Tuesday 28 February 2006

KEYNES LECTURE IN ECONOMICS
How and Why Does Fairness Matter?
Professor K G Binmore , CBE, FBA, University College London
Economists are commonly thought to believe that the operation of the free market should trump any considerations of social justice. This view is sustainable only if one subscribes to the naive view that real markets and other social systems only have one equilibrium. However, game theory shows that realistic social systems usually have many equilibria. It is therefore not enough to argue that people will strive to improve their individual welfare. Their behaviour needs to be coordinated so that they all end up playing the same equilibrium. I argue that fairness can be explained as one of nature's answers to such coordination problems. That is to say, fairness evolved as an equilibrium selection device. This hypothesis leads to a theory of the structure of the fairness norms that we use in solving the coordination problems of everyday life. The theory allows a new interpretation of John Rawls' famous Theory of Justice that reconciles the seemingly hostile approaches of egalitarians and utilitarians.
 

Tuesday 14 March 2006

 JOINT BRITISH ACADEMY/ BRITISH PSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIETY LECTURE
 Living apart, living together? The role of intergroup contact in social integration
 Professor M R C Hewstone, FBA, New College, Oxford
 Societies, including Britain, are becoming increasingly ethnically heterogeneous or ‘mixed’, but there is growing concern that they are becoming less, not more, integrated (indeed, living “parallel lives”). I will consider what the term integration actually implies and then focus on the distinction between merely living together and actually having meaningful contact across group boundaries. The ‘contact hypothesis’ explores the conditions under which, and the processes by which, intergroup contact can promote improved intergroup relations. I consider the evidence for contact in four domains: ethnic segregation and cross-ethnic friendships; sectarianism in Northern Ireland; Hindu-Muslim communalism in India; and ethnic massacres and genocide.

 Thursday 30 March 2006

 SIR ISRAEL GOLLANCZ MEMORIAL LECTURE
 Bonjour Paresse: Waste and Recycling in Gower's Confessio Amantis
 Professor J Simpson, Harvard University
 Moments of historical rupture not only detest the waste of the past but also define it, the better to dispose of the past as idle waste. Many of us are the heirs of Protestant anxiety regarding work, and bourgeois detestation of waste. We find it difficult to recover the charisma of idleness of any kind, be it religious or aristocratic. That is an especial problem for the time-consuming and non-utilitarian study of literature. This lecture takes a friendly look at the literary representation of erotic idleness, and at the lover's idle reading of past texts.