Animal Rights

Tom Regan

Contemporary American Philosopher Deontologist, in the tradition of Kant Specialist in animal rights The Case for Animal Rights (1983) “Animal Rights, Human Wrongs” (1980)

Animal Rights

Utilitarians are wrong to focus only on pleasure and pain. What is important is respecting the dignity of others, and to treat those with moral standing as ends in themselves, not means (c.f. Kant).

What is wrong with eating veal, for example, is not that the animal suffers, rather: “the fundamental wrong is the system that allows us to view animals as our resources, here for us, to be eaten, or surgically manipulated, or put in our cross hairs for sport or money.”

Moral Standing

Distinguishes “moral agents” from “moral patients” Moral agents typified by competent human adults Moral patients include everything that has interests, e.g. babies, the mentally incompetent and animals.

Both moral agents and moral patients have moral standing, i.e. are ends of themselves and are subject to rights What has interests?

Subjects-of-a-life.

Subjects-of-a-life

“To be the subject-of-a-life … involves more than merely being alive and more than merely being conscious. To be the subject-of-a-life is to … have beliefs and desires; perception, memory, and a sense of the future, including their own future; an emotional life together with feelings of pleasure and pain; preference and welfare interests; a psychophysical identity over time; and an individual welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares well or ill for them, independent of their utility for others.” Not all animals, but only animals that meet these criteria.

Typically “mentally normal mammals of a year or more”, although potentially other animals with the relevant cognitive capacity.

Implications

The following violate animals’ rights: Raising animals for food or fur Hunting for sport or money Keeping pets Keeping animals in circuses or zoos (Most) vivisection Like Singer, holds that only individuals have moral standing, not species or biosystems.

More inclusive than Singer as to what causes harm to animals – e.g. pets, raising well-cared-for animals for food, keeping happy animals in a zoo, etc.

Not as inclusive as Singer as to which animals matter: mostly only mammals of over a year old compared to everything that is at least as sentient as a shrimp

Objections to Singer and Regan

1) Too inclusive: only humans or only humans and some other higher animals (e.g. the Great Apes) should count.

2) Not inclusive enough: should include all animals, maybe even plants (Goodpaster: anything alive should have moral standing) Ironically animal rights is criticized as being essentially anthropocentric – still maintains that only persons count, but some animals count as persons What about species, biosystems, larger ecological systems?

3) Practical complications The devil is in the details e.g. should we protect prey from predators? Should we inoculate wild animals from disease? Should we shoot some members of overpopulated herds (e.g. deer) to prevent mass starvation? How can we judge between competing interests/rights?

Readings

Required: G. Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968), pp. 1243-1248, available at: http://dieoff.org/page95.htm

Guha, Ramachandra, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique” in Environmental Ethics, Vol. 11, No.1 (Spring 1989), pp. 71-83 , available at: www.eci.ox.ac.uk/~dliverma/articles/Guha%20on%20radical%20environm entalism.pdf

Optional: Goodpaster, Kenneth, “On Being Morally Considerable”, in Environmental Philosophy, pp. 49-65, available on reserve at the Philosophy Office