Group rights, also known as collective rights, are rights held by a group qua group rather than by its members severally; in contrast, individual rights are rights held by individual people;
even if they are group-differentiated, which most rights are, they
remain individual rights if the right-holders are the individuals
themselves.
Group rights have historically been used both to infringe upon and to
facilitate individual rights, and the concept remains controversial.
Organizational group rights
Besides
the rights of groups based upon the immutable characteristics of their
individual members, other group rights cater toward organizational
persons, including nation-states, trade unions, corporations, trade associations, chambers of commerce, political parties.
Such organizations are accorded rights which are particular to their
specifically-stated functions and their capacities to speak on behalf of
their members, i.e. the capacity of the corporation to speak to the
government on behalf of all individual customers or employees or the
capacity of the trade union to negotiate for benefits with employers on behalf of all workers in a company.
Philosophies
In the political views of classical liberals and some right-libertarians,
the role of the government is solely to identify, protect, and enforce
the natural rights of the individual while attempting to assure just
remedies for transgressions. Liberal governments that respect individual
rights often provide for systemic controls that protect individual
rights such as a system of due process in criminal justice.
Without certain collective rights, for example, a cardinal principle in
international law, enshrined in Chapter I Article I of the United Nations Charter, secures the right of "Self-determination of peoples". Without this group right, the people have no means or authority to assert the individual rights that self-determination enables the establishment of. If people
are unable to determine their collective future, they are certainly
unable to assert or ensure their individual rights, future and freedoms.
In contrast to individual-collective dichotomy proposed by Peterson and
contemporaries, critics suggest that both are necessarily connected and
intertwined, rejecting the assertion that they exist in a mutually
exclusive relationship.
Ayn Rand, developer of the philosophy of Objectivism,
asserted that a group, as such, has no rights. She maintained that only
an individual can possess rights, and therefore the expression
"individual rights" is a redundancy, while the expression "collective
rights" is a contradiction in terms. In this view, a person can neither
acquire new rights by joining a group nor lose the rights which he does
possess. Man can be in a group without want or the group minority,
without rights. According to this philosophy, individual rights are not
subject to a public vote, a majority has no right to vote away the
rights of a minority, the political function of rights is precisely to
protect minorities from the will of majorities, and the smallest
minority on earth is the individual.
Rand offers several unique perspectives on rights, holding that 1.
ontologically, rights are neither attributes nor conventions but
principles of morality, having, therefore, the same epistemic status as
any other moral principle; 2. rights "define and sanction man's freedom
of action,"; 3. as protectors of freedom of action, rights do not mean "entitlements" to be supplied with any goods or services;
4. "Man's rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It
is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of
his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his
own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment."
and 5. rights derive from the mind's needs: for an organism that
survives by means of reason, freedom is a survival-requirement:initiated
force negates or paralyzes the thinking mind. Rand's overall argument
is that rights protect freedom in order to protect reason. "Force and
mind are opposites."
Adam Smith, in 1776 in his book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, describes the right of each successive generation, as a group, collectively, to the earth and all the earth possesses. The Declaration of Independence
states several group, or collective, rights of the people as well as
the states, for example the Right of the People: "whenever any Form of
Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the
People to alter or to abolish it" and the right of the States: "... as
Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude
Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts
and Things which Independent States may of right do."
