Joint rights: Human beings, corporations and animals

In this paper I, firstly (section 1), distinguish between human rights, natural rights andinstitutional rights and argue that some so-called human rights, such as the right to life, arenatural rights and others, such as the right to vote, are institutional rights. Secondly (section2), I sketch my account of joint rights (developed in more detail elsewhere1) and apply it to twokinds of entities that are importantly different from one another and from individual humanbeings, namely, business corporations (section 3) and non-human animals (section 4). I do soto test the scope of joint rights in the context of the ascription of joint rights to human beingsbeing uncontroversial (although the analysis of joint rights is far from being a settled matter). Iargue that neither corporations nor animals have joint moral rights, since in neither case do theyhave moral rights, but that they do have, or at least they ought to have, legal rights, and someof these legal rights arguably ought to be joint legal rights. In doing so, I introduce a significanttheoretical innovation to the literature on joint rights, namely, that of a layered structure of jointrights