Public Talk: Freedom, Harmony, and Resilience with Philip Pettit

The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford and the Berggruen Institute present a joint public talk: Freedom, Harmony, and Resilience. The speaker, Philip Pettit, is L.S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University, and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University.

With the rise of China and the resurgence of Confucian ideas to justify Chinese structures, the value of social harmony often has been presented as a rival to the allegedly western value of freedom. But how far are those two values in competition with one another? They certainly compete in some standard interpretations. But they need not compete or conflict on what is arguably the most attractive way of construing them. Namely, the free society robustly protects people against feeling vulnerable, while the harmonious society robustly protects them against feeling resentful. Any structure capable of delivering one result also should be able to deliver the other.