'Senior Citizens: Rights, Duties and the Old'
'Senior Citizens: Rights, Duties and the Old'
THE 2018 DUDLEY KNOWLES LECTURE IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Date: Thursday 01 March 2018
Time: 18:00 - 19:30
Venue: Sir Charles WIlson Lecture Theatre
Category:
Speaker: Professor David Archard
Website: www.gla.ac.uk/stevensontrust/
It is all too easy to think of the old within our society as the beneficiaries of collective care at the inequitable expense of others and at the same time as possessed of civic rights – such as that of voting - that are exercised to the detriment of the interests of those who will outlive them. Yet whilst we do have duties to the old there is reasonable disagreement as to the value of longer lives and the place of old age within these.
Such disagreement can only be resolved by political deliberation. The right to vote should not be accorded only on the basis of a principle of affected interests. Moreover, the senior citizen has a particular status, perhaps not one as the repository of accumulated wisdom, but as that of our collective memory.
Professor Dudley Ross Knowles (1947 – 2014) was a renowned political philosopher who taught at Glasgow University from 1973 to 2011. He was a staunch supporter of the Stevenson Trust and insisted that the Trust’s commitment to public education must include the contribution of political philosophy to examining issues of contemporary relevance in a manner accessible to all citizens. In 2015 the Stevenson committee endorsed his view by instigating an annual public lecture on political philosophy in his memory.