not. In significant measure this is due to grounding the concept of human rights in a view of human beings as essentially free, autonomous individuals. In this way civil and political rights may be straightforwardly championed and legally defended, but not the social, economic or cultural, except on some other basis than rights. Seeing human beings most basically as interrelated persons, Confucians can easily champion both sets of rights, giving their role ethics a claim on our attention today as the gap between the wealthy and the impoverished continues to widen both at home and abroad.

Dr. Henry Rosemont Jr. is regarded as one of the top Confucian scholars in the world. He is concurrently the George B. and Willma Reeves Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts Emeritus at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and senior consulting professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. Dr. Rosemont holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Washington and an honors A.B. from the University of Illinois. He pursued post-doctoral studies in linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969-71, studying with Noam Chomsky. He is the author of A Chinese Mirror (1991), Rationality and Religious Experience (2001), Radical Confucianism (forthcoming 2007), and more than 60 articles and reviews in anthologies and scholarly journals.