Group rights, participatory goods, and language policy

This article asks whether groups or individuals should hold rights to participatory goods. Participatory goods are a type of public goods that can only be enjoyed jointly, in participation with others. Denise Réaume, who coined the term, argues that individual interests in participatory goods cannot be of sufficient weight to ground rights to the core of participatory goods. James Morauta has interpreted Réaume's argument as a constraint on the types of right-holders that can hold rights to participatory goods-a holding constraint. Morauta then criticizes the interpretation he made of Réaume. This article clarifies the disagreement between these two authors by analysing how participatory goods are produced and, more specifically, by introducing a distinction between threshold actions-that is, actions that are necessary to produce a participatory good- and surplus actions-that is, actions that are not, strictly speaking, necessary to produce a participatory good. I use this analysis to do four things. First, I show that Réaume is right when it comes to threshold actions but that Morauta is right in the case of surplus actions. Second, I offer a new argument for an adapted holding constraint-that says that groups as well as individuals should hold rights to participatory goods-based on an account of what it means to produce participatory goods. Third, I show that this argument withstands Morauta's criticism. Finally, I spell out an account of group rights that is in line with my argument. The result is an argument for, and an account of, group rights that grants groups the legal standing to sue, which I think should be granted to speakers of minority languages living intermingled with speakers of majority languages.