"I thought he was going to speak of things that were more readily digestible," Steiner quipped.
Sen, who 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."
"It wasn't your usual after-dinner speech," said Sephen Livingstone, an HLS graduate and law professor from Belfast.
Sen 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 X for him.
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.
Yet according to Sen, there are ethical imperatives that exist prior to any state, and it is from these imperatives that the concept of human rights draws its strength.
You must "do the sensible thing for others within the limits of what you can and what you know," he said.