Annual Simone Weil Lecture

The Simone Weil Lecture on Human Value is hosted by the School of Philosophy. It was first held in 2000, an initiative of Professor Raimond Gaita. It is a free public lecture held annually in Brisbane and Melbourne.

Each year, a distinguished international scholar is invited to give a public lecture and academic seminar at ACU. The lectures are inspired by Simone Weil’s ethical vision that is rooted in attentive compassion and obligation to others, her unstinting desire for the Good, and her non-negotiable commitment to justice.

2019 Simone Weil Lecture on Human Value

Virtue in a changing climate:
How do we respond morally to global warming?

Professor Roger Crisp
Uehiro Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy St Anne’s College Oxford
Professor of Moral Philosophy University of Oxford

This lecture considers how we might respond morally to our rapidly changing climate. It will be shown that Ancient writers on the virtues, in particular Plato and Aristotle, can help us more with this issue than we might have expected, but that there are some features of our modern situation require attention to more recent moral philosophy. No knowledge of the science of climate change, or of philosophy, will be assumed.

Register to attend

About Professor Crisp

Roger Crisp is Uehiro Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, at St Anne’s College, Oxford, Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and Professorial Fellow at the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy at Australian Catholic University.

He is the author of Mill on Utilitarianism (1997), Reasons and the Good (2006), The Cosmos of Duty: Henry’s Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics (2015), and Sacrifice Regained: Morality and Self-interest in the British Moralists from Hobbes to Bentham (2019). He has translated Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics for Cambridge University Press and edited the Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics.

Explore profile

Past lectures

Lectures from more recent years, together with invited speakers, are listed below. Recorded lectures can be accessed via the topic link.