Topics Ethics

Question In the context of human rights, there is often talk about so-called "group rights." One such group right is the right to protection against genocide - i.e., against mass murder. Why is a "group right" necessary in such cases? If one accepts the validity of human rights at all, then one almost certainly accepts that all individuals, including all members of a minority group, have the right to life. Why provide an additional group right against genocide? Anyone committing genocide is necessarily and directly infringing upon the right to life. What is gained by formulating extra group rights, besides an additional offence to add to the records of human rights offenders? Other "group rights" are also, or could easily be, covered by individual rights (right to speak the language of one's choice, right to teach one's children the language and culture of one's choice, etc.). Groups, unlike the individuals that make up the group, cannot be said to suffer at all unless their constituent individuals suffer, whereas individuals can suffer regardless of the well-being of their group - and the well-being of the group (or the race, or the majority, or society, or a particular class) has often been the justification for atrocities in the past. Considering all this, what is the advantage of formulating such a thing as group rights?

Accepted:
October 14, 2010

Comments

I can see at least two responses to your challenge.

International interventions and sanctions are confined to the most serious violations of human rights. And the seriousness of crimes is not merely a matter of the harm done to the victims, but also a matter of the motivations of the perpetrators. Just as we regard premeditation as an aggravating condition, we so regard also aggression directed against people on account of their skin color, ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. Genocide -- defined as the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group -- is then arguably more serious than random violence of comparable magnitude. And the special expression is then useful to indicate the heightened responsibility of people, within the affected society and abroad, to preempt genocide and to stop it with all deliberate speed if it nonetheless occurs. Or so one might argue.

The other response can be introduced through your example of language rights. You have a right to speak to your children in the language of your choice; but do you also have a right that they be taught this language in school? Not, presumably, if you're the only speaker of this language far and wide. But if thirty percent of the adults in your town speak Spanish as their native language, then that could be a very compelling reason for requiring that Spanish be taught in the local schools. In this sort of case, no individual has the right, but a sufficiently numerous group may have it. (To be sure, you can translate this into a gimmicky individual "right to have Language L taught in a town's public schools if more than XX percent of the people in this town are speakers of L".)