Many people believe that morality and international criminal law rest on the premise that we all share ‘a common humanity.’

The concept of humanity at play here is not just biological but ethical, as it is when we speak of seeing or failing to see the full humanity of another. The philosophical task, therefore, is to try to understand what that ethical loading amounts to. 

Join Emeritus Professor Raimond Gaita, author of Romulus, My Father, as he argues it is a mistake to seek this commonality, as philosophers do, in universal abstract principles. Rather, we better understand the kind of universality appropriate even to international criminal law if we compare it to the universality of great literature, translated, not into some universal common language like Esperanto, but from one natural language into another.

Professor Gaita will sketch what this means for discussions about the allegedly Eurocentric character of much international criminal law.  

What: UNSW Law’s Justice Talks free public lecture with Raimond Gaita

When: 6-7:30pm. Thursday, 4 September 2014

Where: UNSW Tyree Room, John Niland Scientia Building

Registrations are essential.

Enquiries: amy-louise.stanley@unsw.edu.au

Professor Gaita will also speak at an Australian Human Rights Centre seminar on Friday 5 September.

About the speaker: Raimond Gaita is Professorial Fellow in the Melbourne Law School and the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne and Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at King’s College London. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Gaita's books, which have been widely translated, include: Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception; Romulus, My Father, which was made into a feature film of the same name; A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love & Truth & JusticeThe Philosopher's DogBreach of Trust: Truth, Morality and Politics; After Romulus, and, as editor and contributor, Gaza: Morality Law and Politics, Muslims and Multiculturalism.

Media contact: Steve Offner, UNSW Media Office, 02 9385 1583, 0424 580 208