Thus far in this book I have put forward a teleological cooperative model of social action and offered piecemeal philosophical analyses of what I take to be the main social action types, including conventional and norm-governed action and organisational and institutional action. In all this the notion of joint action has played a pivotal role, and thereby provided a certain unity to my account. In the remaining two chapters I turn to the analysis of two fundamental moral properties that arise in the context of social action, namely collective right and collective responsibility. Once again, the central theoretical notion underpinning these analyses is the notion of joint action. I will consider collective rights in this chapter, and collective responsibility in the following one.

A discussion of collective moral rights raises a number of important issues. One such issue is the claimed existence of supra individual entities, such as nations and ethnic groups, that possess moral properties, including moral rights, above and beyond the moral properties possessed by the individual persons that compose them. Another issue is the possibility that fundamental human rights possessed by individuals might be justifiably overridden by collective rights. A third issue is the moral claims of minority cultural groups. Such claims are typically couched in terms of collective rights. A fourth issue is the justification for interference by one state in the affairs of another state. One form of justification in such cases is the alleged collective right of the members of a community to outside assistance.

Many collective moral rights are joint rights of individual persons. My notion of a joint right presupposes the analysis of joint actions provided in Chapter 2.