It's My Right: What Are Natural Rights and What Rights Do We Have? | Prof. Joseph Trabbic

The Thomistic Institute

Catholicism, Christianity, Thomism, Religion & Spirituality, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Society & Culture, Catholic, Philosophy

4.8 • 873 Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2023

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was given on November 9, 2022, at Regent University. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Dr. Trabbic is associate professor of philosophy at Ave Maria University, where he has taught since 2006. He earned his PhD in philosophy from Fordham University in 2008. His areas of interest include Aquinas, continental philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. He has published his work in various academic journals, including Religious Studies, The Heythrop Journal, and New Blackfriars.

Transcript

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0:38.8	because it matters what you think.
0:51.1	My talk is on, as Mayle said, it's on natural rights.
0:55.0	And I will be presenting natural rights from a somistic perspective.
1:04.0	So I'll just get into my paper here.
1:09.0	I made a bunch of last minute edits that I didn't, unfortunately,
1:14.4	wasn't able to put into a word document and print, so they're all written in here in pencil.
1:19.5	So if I stumble a little bit, you'll know why.
1:23.2	As many people understand it, you write as an attribute of a person is the license to do, to demand, or to possess something.
1:32.3	For many of us, the political regimes in which we live confer upon us rights thus understood.
1:40.3	Amendments to our American Constitution, for example, grant us the right to vote, which is a right to do something,
1:48.0	the right to trial by jury, which is a right to demand something, and the right to bear arms, which is a right to possess something.
1:57.0	Philosters and jurists call rights of the sort granted to us by the U.S.
2:03.6	Constitution, positive rights. A positive right is a right that is conferred upon me by other
2:10.6	human beings. Many people claim, and I am one of them, that besides positive rights, there are also such things as natural rights.
2:20.3	These are rights that are implied in some way by our human nature.
2:25.3	For this reason, they can also be called human rights.
2:28.3	Proponents of natural rights, and here again I include myself, hold that positive rights should be based on natural rights.
2:38.0	So whatever constitutional rights I have, for example, should be such that they can be traced back to natural rights.
	...

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