5 - Groups and human rights

Summary

Introduction

Human rights are rights possessed by human beings, and human beings are individual beings. An individualism that gives primary moral standing to individuals is therefore built into the very idea of human rights. However, the description “individualist” is often applied to human rights in a more far-reaching and pejorative sense. Human rights are sometimes said to manifest an atomistic conception of human life in which individuals are set apart from one another and channeled away from communal to more individualistic forms of life. Human rights, the charge goes, fail to recognize and to provide adequately for the social nature of human beings and the value of human community. The charge is not easily sustained (Howard 1995). Human rights are thoroughly social in both context and purpose and, rather than steering people away from communities, they aim to secure the freedoms and social arrangements that are essential for living a decent human life of any sort, including the most communitarian of communal forms of life.

There is, however, one aspect of the argument over the “individualism” of human rights that continues to divide the proponents of human rights as well as to attract the attention of the critics: the relationship between groups and human rights. There is continuing division over whether human rights can be group rights or whether they can be possessed only by individuals taken severally. It is that question that I investigate in this chapter.