Ep. 339 How to Demonstrate the Existence of Rights
The Tom Woods Show
Tom Woods
4.8 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 12 February 2015
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Topics Discussed
- What rights do individuals have?
- How do we know they have these rights and no others?
- Do animals have rights?
- What’s wrong with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
- Why isn’t there a “right to a pension” or a “right to a paid vacation”?
- Is there such a thing as natural law?
- If so, what can it teach us?
- Isn’t utilitarianism just as good a grounding for libertarianism?
About the Guest
Frank van Dun is a Belgian law philosopher and natural law theorist. He is a senior lecturer in the philosophy of law at the University of Ghent.
Guest’s Website
Articles Discussed
“Human Dignity: Reason or Desire: Natural Rights versus Human Rights”
“Natural Law: A Logical Analysis”
“Argumentation Ethics and the Philosophy of Freedom”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In a world of Democrats, there will be time for them to make profits. |
| 0:05.2 | Now's not that time. |
| 0:06.4 | And Republicans. |
| 0:07.9 | I've abandoned free market principles to save the free market system. |
| 0:12.2 | You need a voice of liberty. |
| 0:15.0 | Look no further. |
| 0:16.7 | You've found it. |
| 0:18.4 | Tom Woods. |
| 0:21.2 | Beware, citizen. |
| 0:22.9 | You are now departing from the world of allowable opinion. |
| 0:26.9 | The Tom Woods Show. |
| 0:34.0 | Welcome to the Tom Woods Show, episode 339. |
| 0:38.9 | Today we're joined by Frank Van Dunn. |
| 0:41.2 | We're going to talk about rights and whether they exist and how we can show that they exist, |
| 0:47.5 | and whether we can defend libertarianism without rights. |
| 0:52.0 | So all kinds of interesting questions to be answered today. Frank Van Dunn is a senior |
| 0:57.3 | lecturer in Philosophy of Law at the University of Ghent. He is widely published. We will link to his |
| 1:04.4 | faculty page over on the show notes page for this episode, which is tomwoods.com slash 339. So let's talk now to Frank Van |
| 1:14.7 | Dunn. Welcome to the show. |
| 1:18.5 | Hello, Tom. Glad to be on your show. You've done very, very important work in the area of |
| 1:25.6 | natural law, natural rights from a libertarian standpoint. And these are issues |
| 1:30.6 | that, you know, create confusion even in the minds of some libertarians. And I thought some |
... |
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