ABSTRACT
Political philosophy has regarded the proposition that groups can hold rights with a mixture of scepticism and suspicion. If rights are held by individuals separately, their shared rights do not add up to a group right even though their rights relate to a characteristic which marks them off, sociologically, as a group. Two considerations further complicate the disentanglement of group rights from individual rights. First, if a legal or institutional group right is justified by a moral right, that moral right could be a right held by individuals rather than by the group as a collective entity; conversely, an individual legal right may be underwritten by a moral group right. A second complication is that sorting rights into individual and group rights is not always a matter of mere analysis. The distinction between the collective and the corporate conceptions turns upon different understandings of the subject of group rights.
