People and other sentient beings certainly deserve our consideration, but I want to go all the way and claim that all objects whatsoever deserve some measure of respect.
In Brandom’s terms, this would be a bad, traditionalist direction, because it seems to attribute to things a kind of normative status that is intrinsic, rather than being derived from a taking, judgment, or attitude. But I am more committed to the proposition that the normative status or goodness of things depends upon explainable reasons, than to the proposition that it only has meaning as following from how they are for someone. It seems to me that the Kantian arguments about the fundamental role of our taking things to be thus-and-such stress the answerability of such takings to ethical reason, more than any mere Cartesian-style unimpeachable fact of their seeming so to someone.
There can be no normativity without normative judgment. But equally, there can be no proper normative judgment without reasons. And the question may remain open whose judgment it is. (See Consciousness and Identity; Grammatical Prejudice?.)
All Kantian scruples about existence claims notwithstanding, I don’t see anything necessarily dogmatic in saying that something has inherent value. This kind of open, nonexclusive affirmation is worlds apart from, for example, a claim that some individual human or group of humans is inherently superior to others. If we judge that we soundly judge something to have value, why not then allow ourselves to say it “has” value? Isn’t that a good enough meaning for the word? (See also Respect for All Beings.)
The Postmodern Peripatetic 