I have always assumed that natural rights exist. But this lecture Nigel Biggar gave at the Thomistic Institute has challenged my thinking. Biggar is author of What’s Wrong with Rights? (Oxford, 2020). Last year Biggar addressed the Thomistic Institute with an overview of his scholarship on natural rights. He argues (in my view cogently) that “natural rights as absolute, lacking information by social exigency and qualification by social circumstance, and so obtaining universally, always and everywhere, do not exist.”
