University Center for Human Values

Fostering ongoing inquiry into important ethical issues in private and public life and supporting teaching, research, and discussion of ethics and human values throughout the curriculum and across the disciplines at Princeton University. Learn more >

What Are Human Rights?

Values and Public Life seminar explores the question, “What are human rights?”
Anna Stilz receives the John H. Pace, Jr. ’39 Center for Civic Engagement’s Community Engagement Award

Stilz is the director of the undergraduate certificate program in values and public life. She is also the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values.
Barbara Herman Moffett Lecture Recap: "The Challenges of Beneficence: Revising the Terms"

When we think about helping others in need, the scenarios that first come to mind are likely the extreme cases we see in the news: a group of strangers forming a human chain to save a drowning person or a passerby catching a toddler falling out of a window.
Melissa Lane publishes article in Aeon

In the Aeon article "Rules or Citizens," Melissa Lane, director of the UCHV and Class of 1943 Professor of Politics, explores how Ancient Athenian and Greek practices afford us insights into how and why to maintain real accountability in public life.
10th Anniversary Edition of "The Life You Can Save" Published

The 10th anniversary edition of Peter Singer's book "The Life You Can Save" was published on Giving Tuesday. You can download a free version of the book on the book's website.
Kim Lane Scheppele featured on "We The People" podcast

On the podcast "We The People," Professor Kim Lane Scheppele weighs in on the question "Is Brexit a British Constitutional Crisis?"
Philip Pettit awarded the 2019 APSA Benjamin E. Lippincott Award

Philip Pettit, the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor in the University Center for Human Values, won the American Political Science Association's (APSA) prestigious Benjamin E.
Professor Cécile Laborde delivers the James A. Moffett '29 Lectures in Ethics.

Laborde Moffett Lecture: A Summary

Cécile Laborde, the Nuffield Chair of Political Theory at the University of Oxford and a fellow of the British Academy, delivered the spring 2019 James A. Moffett '29 Lecture in Ethics. Laborde spoke on “Who Needs Secularism? India, Liberalism, and Comparative Secularism.”
LSR Fellow Nelson Tebbe Summarizes Michael McConnell's (Stanford Law) Recent Tanner Lectures on Human Values

Professor McConnell, a former federal judge who now teaches at Stanford Law School, delivered his lectures on November 28 and 29, 2018, and he titled them "The President Who Would Not Be King."