Human beings to be treated equally: British ethicist Prof Dr John Edmund

Lahore: Renowned British classicist, philosopher and ethicist Prof Dr John Edmund Hare has said every human being should be treated equally and on the conception he is defending, there is a call by God to every human being to love Him in a particular and unique way.

He was delivering a lecture on ethics and religion organized by Punjab University Department of Philosophy at Al Raazi Hall here on Thursday. PU Vice Chancellor Prof Dr Mujahid Kamran, Chairperson Department of Philosophy Dr Shagufta, Director Students Affairs Shahid Gul, faculty members and a large number of students were present on the occasion.

The lecture was organized in connection with Iqbal Memorial Lecture series. Delivering the lecture, Prof Hare, Noar Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology, Yale Divinity School, Yale University New Haven, CT. USA, said that Kantian morality required that we give equal moral status, or dignity, as opposed to price, to all human beings but it has proved hard to justify this status.

He said we could establish the dependence of morality upon religion in three ways i.e the argument from providence, the argument from grace and the argument from justification. He said the basic idea of locating our dignity in our responsiveness to God’s call is in Kant in what he calls ‘the predisposition to the good,’ and is part of his inheritance from the Lutheran catechisms of his youth.

He said what he had added to Kant was that his responsiveness may not come in this life but in the next. He said the justification of obligation, that it was obedience to God’s commands, was shown to rely on a basic premise that God is to be loved. He claimed that this justification gave us a way to ground the basic principle of Kantian morality that gives the same dignity to every human being.

Addressing the participants, PU VC Dr Mujahid Kamran thanked Prof Hare for an absorbing and interesting lecture on the topic and said we could not do without philosophy.