The Holberg Lecture 2017: Onora O'Neill: "Justice without Ethics, A Twentieth Century Innovation?"

Lecture by the 2017 Holberg Laureate Onora O’Neill, Honorary Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge. For centuries discussions of justice and ethics were seen as linked domains of duty in European thought and culture. In the twentieth century they were seen as diverging in marked, interesting and unsettling ways. There is now widespread acceptance that justice is a matter of respect for objectively justified human rights, but (other) ethical standards lack wider justification and reflect either individual choice or shared standards. I shall argue that this view promotes inadequate accounts both of justice and of other ethical standards. Onora O'Neill is introduced by Professor Ellen Mortensen, Academic Director for the Holberg Prize.