Individual and Group Rights - Philosophies

Philosophies

In the minarchist political views of libertarians and classical liberals, the role of the government is solely to identify, protect, and enforce the natural rights of the individual while attempting to assure just remedies for transgressions. Liberal governments that respect individual rights often provide for systemic controls that protect individual rights such as a system of due process in criminal justice. Collectivist states are generally considered to be oppressive by such classical liberals and libertarians precisely because they do not respect individual rights. Interceding within that spectrum for the actual availing of collective governance to be allotted systematization and their undivided agency, but relegated for the regulation of such freedom toward constructed entities is the federative process. A faculty of federalism that lends to relative de-standardization of governance under its auspices, unlike libertarian or socialistic manners of state. Federated structures allow for diversity of power distribution between the alternating group and individual interest schemata where neither liberal nor collective type governing alone can codify in variation.

Ayn Rand, developer of the philosophy of Objectivism asserted that a group, as such, has no rights. She maintained that only an individual man can possess rights, and therefore the expression "individual rights" is a redundancy, while the expression "collective rights" is a contradiction in terms. In this view, a man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group nor lose the rights which he does possess. Man can be in a group without want or the group minority, without rights. According to this philosophy, individual rights are not subject to a public vote, a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority, the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from the will of majorities, and the smallest minority on earth is the individual. This could be argued to contravene the idea of corporate personhood.