An ethic that emphasizes relationship and community can be concerned with protecting the individual's interests, but always with an eye to trying to reconcile those interests with those of others. An ethic emphasizing rights and autonomy should be concerned with promoting enough community to foster a motivating concern for everyone's rights, not just one's own.
David WongFor Confucians, we are such thoroughly social beings that individual and social interests are not in the end regarded as fundamentally incompatible. Though there will be conflicts, the central mission of moral and political philosophy is to foster approaches that will render them compatible or if that is not possible in some cases, to keep a reasonable balance so that neither side is consistently sacrificed for the sake of the other.
David Wong