Freeing the Mind: What Truly Matters in a Princeton Education
What’s the point of a Princeton education? What is liberal arts learning all about? How can students make the most of opportunities afforded to them by liberal arts colleges and universities? Two of Princeton’s most distinguished scholars and…
Today’s Supreme Court professes a commitment to originalism—the idea that the Constitution’s meaning is fixed at ratification and binds judges today. But in interpreting the Constitution, the Court often looks to the post-ratification practices of other actors: Presidents, Congresses, or states. The Court has held, for example,…
This year marks the 150th anniversary of one of the most influential decisions ever handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, in The Slaughter-House Cases. Slaughter-House has shaped federal-state jurisprudence for the last century-and-a-half. Join us for a half-day symposium to examine the influence and…
Open to the public.
George F. Will's newspaper column has been syndicated by The Washington Post since 1974. Today it appears twice weekly in more than 300 newspapers. In 1976 he became a regular contributing editor of Newsweek magazine, for which he provided a bimonthly essay…
Join Keith Whittington, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, and Myles McKnight, an alum from Princeton's Class of 2023, as they discuss the free speech rights of Princeton students. Then, stay for a catered dinner and an open house while Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program,…
Panels open to the public. See conference schedule at bottom of page.
What is history? Used in one common sense, history refers to the scholarly, and perhaps even the scientific, study of the human past. Thought of in this way, history is primarily a matter of the intellect. History, however…
Join Robert P. George, Director of the James Madison Program and McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, as he engages a panel of professionals in a conversation about the future of dissenters in the working world.
After surveying the historical evidence for Adam Smith's influence on James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, this lecture will consider ways in which the founders' nuanced view of human nature as a balance between virtue and selfishness may derive (in part) from Smith.
Professor Samuel Fleischacker studied at Yale University, receiving his PhD in 1989. He works in moral and political philosophy, the history of moral and philosophy,and the philosophy of religion. Among the issues that have particularly interested him are the moral status of culture, the nature and history of liberalism, the relationship between moral philosophy and social science, and the relationship between moral and religious values. His publications include The Ethics of Culture (Cornell, 1994), A Third Concept of Liberty (Princeton, 1999), On Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion (Princeton, 2003), A Short History of Distributive Justice (Harvard, 2004), Divine Teaching and the Way of the World (Oxford, 2011), What Is Enlightenment? (Routledge, 2012), The Good and the Good Book (Oxford, 2015), and Being Me Being You: Adam Smith and Empathy (Chicago, 2019). Professor Fleischacker has been a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the University Center for Human Values at Princeton, and the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at Edinburgh University. He taught previously at Williams College.
The spectacular emergence into the public domain over the past few months of generative AI applications based on large language models, such as ChatGPT and Bing, has underscored a disturbing time lag between technological advance and regulatory vision. One question raised by this phenomenon is: what is the ethical framework that will enable a compelling regulatory approach to AI to emerge? This lecture will argue that a broadly Aristotelian ethical framework has great promise in this respect and has notable advantages over the utilitarian approach that tends to be rather uncritically adopted by many theorists and policy-makers in the AI domain. The lecture then considers two topics from this perspective 1) the place of work in a meaningful life, and how the impact of developments in AI bear on work as a source of human fulfilment. In particular, are those theorists right who suggest that play can take the place of work in a future shaped by AI? and 2) whether developments in AI require fundamental revisions to our human rights framework. In particular, should we acknowledge a human right to a human decision with the result that certain forms of decision-making should be reserved exclusively to our fellow human beings.
Andrew Koppelmann, John Paul Stevens Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University
Respondent: Leif Wenar, Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities and Professor of Political Science and Professor of Law Senior Fellow, Woods Institute for the…