Justifying The Restrictions Of Some Individual Rights

The origin and the restrictions of individual rights have been central issues of modern political philosophy and moral philosophy.One of the issues that philosophers concern most is whether certain individual freedom should be restricted.In practice,there are a lot of concrete cases on this restriction issue.This thesis will focus on three cases,namely,organ trade,surrogacy service and homosexual marriage.These three kind of cases are prevalent in contemporary China.They have widely aroused social attentions,and been discussed in the level of legislation.The thesis will start with representing these cases,then analyze the different opinions and intuitions about individual rights and good life.After that we will look through three mainstream theories of individual rights and its restrictions,namely Utilitarianism,Liberalism,and Communitarianism,and try to evaluate their argumentative strengths and weaknesses.Utilitarianism,Liberalism,and Communitarianism are respectively based on the feelings of pain and happiness,the human rationality and the value of community.These theories justify individual rights and its restrictions through different approaches of utility,rights and commonweal.They answer not only the questions of the origin and the application of individual rights,but also the questions of what the government or other kinds of communities should do to protect and regulate individual rights.Utilitarianism maintains that the core issue of morality and politics is the calculation of utility,and the individual rights should be restricted by collective utility.Treating individual rights as instruments,Utilitarianism falls short of justifying it.Liberalism predominates the field of modern political philosophy.We will concentrate on contemporary philosopher John B.Rawls and his egalitarian liberalism theory,which emphasizes on the absolute priority of basic rights,and implicates that all the infringements upon basic rights should be restricted.Following the line of Kantian rationalism,this theory takes equal and free rational being as its starting point.But Communitarians critiques that rational being is an unhistorical and unrealistic notion.Communitarianism follows the tradition of Aristotle's virtue theory,and becomes more and more active within the de-globalization and diversification tendency in the recent decades.It underlines the importance of community,and maintains that individual rights can only be defined in terms of the social relationship and should be restricted by public good of the community.Communitarianism has to come up with a solution to the accusation of relativism and totalitarianism.This thesis pays most attention to the debate between Liberalism and Communitarianism.In their debate,the former embraces the political ideals grounded on "rights",while the latter focuses on "commonweal".The real divergence is about the different status between individuals and community and we need to decide which one has the priority.The preliminary conclusion of this thesis would be that Liberalism and Communitarianism complement each other.We should learn from the historical experience of Western world,which tell us it is dangerous to insulate Liberalism and Communitarianism.