The Tanner Lectures are the idea of Obert Clark Tanner, now Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. They are intended in the Trustees' words ‘to advance and reflect upon the scholarly and scientific learning relating to human values and valuations’; they were formally established at Clare Hall Cambridge on 1 July 1978, and are given annually at Harvard, Michigan, Stanford, Utah, Brasenose College Oxford and Clare Hall, and occasionally elsewhere.

It is part of the point of the lectures that they shall be published. This is done by the University Presses of Utah and Cambridge in volumes edited by Sterling McMurrin under the title The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. A shortened version of the two lectures given by Amartya Sen in Cambridge appears, with those given elsewhere in 1985, in Volume VII (McMurrin 1986). The fellows of Clare Hall have decided that the purpose of the lectures, for which they themselves are responsible, might be furthered by publishing them in full and by including in that publication some of the comments made at the subsequent seminar. The Tanner Trustees and the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press have agreed, and the present volume is the first result.

The ‘standard of living’ could not more directly have addressed Obert Tanner's intention. If not always under this description, it has become one of the first considerations of government; maintaining and improving it has become one of the central expectations of those who are governed.