Highlights - HENRY SHUE - Author of “The Pivotal Generation” - Snr. Research Fellow, Ctr. for International Studies, Oxford
“When I was at my first university, it was thought of as one of the world's leading places in philosophy. And I learned to use the methods that were dominant there. When I went to the other university, the first seminar that I took was a critique of the methods that I had learned at the first university. And this made a big impression on me because I had left the one where I did the Masters thinking, 'Okay, I know how to do this now, I'm getting good at this.' But then I learned, actually, there are problems with this way of doing things, too. So what I learned from all this is not that no method works and nothing is worthwhile, but just that however good the methods of analysis one has at any given time They're not going to be perfect. And so one needs to keep some humility and keep an open mind and keep on learning and not assume that you're on top of things.
So, one lesson I would draw for education is we really do need to teach people to think critically and not just try to pump them full of the beliefs that we think are right. And I do worry about the extent to which some topics are put sort of out of bounds at universities. We don't want to allow hate b behavior, but I think we also need to maintain free speech and enable people to think critically. And this is another of these tricky matters, but I think that's another balance we need to try to keep.
Young people need to encounter nature to actually get out into it and see it and feel it and smell it, sense it. And one thing philosophers can do and are trying to do is to argue that value is not just value to humans, which would be a kind of instrumental value. Things can have value in themselves. The other is to try to find ways that especially young people actually experience nature.”
Henry Shue is Professor Emeritus of Politics and International Relations at University of Oxford’s Merton College. He's the author of Basic Rights, as well as The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now, among many other publications. In 1976, he co-founded the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland. He was a supporter of the successful campaign by Virginia's Augusta County Alliance to stop the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, and now works primarily on explanations for the urgency of far more ambitious policies to eliminate fossil fuels in order to avoid irreversible damage for future generations.
www.merton.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-henry-shue
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691202280/basic-rights
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691226248/the-pivotal-generation
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