The Other Side of the Coin—Response to the Comments on My Paper on a Confucian Approach to Human Dignity Peimin NI 1 Published online: 3 October 2016 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016 It is truly an honor to receive the 2014 Dao best essay award for my paper on human dignity. I am especially happy that, as part of the award, I have the privilege to receive critical comments from learned scholars in the field and am offered the chance to engage in further discussions with them in the journal. Let me begin with acknowledging my appreciation of Erin Cline’ s articulation of the Christian view of human dignity. It does more justice to Christianity than my simplistic treatment of it in the article. Actually my treatment of the Kantian view on human dignity is open to the same critical assessment as well. Although my main focus was to bring up the Confucian account of human dignity and my discussions of the Christian and Kantian views were serving as a way of introducing the Confucian account, both views deserve much more careful analysis. I find Cline’ s application of the Confucian account of human dignity very interesting and significant. If the Confucian account of human dignity has any value today, or ever, it must be able to be applied to concrete issues in which humans, infants and fetuses included, are treated. I am particularly intrigued by her question: why, despite the Confucian emphasis on love and humanity, it “did not lead to a prohibition on infanticide in China (or to concerns about the moral permissibility of abortion),” at least not to the degree as much as early Jews and Christians. This can be the subject of a full-length paper in itself. While I do not assume that I have a good answer to this particular question, I can offer some observations here. First, I would say that in discussing this issue, Confucians would not simply say that fetuses/infants either do or do not have value. They would first admit degrees of value. Dao (2016) 15:631–637 DOI 10.1007/s11712-016-9516-8 * Peimin NI nip@gvsu.edu 1 Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, Peking University, Bldg 4, Lee Shau-kee Humanities, Peking University, 5 Yiheyuan Rd. Haidian District, Beijing, China 100871