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Reviewed by:
  • Community and Collective Rights: A Theoretical Framework for Rights Held by Groups
  • Andrew Woolford
Dwight Newman Community and Collective Rights: A Theoretical Framework for Rights Held by Groups. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2011, 243 p.

Community and Collective Rights is a rigorous and convincing defence of the rights of groups as groups rather than as a set of aggregated individual rights. Dwight Newman conducts this argument in conversation with the liberal tradition of political and legal philosophy, pushing it beyond its individualistic frame of reference in order to support the moral duties of and respect owed by others to specific collectivities. In this manner, he offers an internal critique of liberalism, finding space within its overarching logic for collective rights.

My own instincts with respect to group rights tend toward a degree of cultural relativism. Despite this contrary starting point, however, I appreciated [End Page 272] Newman’s efforts to defend group rights. In particular, Newman takes care to avoid prescribing, essentializing, or freezing collective life, seeking instead to establish grounds for group rights that embrace groups in all their complexity and fluidity. His argument on behalf of group rights thereby aligns current legal and political thought on collective rights with contemporary anthropological and sociological insight into the negotiated, contested, and processual nature of collective life. In Newman’s theorization, groups are not afforded rights as carriers of unchanging traditions; rather, groups are sources of meaning and identity for their members even as they adapt and change over time.

To begin, Newman criticizes the work of Will Kymlicka and others who rest group rights upon the autonomy of individuals (chapter 1). Kymlicka’s notion of group-differentiated rights posits that specific rights are held by individuals because of their membership in groups. By prioritizing the individual dimension of rights, Kymlicka suggests, we can lend our support to “external protections” of the group but not to “internal restrictions” placed upon group members, since the former defends the autonomous choices of individuals to participate in collective life while the latter involves group restrictions on individual autonomy. Newman, in contrast, argues that we should not dismiss internal restrictions en masse. His project offers a more subtle examination of the rights of collectivities, acknowledging that group-based entities have interests in things that make collective life better and allow them to flourish (pp. 66–76). These interests extend beyond the autonomous needs of group members and may require internal restrictions.

Newman examines the interests of groups and their members in light of two key principles. The first is what he terms the “service principle,” which “is a normative requirement that collectivities serve their members’ interests in a broad sense” (p. 107). This principle suggests that groups provide their members with goods that are morally preferable to those that would be available to them if they did not participate in group life. The service principle allows one to withhold legitimacy from a group that, for example, brainwashes its members toward collective suicide (p. 124). The service principle couples with Newman’s “mutuality principle,” which restricts “a collectivity’s legitimate claims such that the collectivity does not inappropriately trench upon the interests of non-member individuals or other collectivities” (p. 131). The mutuality principle provides moral reasoning as to why we might question the practices of missionary societies that aggressively proselytize to and degrade the spiritual beliefs of Indigenous groups. These two principles serve as guidelines that allow one to navigate between an uncritical acceptance of tradition for tradition’s sake and a crass reduction of group rights to individual rights. In the space between these two perspectives, Newman seeks to assess the specific moral dimensions of collective life and moral claims to collective rights. These discussions are undertaken in light of complicating factors that cannot be adequately summarized here, including conflicts that take place between potentially opposed collective rights (chapter 4); the degree to which group members should be permitted to exit or voice their [End Page 273] disagreements with collective life (chapter 7); the reality of imperfect collectivities (chapter 8); and the grounds for principled interventions into collective life (chapter 9).

Newman’s argument is not as abstract as presented in this review...

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