Joint Rights : Human Beings, Corporations and Animals

In this paper I, firstly, distinguish between human rights, natural rights and institutional rights and argue that some so-called human rights, such as the right to life, are natural rights and others, such as the right to vote, are institutional rights. Secondly, I sketch my account of joint rights and apply it to two kinds of entities that are importantly different from one another and from individual human beings, namely, business corporations and non-human animals. I do so to test the scope of joint rights in the context of the ascription of joint rights to human beings being uncontroversial. I argue that neither corporations nor animals have joint moral rights, since in neither case do they have moral rights, but that they do have, or at least they ought to have, legal rights, and some of these legal rights arguably ought to be joint legal rights. In doing so, I introduce a significant theoretical innovation to the literature on joint rights, namely, that of a layered structure of joint rights.