What are Natural Rights and What Rights Do We Have? | Professor V. Bradley Lewis

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2023

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was given at Florida State University on January 27, 2023. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: V. Bradley Lewis is associate professor in the School of Philosophy in the Catholic University of America. He specializes in political and legal philosophy, especially that of the classical Greeks and in the Thomistic tradition, and is currently working on a book on the idea of the common good. In addition to these things he has served as a consultant on ethics to the federal government, testified before a congressional subcommittee about immigration, and currently serves as associate editor of the American Journal of Jurisprudence.

Transcript

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1:16.6	Rights talk is inherently aggressive, even imperial. It tends towards moral inflation and militates against accommodation.
1:22.6	Rights talkers, with their inner monologues of preemptive resentments,
1:26.6	work themselves into a simmering state of annoyed vigilance against any limits on their willfulness.
1:33.3	I wonder if anybody knows who said that. It's a quote.
1:37.3	It's from George Will, the conservative newspaper columnist, and that's from a column that he wrote in 2009,
1:47.0	the balance of which was, so far as I can tell, a spot-on account of life in the well-heeled
1:53.0	suburban state of nature known as Chevy Chase, Maryland, where he lives. In the course of that column about rights talk, what he called Rights Talk, he mentioned one of the most celebrated academic criticisms of Rights Talk, which was a 1991 book called Rights Talk by a Harvard professor and former United States ambassador to the Vatican,
2:21.1	Marianne Glendon. The conservative criticism of rights talk usually dilates on a kind of individualistic,
2:31.0	agonistic, zero-sum politics, which is really no politics at all, but what one might
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