Dethroning the sovereign individual: a Confucian reconstruction of the theory of right holding

Abstract

This dissertation aims at developing a theory of right-holding not based on the concept of the sovereign individual, but based on the concept of the Confucian moral individual. The failure of the Will and Interest theories has its root cause in accepting John Stuart Mill’s concept of the sovereign individual, but as Karl Marx and Evgeny Pashukanis point out, this concept shares the same logic of the commodity owner and it ultimately suffers from the problem of the logic of commodity form: assuming the egoistic, isolated and self-sufficient monad and inverting the logic between subjects and objects. The contemporary Chinese theories of right-holding try to respond to the Marxist critique here, but they all fail: they either completely abandon the concept of the sovereign individual, thus failing to explain the subjectivity of the right-holder or they retreat to the sovereign individual, and make the same mistakes again as the Will and Interest theories do. To rescue this problem, I argue that the concept of the sovereign individual should be replaced with the concept of the Confucian moral individual. The Confucian moral individual means an individual has innate moral inclinations which is capable of determining what an individual can do and what other people should and should not do to an individual and it can be used as the assumption of right-holding. Therefore, the Confucian theory of right-holding argues that the necessary but insufficient feature of right-holding is that holding a right indicates a justifiable ground for an individual to have the Hohfeldian entitlement(s) which has the peremptory force and can solve the problems that the two theories of rights fail to do.