Ayn Rand | 'Man's Rights' | Philosophers Explained | Stephen Hicks

Philosophers, Explained covers major philosophers and texts, especially the great classics. In each episode, Professor Hicks discusses an important work, doing a close reading that lasts 40 minutes to an hour.

In this episode, Dr. Hicks discusses the novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand's essay on individual rights.

Ayn Rand (1905-1982) emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States as a young woman. She wrote four novels, including The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. In the course of writing these novels, she developed her rational, realist philosophy which she named 'Objectivism."

Timestamps:

00:59 The text
03:21 What are rights?
07:27 There is no such thing as "society."
13:45 Subordination of society to moral law
16:59 Rights defined
20:48 Rights as freedom of action
23:24 Property rights
25:09 Rand's theory of individual rights
32:42 Violators of man's rights: criminals and governments
37:00 150 years of civilized society
40:12 The language of rights changes
45:47 The right to the pursuit of happiness
49:57 Censorship
53:40 "Economic rights" are not rights

Stephen R. C. Hicks, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, USA, and has had visiting positions at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., University of Kasimir the Great in Poland, Oxford University’s Harris Manchester College in England, and Jagiellonian University in Poland.

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[craigcernek]

Very interesting and helpful presentation Dr. Hicks.

[johnbrown]

This was a terrific overview of Rand's philosophy. Thank you.

[GrimrDirge]

This was one of the most important pieces that I ever read, I stumbled across it in my mid-20s and it started my departure from conservatism.

[nulinf]

Thank you Stephen, this presentation has been extremely useful in clarifying objectivism.

[winstonsmith]

Criminals should be restrained as should governments (para)

[StephenHicksPhilosopher]

The 30 in the first series include:
1. Immanuel Kant
2. Plato
3. Galileo Galilei
4. Ayn Rand
5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
6. René Descartes
7. Jean-Paul Sartre
8. Socrates
9. Martin Heidegger
10. Thomas Aquinas
11. Arachne and Athena
12. Aristotle
13. Albert Camus
14. Friedrich Nietzsche
15. John Dewey
16. Sigmund Freud
17. G.W.F. Hegel
18. William James
19. Søren Kierkegaard
20. John Locke
21. Karl Marx
22. John Stuart Mill
23. Thales
24. Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile
25. William Paley
26. C.S. Lewis
27. David Hume
28. John Maynard Keynes
29. Thomas Kuhn
30. George Orwell

[oldsachem]

The notion of individual human right, or a bundle of human rights, sounds swell, but it is a slippery concept, that becomes more so when tied to the distributive principle of equal rights per each individual. The understanding and theory of human rights, including corresponding deontic obligations of the individual, seems to me to correlate to a fuzzy analogy in mathematics, with various logical theorems such as identity, a=a, counting, addition, subtraction, multiplication, measurement, approximation, rounding, irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, etc. If so, then the complexity of maths suggests like complexity, and increasingly so as history and time march on, of "human" rights.

[BobsCrazyUncle]

I am happy to hear you finally talk about Ayn Rand. I sense that the started with Ayn Rand then have diverged. I have not been able to find a reasonable criticism of Rand. Can you point me to one? I think she is weak in the choice of values. That is she has a very limited set of acceptable values.

[matthewstroud]

Interesting thought:

The connection of altruism to collectivism, they are not identical. If we could imagine an individualist-altruist, would that be someone that held others as their primary moral standard, but was free of discrimination as to whom they sacrifice to? Is this an impossibility and a contradiction in terms? Or is it simply an improbability?

If they are inextricably linked, does altruism command the formation of some group division within the totality outside of the single, individual person? In order to perform a sacrifice, does the altruist find they are forced to make divisions in society? Does there even need to be a recipient of sacrifice (such as is the case in environmentalism)? Can an altruist simply be someone that negates all personal values? Rather than "the other" it could simple be "not me". Is this the border between altruism and nihilism?