## 1. Identifying group rights



A group right is a right possessed by a group qua group rather than by
its members severally. It contrasts with a right held by an individual
person as an individual. An example of a commonly asserted group right
is the right of a nation or a people to be self-determining. If there
is such a right, it is a right possessed and exercised by a nation or
a people as a group. It will not be reducible to the individually-held
rights to individual self-determination of those who belong to the
relevant nation or people. Other rights that have often been asserted
as group rights include the right of a cultural group that its culture
should be respected and perhaps protected; the right of a linguistic
group that its language should be usable and provided for in the
public domain; and the right of a religious group that it should be
free to engage in collective expressions of its faith. Groups rights
are also claimed for organized groups such as commercial corporations,
churches, political parties, universities and charitable associations.
In each of these cases, the right is a right held by the group qua
group, and duties generated by the right will be duties owed to the
group.



Group rights should not be confused with rights that people possess in
virtue of being group members. People normally possess rights as
members of universities or sports clubs or businesses or trade unions
or churches or states but, in the ordinary run of cases, these are
individual rights. For example, the right of a member of a university
to use its library, or the right of a citizen to vote in elections, is
the right of an individual person. An infringement of that right would
infringe the right of the individual right-holder, rather than a group
right of the relevant university or state. In fact, most rights held
by individuals are associated with group identities or group
memberships of some sort. If we are willing to extend rights to
non-human animals, even human rights will be rights unique to a
particular group; yet most human rights are conceived as individual
rights and, on some views, can only be individual rights.



A group right should not therefore be identified with a
"group-differentiated" right. That term has been coined by
Will Kymlicka (1995) to describe a right that is accorded to a
particular group but not to the larger society within which the group
exists. For example, a society might accord special rights, such as
special territorial rights or rights of self-government, to an
indigenous minority in recognition of the special status that that
minority should enjoy within the larger society, or out of concern for
the vulnerability of its traditional form of life. These would be
"group-differentiated rights". That term is now sometimes
abbreviated to "group right", which is unfortunate since a
group-differentiated right may or may not be a group right properly
so-called. If, for example, the group-differentiated right is the
right of a group to be self-governing, it will also be a group right.
But if it is, for example, a right unique to the members of an
indigenous minority to fish in certain waters and if that right is
vested in, and is exercisable by, the several individuals who make up
the minority, it will be a group-differentiated individual right.
(Kymlicka 1995, 45-48; Jones 2010.)


## 2. Moral and legal group rights



Group rights can be legal or moral or both. If a legal system accords
rights to a group, or recognises it as an entity possessing rights, it
will simply be the case, for that legal system, the group has rights.
Those legal rights might then spawn moral rights. A law may create a
wrong that would not otherwise be a wrong but, if the legal system is
generally just and if the law serves a useful purpose, its breach may
be considered a moral, as well as a legal, wrong. For example, you may
have no right to a particular good in the absence of a law giving you
legal title to it but, once you have legal title, my theft of that
good can wrong you morally as well as legally. Similarly, once a group
has been accorded legal rights, we might think that, in at least some
cases, violations of its legal rights wrong it morally as well as
legally. A group may therefore be credited with legally-dependent
moral rights.



If group rights could only ever be creatures of law, however, we could
not protest that a legal system failed to recognise or respect a
group's right. Proponents of group rights, like proponents of
individual rights, have been keen to use the language of rights in
arguing about the form that legal, political and social arrangements
should take. That implies a conception of group rights that is moral
in foundation and that might be used to determine what legal rights
groups should have. It is as moral rights that group rights are most
controversial. Individual rights are subject to innumerable disputes,
but few deny that individuals, as persons or in other capacities, are
capable of possessing rights. By contrast, many reject the very idea
that groups can possess moral rights and even those who embrace that
idea frequently disagree over the sorts of group that can possess
them.


## 3. Groups as right-holders



No-one ascribes rights promiscuously to every kind of group, so what
makes a group the kind of group that might bear rights? For many
theorists an essential condition is the integrity it manifests: a
group must surmount a threshold of unity and identity as a group if it
is to be capable of bearing rights.



Thus Peter French (1984, 5-18) distinguishes between
"aggregate collectivities" and "conglomerate
collectivities". An aggregate collectivity is a mere collection
of individuals such as a crowd or the people standing at a bus stop or
a statistical category such as middle-income earners. If we were to
ascribe either moral responsibility or moral rights to an aggregate,
those would be reducible, without remainder, to the responsibilities
and rights of the several individuals who made up the aggregate. A
conglomerate collectivity, by contrast, has a unified being since it
is formally constituted as an organization with an internal structure,
rules, offices and decision-procedures. (For a similar, but not
identical, distinction between aggregates and organizations, see Copp
1984.) French's examples of conglomerates include the Democratic
Party, the US Congress, the US army, the Red Cross, university
faculties and business corporations. Organizations of this sort have
identities that are not exhausted by those of the persons in them; one
person's leaving and another's joining does not yield a new
organization. Thus, "what is predicable of a conglomerate is not
necessarily predicable of all of those or any of those individuals
associated with it" (1984, 13), including the rights and
responsibilities we might ascribe to the conglomerate. French does not
deny that the individuals in a conglomerate, such as a business
corporation, will have rights and responsibilities relating to its
activities; he denies only that the rights and responsibilities of the
conglomerate can be distributed without remainder amongst those
individuals. Thus, if the Gulf Oil Corporation buys or sells property,
or joins a cartel, or is found causally responsible for environmental
pollution and held morally responsible for cleaning it up, the
Corporation as agent and as patient is not reducible to the
individuals who are currently associated with it.



Dwight Newman (2011, 4) distinguishes in a similar fashion between
"sets" and "collectivities". A set, like
French's aggregate, becomes a different set each time its membership
changes. A collectivity, by contrast, remains identifiable as the same
collectivity even though its membership changes. For both French and
Newman, a group's having an identity that survives changes in its
membership is essential to its being the kind of group that might bear
rights. (See also Graham 2002, 68-9; List and Pettit 2011,
31-32; Van Dyke 1977.)



The phenomenon of a group's having an identity and existence that is
separate from its members is most readily apparent in the case of
formally organised groups. So, for example, we can think of a football
club or a university department or a trade union as remaining the same
football club, university department or trade union, even though the
individuals who constitute its members change over time. When you or I
join or leave a formally constituted organisation, there is something
independent of ourselves that we join or leave. Thus, if we ascribe
rights to a formally constituted group, the right-bearing group will
be something other than the set of individuals who happen to belong to
it at any moment.



Formal organization may not be deemed essential to a group's having an
irreducible and enduring identity. Nations, for example, are often
conceived as entities whose identities run across successive
generations of nationals. A nation's historic entitlement to a
particular territory would typically be conceived as the entitlement
of a single enduring entity rather than a right inherited and
bequeathed by successive generations of nationals so that,
historically, no temporally continuous entity has possessed rights
over the territory. People are given to thinking of nations in this
unitary and enduring fashion even in cases, such as the Kurds, where a
nation has not been instantiated in a state, or the Poles, where the
nation has been deprived of political independence for lengthy periods
of its history. Whether we conceive a group as having an identity and
being that supersedes that of its members turns not just on what we
find in the world, but also on how we see it.



For some proponents of group rights, we should look for the integrity
essential for right-bearing neither in the group's internal
organization nor in its objective characteristics but in its
subjectivity. What matters is that the individuals who make up the
group feel themselves strongly bound together as members of a group
with which they identify. Marlies Galenkamp holds that a right-holding
group must possess a strong form of intra-group solidarity and be the
kind of group that communitarians describe as a constitutive community
(1993, 81-100, 111-2, 131; see also Segesvary 1995).
Michael McDonald (1991) argues that it is a shared understanding
amongst individuals that they are normatively bound to each other that
makes them a group for moral purposes. That shared understanding may
be related to and promoted by shared objective characteristics, such
as a common history, language, system of belief or social condition,
but it is still the subjectivity of the group rather than those
objective features that is crucial to its being a right-bearing group.
Larry May (1987) and Paul Sheehy (2006, 151-173) also find the
source of a group's moral status in the interrelatedness of its
members, but argue those interrelationships are significant for the
common interests and needs to which they give rise.



A significant measure of unity and identity might then be essential
for a group's being the kind of group that can bear rights but, if it
is, that condition would seem necessary rather than sufficient. Those
who question the very idea of group rights do not deny that groups
come in different forms or that some exhibit a high degree of unity or
that groups can be very important in people's lives. They deny only
that we have reason to ascribe groups, however unified and however
significant, the moral properties they must possess if they are to be
independent right-holders. So where do proponents of group rights find
those properties?



Philosophical analyses of rights have been dominated by two rival
theories. One is the choice or will theory according to which to have
a right is to possess a choice (e.g. Hart 1982; Steiner 1998). On that
theory, rights can be possessed only by beings capable of choice. If
we take the case of claim-rights (rights that impose corresponding
duties upon others), those rights should be ascribed only to beings
capable of exercising control over the performance of the
corresponding duties. We can possess rights only if we are capable of
exercising them.



The other theory is the interest or benefit theory for which the
crucial feature of a right lies in its providing for the
right-holder's interest or benefit (e.g. Kramer 1998; Lyons 1969). If
we take the case of claim-rights again, those rights can be ascribed
to the beings at whose interests the corresponding duties are
directed, irrespective of whether the right-bearer is able to control
the performance of those duties. Of course, not every interest will
generate a right and interest theorists usually therefore propose more
discriminating versions of the theory. David Lyons (1969, 176), for
example, provides that someone has a claim-right only if they are the
"direct, intended beneficiary" of another's duty. In
another much-used formulation, Joseph Raz (1986, 166) holds that X has
a right "if and only if X can have rights, and, other things
being equal, an aspect of X's well-being (his interest) is a
sufficient reason for holding some other person(s) to be under a
duty".



In conformity with these rival theories, some accounts of group rights
emphasize a group's capacity for choice or, as it is more commonly
described, its capacity for "agency" as the crucial test
of its capacity to possess rights, while others focus upon the group's
capacity to possess interests as a group.



A capacity for agency is central to the ascription of rights to groups
in the accounts of Peter French (1984, 1995) and Christian List and
Philip Pettit (2011). French argues that we have reason to ascribe
some groups the moral agency and moral personality that we ordinarily
ascribe to human individuals. If a group is to be a moral agent, it
must be capable of intentional action as a group; it must be able to
have purposes, plans, goals and interests that motivate its conduct.
It must also be capable of making rational decisions about its
intentions and of responding to events and ethical criticism by
adjusting its intentions and behaviour as those bear upon others
(1995, 10-12). Conglomerate groups, such as business corporations,
which possess internal decision structures and expressly formulated
policies, can meet those conditions. That suffices to make them both
moral group agents and "full-fledged moral persons"
equipped with moral responsibilities and moral rights. They are
properly accorded "whatever privileges, rights and duties as
are, in the normal course of affairs, accorded to all members of the
moral community" (1984, 32).



For List and Pettit (2011) a group can be an agent if it has
representational states, so that it can form beliefs, and motivational
states so that it can possess desires. It must also be capable of
processing and acting on its beliefs and desires and of attaining a
minimal level of rationality, particularly consistency, in the way its
attitudes connect with one another and with its environment. Organized
groups, such as states, churches, commercial corporations and
voluntary associations, can, they argue, satisfy those conditions and
so be agents. The attitudes formed by such groups supervene on those
of their individual members but are not reducible to those of their
members. A group can therefore possess agency as a group.



The specific case that List and Pettit make for group agency is
epistemological rather than ontological and cannot be reproduced here.
Agency alone, however, does not make the case for group rights. A
robot could be an agent but it would not bear rights since it would
not possess the sort of agency required for personhood. List and
Pettit adopt a "performative" conception of personhood,
according to which being a person turns on what an entity can do
rather than the stuff of which it is made. To be a person is to be
"an agent who can perform effectively in the space of
obligations" (173). It is to be capable of participating in a
system of conventions, such as a system of law, in which the
participator contracts and honours obligations to others and derives
entitlements from the obligations of others. Group agents possess that
normative capability and so should be accounted persons. As persons,
they can and should be held morally responsible for their actions and
be credited with rights, albeit fewer rights than we should ascribe to
natural human persons (on which, see section 7 below).



Making group agency a necessary condition for group right-holding
significantly limits the range of groups that might possess rights.
Adina Preda (2012), for example, an adherent of the choice theory,
holds that only organized groups equipped with collective
decision-procedures can possess rights since only they are capable of
intentional action as groups. Groups that lack those structures, such
as ethnic or linguistic groups, may have members who possess
individual rights relating to their group characteristics, but the
groups of which they are members will not possess rights as
groups.



Those who subscribe to the interest theory of rights can view the
range of groups that might possess rights much more generously. Thus
Keith Graham points out (2002, 89-93) that a group does not have
to be a moral agent to be a moral patient or to be treated more or
less justly or to flourish more or less well. Similarly for May
(1987), McDonald (1991) and Sheehy (2006) the critical consideration
is that a group can have interests as a group that are more than the
aggregated interests of its individual members. That renders groups
capable of being harmed or of being treated unjustly as groups and
therefore suitable candidates for rights.



The most developed and sophisticated interest-based account of group
rights has come from Dwight Newman. For Newman (2011, Part I) groups
that constitute right-bearing "collectivities" can range
from corporations and churches to cultural groups and hockey teams. A
collectivity is distinguished by the central values to which it is
committed and by a structure which defines its membership and marks it
off from other groups. Its members are essential to its existence, but
the collectivity is no mere aggregation of its members. Rather, it
supervenes on its members. It supervenes on their existence but also
on their relationships with one another and their beliefs about those
relationships. Supervenience does not imply reducibility; neither the
existence of the collectivity, nor its actions or intentions, can be
reduced to those of its individual members. For Newman a collectivity
has moral status as a collectivity. It can therefore bear moral rights
and moral responsibilities as a collectivity. It can also have
interests, which are other than the aggregated interests of its
members; those interests will lie in whatever makes the collectivity's
life go better as a collectivity. In conformity with Raz's conception
of rights, a group's interests will generate rights whenever they are
of sufficient importance to justify the ascription of duties to
others.



Miodrag Jovanovic (2012) provides another interest-based account
of group rights but of a rather different sort. Current international
and domestic systems of law ascribe rights to groups, such as rights of
self-determination and rights designed to protect their cultures.
Jovanovic seeks to explicate those rights by uncovering the
"normative moral standpoint" implicit in them. That
standpoint, which he himself endorses, is, he argues,
"value-collectivism": "the view that collective
entities can have inherent value, which is independent of its
contribution to the well-being of individual members" (2012, 6).
In other words, we should understand the legal rights attributed to a
group as grounded in the irreducibly collective value of the group, a
value that is not reducible to the value of the group for the several
individuals who constitute its members. Jovanovic does not
ascribe those rights to every sort of group recognised in law. In
particular, he does not ascribe them to juristic persons, such as
business corporations and trade unions. Rather, he ascribes them only
to groups that possess a pre-legal existence and identity, such as
national, ethnic, linguistic and religious groups. It is the
irreducibly collective interests of those groups that, on his account,
legal group rights should aim to protect and promote.


## 4. Group rights: corporate and collective



The various approaches to group rights described in the previous
section share a common feature. Each supposes that ascribing a right
to a group entails conceiving the group as moral entity in its own
right: the group must possess a moral standing that is not reducible
to the standing of its members. That is why arguments about group
rights frequently assume the same character as arguments about the
ascription of rights to foetuses or the dead or future generations or
non-human animals. In each case, the central issue is whether we
should allow that the relevant entity has the moral standing necessary
for it to bear rights.



If, for groups, we answer that question affirmatively, we shall
conceive group rights analogously with individual rights. A group
right, like an individual right, will be a right held by a single
unitary entity. The right of a group will be "its" right
rather than "their" right. Indeed, we might think of a
group right as the right of a "group-individual". Groups
might bear duties in the same fashion. A group, as a single integral
entity, can possess duties just as it can possess rights, and those
duties may derive from group rights. For example, each nation's right
of self-determination is most obviously directed at other nations who,
as nations, have corresponding duties to respect one another's rights.
(It remains logically possible, of course, that duties stemming from
group rights will fall upon individual persons, just as it is possible
that the rights of individual persons will generate duties for groups.
On the relatively neglected subject of group duties, see Collins,
2019.)



This might be described as the "traditional" conception of
group rights, in that it describes the way in which group rights have
been most commonly understood. In recent years, however, some
proponents of group rights have conceptualised them quite differently.
They have understood a group right as a right that is the shared or
jointly held right of a set of individuals. In this conception, a
group right is still properly so-called because the individuals who
make up the right-holding group possess a right together that none of
them possesses separately. The right is not a mere aggregation of
rights held individually by the members of the group. But, a group
right conceived in this way does not entail giving a moral status to
the group qua group that is separate from that of its members
severally. Rather, the moral standing that underwrites the group right
is the moral standing of the several individuals who jointly hold the
right. The group right is therefore conceived as "their"
right rather than "its" right (Jones 1999a).



The distinction between these two conceptions has frequently passed
unnoticed and there is no agreed vocabulary that marks it. The term
*corporate* will be used here to describe the traditional
conception, since that conception presents a right-holding group as a
unitary entity. The term *collective* will be used to describe
the conception of a group right as a shared or joint right, since it
conceives a right-holding group as a "collection" of
individuals, albeit a collection that is bound together in a way that
enables them to hold their right collectively. (Note that, contrary to
this usage, many proponents of the "corporate" conception
of group rights use the term "collective" to describe
those rights; e.g. Galenkamp 1993, Jovanovic 2012, McDonald 1991,
Newman 2011.)



Joseph Raz has provided the most influential statement of the
collective conception. According to Raz, if a right is to be a
collective right, it must satisfy three conditions:



> 
> First, it exists because an aspect of the interest of human beings
> justifies holding some person(s) to be subject to a duty. Second, the
> interests in question are the interests of individuals as members of a
> group in a public good and the right is a right to that public good
> because it serves their interest as members of that group. Thirdly,
> the interest of no single member of that group in that public good is
> sufficient by itself to justify holding another person to be subject
> to a duty. (1986, 208)
> 



Raz's conception of a collective right is tied to his interest theory
of rights according to which, as we have seen, X has a right if X has
an interest that suffices to ground another's duty (1986, 166). Thus,
a group of individuals has a collective right if their shared interest
is sufficient to ground a duty in others, and if the interest of any
single member of the group is insufficient by itself to ground that
duty. When these conditions are satisfied, the group of individuals
possess a right together that none of them possesses separately. In
fact, Raz argues that the interests that ground a right are not
necessarily limited to the interests of the right-holder; they can
also include interests that others have in the right-holder's having
the right (1986, 245-63; 1994, 44-59; 1995). For example,
the right of journalists not to disclose their sources is grounded not
only in their own interests but also in the public's interest in their
having that right. That consideration can also apply to collective
rights. The rights of a group in respect of its culture, for example,
might be grounded not only in the interests of the group's members in
their culture but also in the interests of "outsiders" in
the continued existence of the group's culture.



Some other theorists whose approach to group rights is consistent with
what is described here as the "collective" conception are
Nathan Brett (1991), Allen Buchanan (1993, 1994), Leslie Green (1991),
Vinit Haksar (1998), Lesley Jacobs (1991) and Seumas Miller (2001,
2010). (See also Margalit and Raz 1990.) The collective conception
need not be tied to an interest theory of rights. Miller, for example,
gives an account of the collective conception that owes nothing to
that theory (2001, 210-33). But the ascendancy of the interest
theory of rights in recent years has meant that those who have adopted
the collective conception have frequently followed Raz in combining it
with the interest theory. (For criticism of the collective theory so
conceived, see Griffin 2008, 261-265; Preda 2013.) Moreover,
that theory does provide a ready-made account of what it is that
individuals share--interests--that makes them a
right-holding group. The way that interests can accumulate across
individuals also helps to explain how it is that a group of
individuals can have a right, as a group, that none of them possesses
singly. For Raz, the number of individuals in a group can affect both
whether the group has a right and how weighty its right is (1986, 187,
209). Others are less comfortable with that "aggregative"
feature of Raz's conception; yet the relevance of numbers is often
hard to dismiss. Consider, for example, the claim of a linguistic
minority that its language should be usable, and provided for, in the
public domain. Given the public costs of meeting that claim, it would
seem implausible to hold that we should take no account of the size of
a linguistic minority (of which there may be several) in deciding
whether the claim amounts to a right.



The fact that, on the collective conception, the individual members of
a group hold their right jointly does not entail that the right must
be grounded in an interest that an individual could have as an
independent individual. Some goods take a necessarily collective form,
so that they cannot be made available to an individual in isolation
from others; for example, the good constituted by a group's culture or
its communal form of life. Yet it still makes perfect sense to hold
that a group right to those goods is morally grounded in the interests
of the several individuals who make up the relevant group and that the
right is held jointly by those individuals. Thus, even though the
collective conception gives no moral standing to a group independently
of its members, it can still account for groups' having rights to
goods that are necessarily non-individual in form.



At the same time, there is nothing in the logic of the collective
conception that limits the possible objects of group rights to
non-individualizable goods. Nor, if we adopt the interest theory, need
the right-holding group be a group in virtue of anything other than
the shared interest that grounds their right. The second condition
that Raz stipulates for a collective right suggests that individuals
must be members of a group before they can go on to have interests of
a sort that might ground a collective right. Miller, too, makes
membership of a social group a defining condition of a joint right's
being a collective right (2001, 211). But it is not clear why we
should hold that a set of individuals can have a collective right only
if they constitute a group in virtue of something other than their
shared interest. 



Consider the following example. A city is characterised by very heavy
traffic that poses a danger to its pedestrians. The city's pedestrians
have an interest in there being a network of walkways so that they can
move around the city in safety. Each pedestrian, as an individual, has
an interest in those walkways, but the interest of just one pedestrian
is insufficient to create a duty for the city authorities to construct
the walkways. However, the shared interest of all pedestrians may well
suffice to ground that duty, in which case pedestrians will have a
collective right that the authorities should construct and maintain
the walkways. The point of this example is not to insist that, in
these circumstances, pedestrians would indeed have that right. Rather
it is to show that (a) a group might have a right to a good that is
intelligible as a good for an independent individual, and (b) a
right-holding group need be a group only in virtue of the shared
interest that grounds their right. The group need not be
institutionalised as a group, nor need it be distinguished by a common
ascriptive feature. (In the example given, the fact that the
right-sharing individuals are identifiable as
"pedestrians" contributes nothing to their having a
collective right independently of their interest in being able to walk
around the city safely, .)



The collective conception can, then, make sense of group rights both
to goods that would be intelligible as goods for independent
individuals and to goods that are intelligible only as goods enjoyed
collectively with others. It is often supposed that, if a good takes a
necessarily collective form (e.g. the collective good of possessing a
common culture), the interest in that good can be understood only as
the irreducible interest of a group. That is associated with the
supposition that, if the shared interest generates a group right, the
right-holding group must also be understood as an irreducible moral
entity. Both suppositions are mistaken. Even in the case of a shared
or collective interest, the interests that do the moral work in
generating a right are entirely intelligible as the interests of the
several individuals who make up the group and whose good is at stake.
Similarly, the moral standing necessary for the individuals, as a
group, to have a right to the shared good can be the standing of the
several individuals who compose the group. Thus, vindicating group
rights need not entail showing that the right-holding group has either
interests or a standing that is not reducible to those of its
members.



At the same time, there is a limit to the range of cases the
collective conception can encompass. As was mentioned earlier, there
can be cases in which the interest of a group logically precedes that
of its members and in which the members have interests simply because,
qua members, they share in the interest of the group. For example, a
football club may have the stated aim of being as successful as
possible in playing against rival clubs. The club will then have an
interest in whatever will promote that aim, including fielding the
strongest team possible in each game. I, as a member of the club, will
share in its interests. So, for example, if it is in the club's
interest to drop me from its team because I am not playing well
enough, that will also be in my interest qua member. That interest qua
member may conflict with a personal interest that I have in remaining
a team player, but arguably that does not disturb my interest qua
member. If we understand the interest that grounds a group's right as
an interest that the group has independently of its members, and if we
understand the members' interests as mere derivatives of that group
interest, we must understand both the interest and the right of the
group according to the corporate model. The group right cannot be
understood adequately as a product of the aggregated interests of the
individuals who populate the group (Newman 2011, 57-82).



For the same reason, the collective conception cannot easily make
sense of a group right as a right possessed by a group whose identity
is unaffected by changes in its membership. As Newman points out
(2011, 59-60), if we conceive a group right as a right held
jointly by those who compose the group, each change in the group's
membership must entail a change in the identity of the right-holding
group. On the other hand, that may not be an objection. Groups, such
as cultural, linguistic, ethnic and religious groups, are often
shifting amorphous entities and we may have to get used to the idea
that right-holding groups can be groups that have constantly changing
compositions. Practically, that may be of little consequence for group
rights provided that there is a reasonable continuity of interest
amongst the group's members, so that the content of the right is not
disturbed by every change in membership.



Finally, note three things about the distinction between corporate and
collective rights. First, the limits of the collective conception
identified above stem from its unwillingness to conceive a group
separately from its members. They do not stem from an inability of the
collective conception to make sense of necessarily shared or
collective interests--interests that individuals can have only
along with others. Secondly, we can most readily conceive a group
separately from its members when it is formally constituted as an
institution, as in the case of a football club or a university. But
once we separate a group from its members in that way, we run into the
issue of whether we should really ascribe the right to an institution
or an organisation rather than to a group (Sheehy 2006, 159-167,
175-195). Presumably it is for that reason that people do not
normally describe the rights of Congress or Parliament or the Supreme
Court as "group rights". Thirdly, it is logically possible
to interpret some group rights as corporate and others as collective,
so that we are not obliged to commit ourselves exclusively to just one
of these conceptions.


## 5. Group rights and collective goods



The distinction between corporate and collective rights concerns the
way in which we might conceive the *subject* of a group right.
But the issue of whether there is reason to ascribe rights to groups
is sometimes approached through their possible
*objects*--through what group rights might be rights to.
If there are goods that have a necessarily group character and if
there are rights to those goods, it would seem that those must be
group rights. So are there such goods?



The obvious place to start is with the economist's idea of public
goods. We might reasonably suppose with Raz (1986, 208) that a right
can be a group right only if it is a right to a good that is public to
the members of the right-holding group. For the relevant group, the
good must be non-excludable (it must be available to all members of
the group) and non-rival (its consumption by one member of the group
must not diminish its possible consumption by other members). However,
as Denise Reaume has pointed out (1988, 8-9), some goods
that are deliverable only as public goods can reasonably be considered
objects of individual rights. Clean air is a standard example of a
public good, but we can reasonably hold that individuals have rights
to clean air as individuals. An industrialist who seriously pollutes a
community's atmosphere might be held to violate the right to breathe
unpolluted air of each individual in the affected community rather
than a collective or corporate right of the community as a group.



Reaume's own proposal (1988, 1994), which has attracted much
attention amongst commentators on group rights, is that we should
understand group rights as rights to "participatory
goods". A participatory good is a public good of a particular
type. It is a good whose enjoyment by an individual depends upon its
also being enjoyed by others. Consider the case of clean air again.
Although this is typically a good that is public to a group, each
individual breathes in and out as an individual and enjoys the good of
clean air as an individual. The goodness of clean air for me does not
depend upon its also being good for you, even though it is good for
you. Now consider goods such as friendship, a team game, and a
convivial party (Reaume 1988, 12-13; Waldron 1993,
355-6). Those are necessarily social goods. I cannot enjoy
genuine friendship as an entirely individual good; I can play a team
game only if others do too; and I can take pleasure in conviviality
only as a shared experience. So some goods are necessarily
"participatory" in nature. These goods have also been
described as "communal" (Waldron 1993, 339-69),
"shared" (Green 1988 207-9; Raz 1995, 35-6),
and "common" (Marmor 2001). Charles Taylor's notion of
"irreducibly social goods" has been deployed to similar
effect: if those goods are the objects of rights, their irreducibly
social character implies that they must be the objects of group rights
(Taylor 1995, 127-145; Sheehy 2006, 159-167,
175-195).



Participatory goods are goods that must be both produced and enjoyed
publicly, and goods that are simultaneously produced and enjoyed by
those who participate in them. While participatory goods combine
production with consumption, it is the necessarily public character of
their enjoyment that really distinguishes them from other public
goods. It is because they can be enjoyed only as shared goods that,
Reaume argues, only groups can have rights to them. Her claim
is not that every participatory good must be the object of a right;
rather it is that, if there is a right to a participatory good, that
must be a group right. The relevant right here is neither the
liberty-right to participate in the good nor the claim-right to be
unprevented by others from participating in the good, both of which
will normally be individual rights. Rather it is a right to the
participatory good itself (e.g. the right not merely to participate in
an orchestra but the right of the orchestra to play as an orchestra,
the right not merely to participate in a culture but the right that
the culture shall be maintained and protected).



Some goods that can yield rights, and that are, Reaume argues,
participatory in at least some of their aspects, are living in a
cultured society, sharing a common language, and being a member of a
religious community. If groups have rights to these participatory
goods, do others have duties to provide them with those goods? If, for
example, a group has a right to its culture as a participatory good,
that might imply that it is entitled to constrain the freedom of its
dissident members in ways that ensure the continuance of its culture.
If a linguistic minority has a right to its language as a
participatory good, that might imply that it is entitled to coerce
reluctant others to use its language in order to sustain and promote
the language as a participatory good. However, those are not the sort
of rights that Reaume proposes since they would be unacceptably
onerous for those who bore the duty (1988, 16-17; 1994,
133-4; see also Marmor 2001). Moreover, some participatory goods
can be the goods they are only if people participate in them
willingly. 



The group rights that Reaume suggests might relate to
participatory goods are rights against "outsiders" rather
than "insiders". And they would be rights not to
outsiders' participation in the good, but to their non-prevention of,
and their non-interference with, the group's participatory good and
perhaps also rights to measures and resources that will facilitate the
group's continued enjoyment of its participatory good. A linguistic
minority may, for instance, have a right that the majority society
should establish, maintain and respect arrangements that will secure
the minority's ability to continue using its language. Similarly, an
indigenous minority may have a right that the majority society should
institute arrangements that will protect its traditional form of life,
which form of life is, for the minority's members, a participatory
good. But these externally directed rights would remain rights
grounded in the group's interest in its participatory good and that,
for Reaume, means they must be group rights.



There is an obvious gap in Reaume's attempt to identify group
rights as rights to participatory goods (1994, 123-4). If only
groups can have rights to participatory goods, it does not follow that
groups can have rights only to participatory goods. They may also have
rights to non-participatory goods, such as safe walkways or community
health safeguards or coastal defences. Even the claim that rights to
participatory goods must be group rights has not escaped challenge.
James Morauta (2002) argues that, conceptually, a participatory good
could be the object of an individual right. An individual might, for
example, have a right to require others to participate with him in
speaking his language and those others may be duty-bound to comply if
he so insists. That may be a morally unappealing state of affairs but
nothing in the logic of rights or participatory goods rules it out
(provided that the very nature of the good at issue does not require
voluntary participation). The lacuna that Morauta identifies indicates
that the proposition that only groups can have rights to participatory
goods relies upon more than just the "structural features"
of those goods. It relies also upon a moral assumption about the
relative standing of the individuals who have interests in, or who lay
claim to, a participatory good.



Suppose, for example, that one person in a nation had, uniquely, a
right that that nation should be self-determining. His
fellow-nationals should then be part of a self-determining unit, not
because they are entitled to be, but because he is entitled that they
should be. He therefore has a right over their lives that they
themselves do not. Normally, we would regard that sort of inequality
in moral standing as entirely unacceptable; but it is because we take
that moral unacceptability for granted that we are predisposed to
accept that rights to participatory goods--or, indeed, rights to
public goods *as* public goods--must be group rights. Of
course, people of equal standing can be unequally interested in a good
but, in any sizeable group, it is most unlikely that one individual's
interest in a good that is public to the group will be so special and
so disproportionate that that individual will have, uniquely, a right
to the good *as* a good for the group as a whole (Jones 2014,
2018).


## 6. Scepticism about group rights



Criticism of group rights can take a case-by-case form. The critic
might argue that close inspection of particular rights commonly
claimed as group rights reveals either that they are not rights at all
or that they dissolve into individual rights (e.g. Griffin 2008,
256-276; Lagerspetz 1998). However, much criticism is directed
at the very idea of group rights. That criticism is generally of two
sorts: either it is sceptical of the claim that groups can hold rights
or it is fearful of the implications or consequences of ascribing
rights to groups.



Sceptics often object to the ontology of groups they take to be
implicit in the idea of group rights. To suppose that groups, like
individual persons, can hold rights is to suppose that groups can have
a being and an integrity that match those of individual persons. But
groups are collections of individuals and to make them out to be
supra-human entities that are somehow more than, or other than, the
sum of their parts is mistaken: "only individuals can make
decisions, can literally have values, literally engage in reasoning
and deliberation" (Narveson 1991, 334). Those who make and
administer the law may have good reason to create and to operate with
fictions, such as the legal fiction of corporate personality. But
moral rights and duties can attach only to real persons;
"fictitious entities have no rights" (Graff 1994, 194).
Groups do not exist separately from their members and, when we ascribe
rights to groups as such, we ignore that simple truth. (Narveson 1991,
331-5; Wellman 1995, 157-77; cf Vincent 1989).



Doubts about the integrity of groups are sometimes sociological rather
than ontological. Generally, we might suppose that the groups to which
we ascribe rights have a unity and identity that is independent of,
and that provides the foundation for, our ascription of rights to
them. A group, such as an ethnic or cultural group, has a certain
"natural" existence and we recognise it as having rights
because of the kind of existent it is. In reality, however,
pre-institutionalised groups are shifting and changing entities and
lack clear boundaries. In addition, any section of humanity that we
might fasten upon as a group is likely to be part of a larger
sociological entity, and to have within it smaller entities, that
might also claim to be "groups". So there can be a
significant element of arbitrariness about the segments of humanity
that we identify as "groups". We may suppose that, in
ascribing rights to a group, we merely acknowledge the entitlements of
a pre-existing entity, but, in reality, it may be the ascription of
rights itself that identifies, creates and fixes a segment of humanity
as a "group". (Flanagan 1985; Kukathas 1992, 110-15;
Mitnick 2006; Offe 1998, 125-31; Waldron 2002. Cf. Mello 2004;
Sharp 1999.)



Groups may be found improper subjects of rights because they lack
properties, other than genuine integrity, that are deemed essential
for right-holding. As we have seen, proponents of the interest theory
of rights are able to view group rights more generously than those who
adhere to the choice theory, although the supposition that groups can
have interests has not gone unchallenged (Wall 2003, 273). Choice
theorists can extend rights to organised groups that possess
decision-procedures (Preda 2012; Sumner 1987, 209-211), but some
argue that even those groups are incapable of the agency required for
right-holding (Wellman 1995, 157-65; Wall 2000, 2003,
270-6; cf. Nickel 1997). Again, if sentience is a necessary
condition of right-holding, that may disqualify groups as
right-holders: "groups are composed of sentient individuals, but
they do not themselves feel anything" (Rainbolt 2006, 208. See
also Kymlicka 1989, 241-2; Ellis 2005, 206-7. For a
contrary view, see Graham 2002, 89-104).



More simply, sceptics often suppose that crediting groups with rights
entails ascribing groups irreducible moral standing as groups, a
standing that the sceptics reject. They do not deny the reality of
groups or their significance for human life but insist that, insofar
as these give rise to rights, those rights can be adequately conceived
as rights held individually by the members of groups. Indeed, that
must be so, since only individual humans can possess moral standing
and only they therefore can possess moral rights. Michael Hartney
(1991), for example, asserts "value-individualism", the
view that "only lives of individual human beings have ultimate
value"; collective entities derive whatever value they have from
their contribution to the lives of individual human beings (297).
Value-individualism, Hartney argues, precludes the possibility of
moral group rights (see also Ellis 2005; Kukathis 1991; Narveson
1991).



For the most part, scepticism about group rights presupposes a
corporate conception of those rights. It challenges claims that a
group might have a being, status or value that is not reducible to
that of its members. But, since the collective conception makes none
of those claims, it is largely untouched by that scepticism. It is
not, however, exempt from other sorts of objection.


## 7. Fears of the implications or consequences of group rights



Worries about the moral implications or consequences of ascribing
rights to groups relate not only to whether we should accept that
groups have rights but also to how generously we should ascribe rights
to them. The common thread running through these worries is the threat
that group rights might pose to individuals and their rights.
Sometimes the concern is for those inside, and sometimes for those
outside, the right-holding group.



One concern is that, if we give moral standing to groups as such, we
shall lose sight of individuals within the group (Vincent 1989, 714).
If a group can have standing as a group independently of its
individual members, those individuals will have no standing on any
matter on which the relevant standing lies with the group. On those
matters, the separate wills of individuals cannot count. They will not
be overridden; they will simply pass unrecognised. 



Another fear concerns the power that a group may wield over its own
members (e.g. Macdonald 1989; Offe 1998, 131-5; Waldron 1993,
363-6). When we allow that a group has rights, those may be
rights that enable it to regiment the lives of its members. Thus, once
again, group rights may function to the detriment of those who fall
within the group. In one respect, that seems an unnecessarily
invidious way of representing the relationship between groups and
their members. There is nothing unusual about a group's organising
itself so that it can make decisions collectively, either directly or
through appointees, that bind its members severally. That describes
the normal state of affairs for tennis clubs, anglers' associations,
political parties, churches and any number of quite unremarkable
groups. The right of a group collectively to make decisions that bind
its members severally is a simple description of democracy.



So why has there been so much angst about allowing that groups can
have rights over their members? The answer is that, in recent decades,
group rights have been discussed primarily in relation to groups that
have involuntary memberships: groups that are distinguished by their
race, ethnicity, culture, or language. People do not choose to be
members of these "ascriptive" groups, nor can they easily
leave them as they might leave a club or association. If they find the
group's authority oppressive or its way of life intolerable, they
cannot simply opt out, since their membership of the group is treated
by others--insiders or outsiders or both--as a natural
"given" to which normal rights of entry and exit do not
apply. That is why Will Kymlicka, for example, a liberal deeply
sympathetic to the claims of cultural groups and indigenous peoples,
is reluctant to allow that the rights of groups can be directed
inwardly as restrictions upon the group's own members, rather than
outwardly as protections against the external world (Kymlicka 1995,
34-48; cf. Marmor 2001).



Concerns about the potential for oppression implicit in group rights
sometimes have an empirical dimension. Demands for group rights are
often looked upon most favourably when they are made by indigenous
peoples, cultural minorities and religious groups whose way of life is
threatened by external influences. But frequently, it is alleged, the
real effect of conceding rights to these sorts of group is to
reinforce the power of conservative elites whose wishes and interests
clash with those of others in the group. Typically, an elite will want
to use its power to maintain the traditions and integrity of the group
and will be unwilling to tolerate dissent, deviance and demands for
reform. It will also seek to maintain the position of those within the
group who have traditionally been subordinate. This issue is often
described as the problem of "minorities within minorities"
(Eisenberg and Spinner-Halev 2005; Green 1994), but it can also be a
problem of majorities (e.g. women) within minorities. In short, while
according rights to a group may enhance the position of some of its
members, it may seriously diminish the freedom and well-being of
others (Cohen et al. 1999; Deveaux 2000; Dick 2011; Kukathas 1992,
113-15; Okin 2002; Shachar 2001; Tamir 1999, 158-64, 173-4). We should
also bear in mind, however, that withholding power from a sub-state
group for that reason involves the assumption that the group's members
will be better served by the state's authority than by the authority
of their group, an assumption that some would question (e.g. Holder
2012).



A closely related fear concerns the potential of group rights to rival
and override the rights of individuals (e.g. Buchanan 1994; Caste
1992; Graff 1994; Isaac 1992; Macdonald 1989, 126-7; Tamir 1999,
161; Teson 1998, 132-137). One of the strongest
motivations for ascribing rights to individual persons is to provide
them with safeguards. Individuals as individuals are vulnerable to
those who wield power in all of its many forms and to the might of
numbers. When we give rights to individuals, we provide them with
moral shields that protect them from the excesses of power, including
excesses of collective power. But, if we ascribe rights to groups, we
may discover that their rights override the rights of individuals, so
that rights lose their potency as safeguards for individuals. When the
rights of a mighty group come up against those of a mere individual,
Goliath rather than David may more frequently emerge as the
victor.



That concern is shared by List and Pettit (2011, 170-85). While
they hold that group agents as group persons should possess rights,
they also subscribe to value (or "normative")
individualism, the view that something is good only if it is good for
individual human beings or non-human sentient beings (182). On their
view, value-individualism provides reason not to abandon group rights
(as Hartney, 1991, alleges) but to curtail the scope of those rights.
Group persons should have only rights that will redound to the benefit
of individual persons, be they members or non-members of the group.
Given the well-known dangers posed by asymmetries of power between
groups and individuals, we should accord groups a more limited set of
rights than we accord individuals, though we have no reason similarly
to curtail the responsibilities we assign groups. (For other views on
value-individualism and the curtailing of group rights, see Hindriks
2014; Pasternak 2017; Rafanelli 2017; Smith 2018).



Group rights conceived collectively may seem less threatening to
individuals than group rights conceived corporately. Because, on the
corporate conception, a group has moral standing independently of its
members, its standing, will and interest can rival and override those
of its individual members. A collective right by contrast, because it
is held jointly by the individuals who make up the collectivity and is
grounded in their standing and interests, presents no similar danger.
But fear of collective rights may still be provoked by the way in
which those rights derive from the aggregation of individual
interests. As we have already seen, on Raz's conception of collective
rights, numbers count. Numbers affect both whether groups have rights
and how weighty their rights are (1986, 187, 209). Others are loath to
accept that rights can derive from, or be affected by, that sort of
aggregation (Reaume 1988, 2003; Tamir 1999, 166-71). In
contemporary philosophy, rights-thinking is commonly opposed to
maximizing consequentialism, of which utilitarianism is the prime
example. Ascribing rights to individuals is a way of acknowledging
their separateness as persons and of safeguarding them from the
aggregative excesses of utilitarianism. But if the aggregation of
interests can yield collective rights, a morality of rights may begin
to assume the character of, and to present the same dangers as, the
very sort of utilitarian thinking that many rights-theorists intend it
to preclude, especially for those outside the right-holding group.


## 8. Group rights and individual rights: co-existence and complementarity?



A number of things might be said in response to these worries. First,
very much depends upon the content that we give group rights. It is
possible to invest individual rights with a content that would make
them unsavoury, but that would not discredit the very idea of
individual rights; similarly, the possibility that we might find some
group rights objectionable is no reason to dismiss group rights
altogether. Secondly, it would seem strangely arbitrary, given the
moral significance that we give to rights, to insist that the objects
of rights can be only goods that individuals can enjoy as independent
individuals and never goods they can enjoy only in association with
others. Some theorists of rights seem to think just that. But we
cannot take for granted that no good, whose shared nature was such
that it could be the possible object only of a group right, could ever
have the significance that would justify its actually being the object
of a right.



Thirdly, there is no reason why individual rights and group rights
should not both figure in our moral thinking. Indeed, they commonly
do. For example, it would be entirely commonplace to hold that a
people, as a political unit, has a collective right to be
self-determining but only within the limits set by individuals' human
rights. Group rights do not have to clash with individual rights and a
complete moral theory would articulate individual rights and group
rights so that they formed a coherent set (cf. Buchanan 1994; De
Feyter and Pavlakos 2008; Holder and Corntassel 2002; Jones 2018). It
may prove impossible to anticipate and avoid every conflict amongst
rights, but, even if it does, we need not suppose that conflicts will
arise more commonly between group rights and individual rights than
amongst individual rights themselves (McDonald 1998; Waldron 1993,
203-24).



There is also a well-established tradition of political thought,
associated particularly with Alexis de Tocqueville and the English
Pluralists, which sees the existence of groups as essential to the
dispersion of power and maintenance of liberty within a society.
According to that tradition, groups do not glower threateningly at
individuals. Rather, the rights of groups help to counter and hold in
check a potentially overmighty state. (Stapleton 1995; Lustgarten
1983. See also Frohnen 2005 and Gedicks 1989.)



Group rights and individual rights can, then, co-exist more or less
peacefully, but it is also possible for them to enjoy a more positive
and mutually supportive relationship. Raz has pointed out that
individual rights frequently presuppose the existence of general
social goods and individual rights themselves frequently promote
social goods (1986, 193-216, 245-263; 1995). Indeed,
individual rights may sometimes be rights only because they promote
social goods. Raz does not claim that those social goods are generally
the objects of group rights, but he does expose the error of supposing
that an antagonism towards collective considerations is somehow built
into the very idea or purpose of individual rights. The interests that
group rights and individual rights seek to protect will frequently be
the same interests.



Indeed, it may sometimes be an individual right that makes the case
for a group right. We might argue, for example, that some of the goods
to which individuals have rights depend for their realisation upon the
health of the communities and cultures to which those individuals
belong, so that there is a case for individuals sharing in group
rights because those rights serve their individual rights or their
individual freedom (Jacobs 1991; Kymlicka 1989, 1995; Wellman 1999).
Or we might argue that individuals have equal rights to the conditions
of self-development, that individual self-development requires common
or joint activity, and that that makes the case for group rights to
the conditions necessary for that common or joint activity (Gould
2001). Or, again, we might hold that amongst the range of options
required for individual autonomy are joint options, options to pursue
ends that require co-ordinated activity with other members of one's
group; that too may justify group rights, such as the right of a group
to control its own affairs (Wall 2007). The claim here might be either
that a group right is conducive to, or, more strongly, that it is
essential for, the realisation of an individual right.



Newman too argues that some individual rights presuppose group rights
(2011, 76-82). His general analysis of the relationship between
individual and group rights is both nuanced and qualified (2011, Part
II). As we have seen, he conceives right-holding groups as having
rights grounded in their interests as groups, interests that are not
reducible to the interests of their members taken severally. Even so,
he insists that group rights must be consistent with the
"humanistic principle", which holds that what matters
ultimately is the well-being of individual human persons. In that
respect, he is, like List and Pettit (2011), a value-individualist and
not, like Jovanovic (2012), a value-collectivist. A group right
cannot ultimately be in competition with the well-being of the group's
members. He formulates that requirement as "the service
principle": if the claims a group makes upon its members are to
be legitimate, those claims must serve the interests of the group's
members. He pairs that with a "mutuality principle": a
right-holding group cannot act without regard for the well-being of
outsiders, be they individuals or other groups. The service principle
does not, however, translate into the familiar claim that individual
rights must invariably displace group rights. People have interests
both as individuals and as group members and sometimes their interests
as members may matter more than their interests as individuals. Newman
therefore cautions against supposing that compliance with his
humanistic principle means that group rights must always take second
place to individual rights.


## 9. Group rights and human rights



In seeking to reconcile group rights and individual rights, should we
take a further step and deem some group rights to be human rights?
Some international human rights documents already suggest that we
should. The preambles to the UN's Covenants on Civil and Political
Rights (1966) and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966)
characterise the rights each Covenant recognises as human rights. The
first articles of both Covenants ascribe to all "peoples"
the right of self-determination, the right freely to dispose of their
natural wealth and resources, and the right not to be deprived of
their means of subsistence. These are manifestly group rights but for
the Covenants they would also seem to be human rights. The UN
instrument that recognises collective human rights most expressly and
abundantly is its Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,
2007. The rights the Declaration announces include, for example, the
rights of indigenous peoples "to maintain and strengthen their
distinct political, legal, economic, social and cultural
institutions" (art.5), their right that their cultures shall not
be destroyed (art.8), and their right not to be forcibly removed from
their lands and territories (art.10).



The mere existence of these international instruments does not, of
course, establish that the ascription of human rights to groups is
either conceptually coherent or morally defensible and, for the most
part, drafters of UN human rights documents have studiously avoided
any suggestion that human rights might be other than individually
held. For many commentators, human rights are necessarily and only the
rights of human individuals; groups may possess rights but they will
not be human rights (e.g. Donnelly 2013, 45-54; Graff 1994;
Griffin 2008, 256-76; Jovanovic 2012, 166-195; Miller
2002; Nickel 2007, 163-167; Nordenfelt 1987; Waldron 1993,
339-69). Others insist that some goods that are fundamental to
human well-being are collective in nature and an adequate theory of
human rights would accommodate that reality and recognise group as
well as individual human rights (e.g. Beitz 2009, 181-186;
Casals 2006; Crawford 1988; Felice 1996; Freeman 1995; Holder 2006;
Jones 1999b, 2013; Kymlicka 2001, 69-90; Malik 1996; Mende 2018;
Thompson 2015).



Where we stand on this issue may turn on what we understand a human
right to be. The orthodoxy among moral and political philosophers has
been that human rights are moral rights which individuals possess in
virtue of their humanity. If we opt instead for a purely legal
conception of human rights (e.g. Buchanan 2013; Macklem 2015), the
question of whether group rights might be human rights may be settled
by legal fiat: if law declares a group right to be a human right, a
human right it will be. Similarly, if we adopt a
"political" conception of human rights, according to which
a right is "human" not because it is grounded in our
humanity but in virtue of the role it plays, or should play, in
international political practice (e.g. Beitz 2009; Rawls 1999; Raz
2010), group rights will figure among human rights if they are
reckoned suitable for that role. But, if we stick with the traditional
moral conception of human rights and take the adjective
"human" seriously (e.g. Griffin 2008; Tasioulas 2007;
Wellman 2011), the possibility of group human rights remains
controversial. Human beings are individual beings so that, if human
rights are rights we hold as human beings, they would seem to be of
necessity individual rights. Moreover, the misgivings many people
entertain about the potential of group rights to rival and threaten
individual rights are likely to be all the greater if the rights we
ascribe to groups are human rights which might match and override the
human rights of individuals.



The main count on the other side of the argument is that many goods
that matter to human beings are collective in nature and many that are
already well-established objects of individual human rights have
collective dimensions. Consider, for example, collective acts of
worship or other shared expressions of religious faith, or provision
for a minority's language in public documentation and public signage.
If these collective goods are objects of human rights, those rights
would seem to be of necessity group rights. UN documents sometimes
seek to avoid that conclusion by distinguishing between the possession
and the exercise of human rights. Individuals may exercise some human
rights "in community with others" rather than individually
but the rights they *exercise* together will still be rights
they *possess* individually. But that distinction can be
difficult to maintain (Jones 2018, 2020). If, for example, a
population engages in an act of collective self-determination, that
act is not intelligible as the simultaneous exercise of so many
individually-held rights of individual self-determination; the act is
a collective act with a collective outcome and the right to perform it
can only be a group right. Similarly, a right to perform an integrated
act of worship *as* an integrated act makes sense only as a
group right. Individuals may possess individual rights to participate
in the collective act but the right to stage the act of worship
*as* a collective act will be a group right. If, with the
Vienna Declaration (1993, Part II, para. 22), we deem the human right
to freedom of religion to include the right of religious communities
that their sacred sites shall not be desecrated, that too would seem
inescapably to be a group right.



The distinction between the corporate and collective conceptions of
group rights is of first importance here. A group right corporately
conceived is a right held by the group as a corporate entity
possessing moral standing as that entity. It is a right borne by an
entity other than a human being and is therefore not plausibly a human
right. A group right collectively conceived is a right held by
individuals, but a right held by those individuals jointly rather than
individually. So understood, a group right is readily intelligible as
a human right. Of course, not all collective rights will be human
rights, just as not all individual rights are human rights. But a
right need not fall outside the domain of human rights just because
the individuals who hold it do so collectively rather than
individually.



What then of fears that ascribing human rights to groups will be to
the detriment of individuals and their human rights? If we ascribe
human rights to groups understood as corporate entities, those fears
are easily understood since potentially we pit the rights of two
different entities, groups and individuals, against one another. But,
if we ascribe human rights to groups understood as collectivities, we
do nothing of the kind since the individuals who hold human rights
collectively will be the same individuals as those who hold human
rights individually. The task of the human rights theorist will then
be to structure the entire set of human rights so that, for all who
hold them, they constitute a morally optimal and compossible set.