Name John Tasioulas | ||
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Education University of Melbourne, University of Oxford, Northcote High School | ||
John tasioulas human rights radcliffe institute
John Tasioulas (born 18 December 1964) is a Greek-Australian moral and legal philosopher. He is the inaugural Yeoh Professor of Politics, Philosophy and Law at The Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London and Director of the Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy, and Law. He holds dual Australian and British citizenship.
Contents
- John tasioulas human rights radcliffe institute
- John tasioulas on is dignity the foundation of human rights or emet lecture11 march 2011
- Biography
- Academic expertise
- Selected works
- References
John tasioulas on is dignity the foundation of human rights or emet lecture11 march 2011
Biography
John Tasioulas was born in Wollongong, New South Wales, in 1964. His parents migrated to Australia from Dasyllio in the Grevena region of Greece. He was a student at Northcote High School and Melbourne High School. He completed undergraduate degrees in Philosophy and Law at the University of Melbourne and was the 1989 Rhodes Scholar for Victoria. He received a doctorate (D.Phil in Philosophy) from Oxford University for a thesis on moral relativism which was supervised by Joseph Raz. Tasioulas was a Lecturer in Jurisprudence at the University of Glasgow (1992–1998), Reader in Moral and Legal Philosophy at the University of Oxford where he was a Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at Corpus Christi College (1998–2010), and Quain Professor of Jurisprudence in the Faculty of Laws, University College London (2011–2014). He is an Honorary Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Law School, an Emeritus Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, a Distinguished Research Fellow of the Oxford Uehrio Centre for Practical Ethics, and a member of the Academia Europaea. He has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. He delivered the 'Or 'Emet Lecture at Osgoode Hall Law School (2011), the Natural Law Lecture at Notre Dame Law School (2012), and the Van Hasselt Lecture at Delft University of Technology (2016).
Academic expertise
Tasioulas works in moral, legal and political philosophy. He has advanced a version of the communicative theory of punishment, according to which the overarching point of punishment is the communication of censure to wrong-doers. His version of the theory is distinctive in making room for the value of mercy alongside that of retributive justice.
In the philosophy of human rights, Tasioulas has argued for an orthodox understanding of such rights, according to which they are moral rights possessed by all human beings simply in virtue of their humanity. This contrasts with a more recent view that characterizes human rights in terms of some political role(s), such as being triggers for international intervention or benchmarks of internal legitimacy. According to Tasioulas, human rights have a foundation both in a plurality of human interests and in equal human dignity.
He has written on a range of other topics including moral relativism, the ethics of biomedicine, and the philosophy of international law. His co-edited volume, The Philosophy of International Law (OUP, 2010), is a central text in the field.