Word: benthamism
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...left Harvard to serve as master of Trinity College at Cambridge University, presented his listeners with an analysis of utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham's accusation that human rights were nothing more than "nonsense on stilts...
...explained that according to Bentham, rights and obligations come in pairs. If person A has a right to some X, then some person or organization has a corresponding obligation to secure...
...Bentham took issue with the open-endedness of human rights--rights that exist prior to the state or any other agent that can secure them, Sen said...
...Bentham's argument was that humans in nature are no more born with human rights than they are with clothes--rights require legislation just as clothes require tailoring," Sen said...
...conversation around house dining halls these days will tell you that. One naive to these parts might see the words "reading period" and think to him or herself, "Oh, how lucky! Perhaps I can catch some Harvard undergraduates sitting around the dinner table and discussing the nuanced arguments of Bentham or the witty repartee of Molière!" But our eager observer would be out of luck, for the real conversations go as follows: "Yeah, I have an eight-pager due tomorrow and a 15-pager due Monday" or "I have a problem set due Thursday and another...