Fellow Creatures provides a way of thinking about our relation to animals that is bold, original, and urgent. But it is much more than that. It is also a meditation on a host of philosophical questions, on topics like the concept of the good, the temporality of moral standing, the nature of pleasure, and the permissibility of using dogs in the military (answer: only if the state they are drafted to defend is one that actually protects them). In its scope and depth, it is an unusual, and unusually satisfying, contribution to the genre of applied ethics. Although I will be focusing on the main line of argument, which aims to show we have moral obligations to nonhuman animals, I urge readers to take the time to follow Korsgaard down the various side roads along the way. Make the most of the opportunity to take a challenging and often surprising philosophical journey, guided by one of the most distinctive minds of our time.

Korsgaard's main argument leads to the conclusion that we are obligated to treat nonhuman animals (henceforth, “animals”) as ends in themselves. They are ends, she claims, but not in the familiar Kantian sense that they are co-legislators in the construction of the moral community. Rather, they are ends in that they are creatures with a good of their own, who are entitled to protection under the laws we humans lay down. I am interested in the constitutivist structure of Korsgaard's argument for this claim. She tries to show that presuppositions of our own rational activity commit us to treating nonhuman animals as ends in this sense. I have questions about how this argument is supposed to work, especially in light of the fact that the animal nature in us is not an entity with its own life to lead, whereas the animal nature in animals is.

同胞生物提供了一种大胆、新颖和紧迫的思考我们与动物关系的方式。但远不止于此。它也是对一系列哲学问题的沉思，诸如善的概念、道德地位的暂时性、快乐的本质以及在军队中使用狗的允许性（答案：只有当它们所在的国家被起草来保卫是真正保护他们的人）。就其范围和深度而言，它是对应用伦理学类型的不寻常的、不寻常的令人满意的贡献。虽然我将重点关注论证的主线，旨在表明我们对非人类动物负有道德义务，但我敦促读者花时间跟随 Korsgaard 沿着不同的小路走下去。充分利用机会进行一次具有挑战性且常常令人惊讶的哲学之旅，

Korsgaard 的主要论点得出的结论是，我们有义务将非人类动物（以下简称“动物”）视为自身的目的。她声称，它们是目的，但不是在熟悉的康德意义上，它们是道德共同体建设的共同立法者。相反，它们的目的在于它们是具有自身利益的生物，有权根据我们人类制定的法律获得保护。我对 Korsgaard 论证这一主张的构成主义结构感兴趣。她试图表明，我们自己的理性活动的预设使我们在这个意义上将非人类动物视为目的。我对这个论点应该如何运作有疑问，特别是考虑到我们体内的动物本性不是一个有自己的生命可以引导的实体，而动物的动物本性是。