But, a group right conceived in this way does not entail giving a moral status to the group qua group that is separate from that of its members severally.
Group rights conceived collectively may seem less threatening to individuals than group rights conceived corporately.
A reviewer here asks whether Hayek assumes that the point of law is to protect property rights conceived as existing prior to legislation.
Some proponents of group rights conceive right-holding groups as moral entities in their own right, so that, as a right-holder, a group has a being and status analogous to those of an individual person.
During the drafting in 1947 of the Universal Declaration, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association warned of the danger that the Declaration would be "a statement of rights conceived only in terms of the values prevalent in Western Europe and America".
That's obvious, but it tells us a lot about how the right conceives blackness.
The linguist George Lakoff suggests that the political right conceives of society as a family ruled by a strict father, whereas the left thinks of it as a family guided by a nurturant parent.
If we are willing to extend rights to non-human animals, even human rights will be rights unique to a particular group; yet most human rights are conceived as individual rights and, on some views, can only be individual rights.
Smith said: "There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death".
"Believe me," she says, and we do; we believe that she is right to conceive of glory not as some ride on a rainbow but in her ability to "Tap across the Tappan Zee" — over the bridge, down the road into the city, to the apartment where someone is reading your book, and loves you best of all.
