I wish to thank Robert Louden for his comments on my book Kant’s Political Legacy. Louden seems to think highly of my work. “We need more of this kind of scholarship,” he writes generously in closing. And yet he attributes to me quite basic mistakes and inaccuracies, that I will now try to address. Louden’s main, repeated and central worry about the first part of my book is that my Kantian foundation of human rights is stained by the erroneous assumption that human beings are for Kant the sole entities capable of moral behavior and therefore endowed with dignity. Louden reminds me that in fact all rational beings are capable of moral behavior for Kant and that the members of the biological species homo sapiens are a subset of this larger kind. Thus in focusing on Kant’s remarks to the effect that we have an innate right (to external freedom) by virtue of our humanity I am “misreading Kant’s remarks about humanity. Kant’s ethics is not a humanist ethics” (37). And this alleged mistake has far-reaching consequences. In Chapter 2 I use Kant to justify the intuition, latent in all major human rights documents, that humans are worthy creatures who possess dignity. And yet, repeats Louden, “on Kant’s view humans are not the only creatures who possess inherent dignity” (3). Finally, when in Chapter 3 I highlight one of my two points of departure from Kant – I deny that humans are the only animals capable of moral behavior – I commit the same mistake again because, forgetting about “extraterrestrial rational beings”, I am ignoring that “Kant does not maintain that the capacity for moral agency is a peculiarity of humans” (3). Of course Louden is right that for Kant not only humans but all rational beings are capable of moral behavior and thus possess dignity. But have I ever suggested that this is not the case? Let us start from this third occurrence of my mistake. As Louden himself notices, when I say that only humans possess the moral capacity (or better that they do so at the highest degree of sophistication), I had in mind terrestrial non-human animals as other potential candidates. In other words, the scope of my affirmation was implicitly but clearly limited to this world. Hence I thought (and still think) that it was not necessary to clarify that if we were talking about the world in general (terrestrial, extraterrestrial and non-sensible), then humans would not be the sole set of entities with the relevant feature.

中文翻译：

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对罗伯特·劳登的回应

我要感谢罗伯特·劳登（Robert Louden）对我的《康德的政治遗产》发表的评论。劳登（Louden）似乎对我的工作高度评价。“我们需要更多这类奖学金，”他在总结中慷慨地写道。但是，他还是将我的一些基本错误和不准确性归因于我，我现在将尝试解决这些错误和不准确性。劳登对我的书的第一部分的主要，反复和中心的担心是，我的康德人权基础被错误的假设所污损，即人类是康德的唯一有道德行为能力的实体，因此具有尊严。劳登提醒我，事实上，所有理性人都有康德的道德行为能力，而智人生物物种的成员就是这种更大种类的子集。因此，在关注康德关于人类拥有与生俱来的权利（对外部自由的权利）的言论时，我“误读了康德关于人类的言论。康德的伦理学不是人本主义的伦理学”（37）。这个所谓的错误具有深远的影响。在第二章中，我用康德来证明直觉是合理的，在所有主要的人权文件中都有这样的暗示，即人类是具有尊严的有价值的生物。然而，劳登重复说：“在康德看来，人类并不是唯一具有固有尊严的生物”（3）。最后，在第3章中，我强调了我离开康德的两个出发点之一–我否认人类是唯一有道德行为能力的动物–我又犯了同样的错误，因为忘记了“外在的理性存在”，我无视“康德并不坚持道德代理的能力是人类的特殊性”（3）。劳登当然是对的，因为康德不仅对人类而且对所有理性人都具有道德行为能力，因此具有尊严。但是我是否曾经提出过这样的建议？让我们从我的错误的第三次出现开始。正如劳登本人所注意到的那样，当我说只有人类拥有道德能力（或者更好的是，他们拥有最高的成熟度）时，我想到了陆地上的非人类动物和其他潜在的候选者。换句话说，我申明的范围是暗含的，但显然仅限于这个世界。因此，我认为（并且仍然认为）没有必要澄清一下，如果我们在谈论一般性的世界（陆地，地球外和不明智的世界），