CANCELLED DUE TO WEATHER *** CANCELLED DUE TO WEATHER
David Rose, a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Missouri, St. Louis and the author of The Moral Foundation of Economic Behavior (Oxford University Press, 2011), will deliver a Hayek Lecture titled "The Empathy Problem" at 4:00 pm on Monday, March 3, in 113 Social Sciences Building.
The lecture is free and open to the public.
The abstract of his lecture reads as follows: "Our capacity for empathy goes to the very heart of what it means to be human. Empathy compels us to refrain from harming others and it makes altruism more efficient. In the small group milieu within which most of our evolution took place, empathy also provides a strong foundation for our being able to trust one another. But important as it is, empathy is still not enough to provide an adequate moral foundation for a high trust society capable of supporting genuine human flourishing. Human flourishing requires large group cooperation and effective large group cooperation requires being able to trust each other in large group contexts. This talk shows why empathy effects wither in large group contexts and explains how some societies have been able to supplement moral beliefs to deal with the empathy problem."
Professor Rose is currently writing a book titled Why Culture Matters Most, which will be published by Oxford University Press later this year.
The Hayek Lecture Series is sponsored by the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University, the Duke-UNC program in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and the program in American Values and Institutions at Duke University. The series is supported by a grant from the Thomas W. Smith Foundation.