Interview with Visiting Professor John Tasioulas on Top Human Rights Books
John Tasioulas on Human Rights
How did you get interested in human rights?
I got interested in human rights through two other prior interests. One was an interest in moral philosophy, in particular the question of relativism: whether there are genuinely objective and universal standards of morality. That’s what really fascinated me as an undergraduate and that’s what I went on to write my doctoral thesis on at Oxford. The other topic that always interested me was international law. If I hadn’t become a philosopher, I would have been strongly tempted to be an international lawyer. Human rights appealed because it brought together both of these preoccupations: the concern about whether there is a universal objective morality and, if there is, how that might be realised through an international legal order ascribing rights to all individuals. So, that’s the background story. The more specific explanation is that two events set me off in this direction. One is that I moved to a teaching job at Oxford in 1998 and one of my colleagues there was James Griffin who was just starting to write a book on human rights that was eventually published some ten years later — a very important book. The other event was in 1999, a year later, when John Rawls published The Law of Peoples. Central to that book was a doctrine of human rights. Very soon after that I had some sabbatical leave, my first leave after eight straight years of teaching, and I thought this was a topic that I really wanted to get stuck into.
You’ve recently been made head of the Centre For Politics, Philosophy, and Law at King’s College, London. Could you just say a little bit about that?
Yes. King’s is extremely fortunate that we received a gift for seven million pounds from the family of an alumnus, Mark Yeoh, to establish a centre for politics, philosophy, and law. It’s a marvellous opportunity to bring together different parts of the King’s College community to address what are clearly common concerns but require different sorts of skills—different sorts of disciplinary competencies—to address them. I see my role here as someone who can be a focal point for that kind of multi-disciplinary activity.
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