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6. See Peimin Ni, “Seek and You Will Find It,” 173–198; and Lee Man Yee, “Universal Human Dignity,” 283–313.

7. Compared with the role of the Enlightenment on the social and institutional dimension of modern Europe, the relative marginality of thinkers like Li Zhi and Dai Zhen in Chinese social and political life is evident. Although in liberal democracies the concept of political and economic freedom, human rights, and separation of religious and civil orders are taken for granted, the Enlightenment project is still unaccomplished, and its long-term practical effects in the world are still limited. The prophetic warnings by Montesquies, Voltaires, and Verris have neither brought to a complete transformation from subjects into citizens, nor prevented the tragedies, repressions, and tyrannies of the twentieth century. Moreover, during the present worldwide social and economic crisis, some basic principles of liberal democracies are deteriorating, so that neither an individual independence of the so-called elites nor a solidarity society has been accomplished. In other words, very frequent are cases where the human rights and life have been trampled owing to the sense of insecurity (see Beck, Risk Society) or in the name of a political ideal, a nation’s destiny, or a religious faith.

8. For a recent scholarly reevaluation of Confucian rites in function of human dignity, see Xu Keqian, “A Contemporary Re-Examination of Confucian Li 禮 and Human Dignity.”

9. Peimin Ni (“Seek and You Will Find It,” 173–198) argues that “For Confucianism, our task is not so much a matter of knowing that we have dignity, but more a matter of how to become dignified. We have dignity not because we possess something that is common to us all, but because we have a sense of what we can and should become” (186).

10. Peimin Ni notes that “If we say that ‘dignity internalism’ believes that human dignity is based on some inner quality of the human person, and ‘dignity externalism’ believes human dignity to be a matter of interpersonal recognition, Confucianism marvelously combines the two: in the case of Mencius, my internal ‘four hearts’ can serve as the basis of my dignity” (“Seek and You Will Find It,” 182). The Confucian sense of shame is an example.

11. Munro, “Unequal Human Worth,” 140. There are various opinions on whether the centrality of family duties in Confucianism is rooted in human nature and continues to be a valid morality today, or whether it is obsolete and should be reformed in favor of greater impartiality to avoid corruption and nepotism (Liu Qingping, “Filiality versus sociality