It's My Right: What Are Natural Rights and What Rights Do We Have? | Prof. V. Bradley Lewis

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 873 Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2024

⏱️ 49 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on April 3rd, 2024, at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speaker:

Bradley Lewis is associate professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of America. He specializes in political and legal philosophy, especially in classical Greek political thought and in the theory of natural law. He holds a B.A. from the University of Maryland and a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. He has published scholarly articles in Polity, History of Political Thought, the Southern Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Communio, the Josephinum Journal of Theology, the Pepperdine Law Review, the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, and the Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, as well as chapters in a number of books. He is currently working on a book project provisionally titled The Common Good and the Modern State. He is also a fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology and serves as associate editor of the American Journal of Jurisprudence.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tumistic Institute podcast.
0:06.0	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:12.0	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tumistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.0	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at
0:21.6	Thomistic Institute.org. I start with a quotation. Rights talk is inherently aggressive,
0:28.5	even imperial. It tends towards moral inflation and militates against accommodation.
0:34.1	Rights talkers with their inner monologues of preemptive resentments, work themselves into a simmering
0:40.3	state of annoyed vigilance against any limits on their willfulness, unquote. Well, that sounds very bad.
0:47.4	That was written by George Will, if anybody reads his column in a 2009 column in the Washington Post, the balance of which was a, so far as I can tell, spot-on account of life in the well-heeled suburban state of nature known as Chevy Chase, Maryland, but about the, on his view, excesses of rights talk and the focus to the exclusion of other things on rights in American political discourse.
1:13.6	Will mentioned one of the most celebrated academic criticisms of rights talk.
1:18.6	I mean, he's a popular commentator, but he mentioned a very celebrated academic criticism of rights talk.
1:23.6	A book published in 1991 called Rights Talk by Harvard Law Professor and former U.S.
1:30.0	Ambassador to the Vatican, Marianne Glendon, the conservative criticism of rights talk, so
1:37.2	from the anti-rights talk from the right, one might say, conservative criticism of rights talk
1:43.4	usually dilates on a kind of individualistic,
1:46.4	agonistic, zero-sum politics, which is no politics at all, but what one might characterize as the
1:53.2	remains of politics left behind by a community that has become rigidly legalistic and incapable
2:00.0	of political deliberation.
2:02.1	So there is the suggestion that rights, individual rights, are a modern idea
2:08.3	connected perhaps causally with some of the characteristic problems of modern politics.
2:16.0	Individualism that dilutes communal bonds and leads to the kind of lonely
2:21.0	egoism identified by many social thinkers, but also a politics characterized by constant
	...

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