A 2003 book by Tom Regan, a well-known advocate of animal rights. Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, worked alongside Regan in the animal movement, but their philosophical positions differ.

Acknowledgments

The Animal Rights Debate, a debate with self-described “proud speciesist” Carl Cohen, appeared in 2001. This book further develops the arguments Regan presented there. I omit his thanks to those who helped with the book.

Introduction

Opponents of animal rights consider its advocates irrational, emotional, anti-scientific, and misanthropic. Regan wrote this book to counter these misunderstandings. His strategy is simple: ask difficult questions and follow the process of finding good answers. He argues that this inevitably leads to the logical conclusion that many nonhuman animals have rights too.

Two important questions in moral theory are 1) what makes right actions right, and 2) what makes wrong actions wrong. Different theories offer different answers: only humans have rights, all sentient beings have rights, and so on. But they cannot all be correct. Providing rational grounds for moral theories is the role of moral philosophy. This book invites reflection on its various topics.

The difficult questions whose answers we will seek are:

Do all and only humans have moral standing?
Do all and only sentient beings have moral standing?
What makes right actions right?
What makes wrong actions wrong?
What are moral rights?
Do all humans have rights?
Can nonhuman animals have rights?

Moral philosophy is not merely theoretical; it has practical significance. If animals have rights, human exploitation of them is unjust; if not, it is not unjust. Regan says that from animals’ perspective this is one of the most important questions. Here the contrast with Singer is stark. As a utilitarian, Singer argues that neither humans nor animals have rights, yet still argues that animal exploitation must end.

Chapter 1. From Indifference to Advocacy

Regan advocates animal rights and actively participates in the movement (sadly, he died in 2017). Its goals include the complete abolition of commercial animal agriculture, the fur industry, and animal experimentation.

His personal history follows, relating to the final chapter.

Born to poorly educated parents in a poor family, Regan spent his childhood and adolescence during the Great Depression. He ate meat at most meals, felt no qualms about dissecting animals in high-school biology, worked in a butcher shop to pay for college, and later gave his spouse a mink hat. Animal rights scarcely concerned him.

After studying philosophy in graduate school, he began thinking about ethics and animals. Campaigning against the Vietnam War drew his attention to violence, and studying Gandhi, who happened to be a vegetarian, made him recognize a contradiction: opposing the war as unnecessary violence against humans while tolerating violence against animals. A second lesson from Gandhi was that criticizing others is easy, but criticizing oneself is hard. He felt the contradiction between antiwar activism outside and meat eating at home. Around this time, his companion dog of 13 years died.

The rational lessons from Gandhi combined with the emotional impact of his dog’s death led him to vegetarianism. Beginning with diet, he gradually learned about animal experimentation and other abuses and avoided more products. He now consumes neither leather nor fur and opposes animal experimentation. Through this process, he gradually reached his present, supposedly “radical” and “extreme,” views.

Chapter 2. Animal Exploitation

Chapter 2 presents various ways humans use animals as tools, abusing and exploiting them: factory farming, the fur industry, and animal experimentation. These practices are more visible now than in the 1970s, and exposing exploitation is not this book’s main subject (moral philosophy and the rights view are), so I omit a summary of Chapter 2.

Chapter 3. The Nature and Importance of Rights

Some moral philosophers argue that judging right and wrong requires the concept of rights; the author agrees. (Utilitarians such as Bentham and Singer argue that no such concept is needed.)

Even those agreeing that individuals have rights disagree about exactly which rights exist and which belong to humans.

Rights may be legal or moral; moral rights divide into negative and positive rights. A negative right is a right not to have something done to you, while a positive right is a right to receive something.

Rights:
- Legal rights
- Moral rights
  - Negative rights: rights not to have something done to you
  - Positive rights: rights to receive something

An example of a negative right is freedom from trafficking; a positive right might be medical care in infancy. In other words, negative rights are violated through commission, positive rights through omission.

Some, such as libertarians, recognize only negative rights; others, such as those with socialist inclinations, recognize both. This book needs only negative rights for its argument, so accepting positive rights is not crucial. Unless specified otherwise, “rights” hereafter means negative rights.

Next come several characteristics of moral rights.

No trespassing: Having rights resembles carrying an invisible “No trespassing” sign. Generally, all humans have two rights: not to be harmed, and not to have their freedom of choice infringed. Both are protected by restricting others’ freedom. When others violate our rights, infringing some of theirs to defend ours is morally justified. Using proportionate physical force to avoid being robbed, for example, is not unjust. Even then, freedom is not unlimited. This seems similar to self-defense in criminal law.
Trump: Rights take precedence over all other human values; no good achieved by violating another’s rights can justify that violation. This is another major difference from utilitarianism, which holds that an act causing slight harm to one person but great benefit to many can be morally right.
Equality: “Moral rights breathe equality.” (This probably means the concept requires equality, but I translated it literally because the sentence is striking.) If two people have rights, they have equal rights regardless of race, gender, religion, and so on.
Justice: Claiming rights demands justice, rather than expecting generosity or kindness. Suddenly visiting wealthy Bill Gates and asking him to buy you a sports car asks for charity, not fairness, and has nothing to do with rights. Forgetting the distinction between justice and generosity leads to paternalistic charity. Worth remembering in any movement on behalf of others, including animal rights.
Valid claim: A moral right is also a claim. To explain what makes a claim to a right valid, and thus justified, Regan introduces direct duty. If someone has a direct duty corresponding to my particular right, my claim is valid. My claim to life is valid only if others have a direct duty not to take my life. My claim to liberty is valid only if others have a direct duty not to restrict my liberty for their pleasure. (Understanding this requires distinguishing direct and indirect duties; Chapters 4 and 5 explain them.)
Respect: No trespassing, trump, equality, and justice all matter, but respect is most important. The most fundamental right, unifying all others, is the right to be treated with respect. A violation of any right, including life or liberty, means I am not being respected.

If animals have rights in this sense, animal experimentation violates them and cannot be morally justified, however many humans benefit.

Even animal-rights opponent Carl Cohen agrees on this point: if animals have rights, animal experimentation is no different from Nazi experiments on Jews. That is why he denies animal rights. Regan argues, however, that closely examining the denial of animal rights inevitably leads to denying rights to some humans as well. Recognizing human rights logically requires recognizing animal rights.

Chapter 4. Indirect Duty Views

Indirect duty views hold that humans have duties regarding animals, but none toward them. If a neighbor who dislikes your companion dog secretly breaks its leg, these views agree that the neighbor acted wrongly, but say the wrong was done to you, not the dog—just as breaking your watch wrongs you, not your watch.

There are several indirect duty views. One distinction concerns interests, a central concept in every moral theory, so let us briefly examine it. There are two kinds: preference interests and welfare interests.

Preference interests: What people prefer to do or have, varying considerably between individuals—golf rather than tennis, for example.
Welfare interests: Conditions needed for a minimally satisfactory life, such as food, shelter, and health, shared by everyone.

Both logically and empirically, these interests can conflict. Serious drug misuse ruining a life, for example, sacrifices welfare interests in pursuit of preference interests. (This example seems inappropriate, given addiction research’s common view that severe drug dependence is independent of personal preference. Still, I think the claim that these interests can conflict remains valid. —ak)

(In Korean, “interest” can mean 흥미, something one finds interesting, or 이익, something beneficial to oneself. Preference interests are closer to the former, welfare interests to the latter. Thinking “what interests me can conflict with what benefits me” makes their potential conflict easier to understand. —ak)

One basis for denying direct duties to animals is Descartes’ claim that animals lack souls and cannot feel pain. Contemporary philosopher Peter Carruthers makes a similar argument: without language, one cannot consciously feel pain, so there are no interests to violate or moral standing. But this is easily refuted. Human children cannot yet speak; on this reasoning they would consciously experience nothing, making language learning impossible. Yet normally developing children acquire language naturally. Nonlinguistic conscious experience can therefore exist without language.

(I think Tom Regan’s argument above is a straw man. In Against the moral standing of animals, Carruthers explicitly says animals feel pain and have inner, conscious feelings of pain like humans. He even explains, by his own reasoning, why preverbal children have moral standing while animals do not. I disagree with his opposition to animal rights, but Regan’s criticism nevertheless seems unfair.)

Returning to the book, Darwin’s theory of evolution allows no fundamental divide between humans and nonhuman animals. Regan says at least mammals are substantially similar to humans. Mammals are a minimum, not a boundary excluding birds or fish. (Korean approved high-school “Life and Ethics” textbooks incorrectly state that Regan recognizes only mammals.)

Those rejecting Darwin’s evolution for religious reasons may use their own scriptures, Regan says: the Christian Bible, Torah, and Quran, and Eastern Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, all make the same claims about humans and animals. This is another difference from Peter Singer, who criticizes the Old and New Testaments as contributing to Western civilization’s speciesist thinking.

Indirect duty views include simple contractarianism and Rawlsian contractarianism.

Simple contractarianism

This recognizes animals’ conscious experience but denies their rights. Morality resembles a contract people enter to protect and promote their own interests: complying is morally right, failing to comply morally wrong. Those directly making the contract have duties to fulfill it and direct moral rights. Nonrational beings unable to participate directly, such as animals, have neither duties nor direct rights. Contractors may have duties regarding nonparticipants, but none toward them. This has two weaknesses. First, because justice, injustice, fairness, and unfairness are determined by participants, their interests may be accorded distorted importance. Second, the socially disadvantaged and minorities are particularly liable to exclusion.

Rawlsian contractarianism

John Rawls argues that, unlike simple contractarianism, his version eliminates discrimination by negotiating behind a veil of ignorance concealing race, gender, status, and so on. Anyone able to understand and comply with whatever principles emerge may participate. But limiting participants to humans inevitably excludes nonhuman animals and is therefore speciesist. Human children and people with severe mental disabilities are excluded too. Rawls offered no reply to this criticism.

This might suggest Rawls actively advocated speciesism, but he did not. In the first edition of A theory of justice, he clearly states his position on animal rights.

Justice as fairness (as he proposes it) is not a complete contract theory. … If it succeeds sufficiently well, the next extension would be rightness as fairness. But even this broader theory cannot encompass all moral relationships, because it concerns only relations among humans, not relations with animals or nature. I do not claim that the contract notion can address all these important topics. I will set them aside in this book. How much its conclusions must change to encompass animals and nature is difficult to determine in advance.

Justice as fairness is not a complete contract theory. … Obviously if justice as fairness succeeds reasonably well, a next step would be to study the more general view suggested by the name “rightness as fairness.” But even this wider theory fails to embrace all moral relationships, since it would seem to include only our relations with other persons and to leave out of account how we are to conduct ourselves toward animals and the rest of nature. I do not contend that the contract notion offers a way to approach these questions which are certainly of the first importance; and I shall have to put them aside. We must recognize the limited scope of justice as fairness and of the general type of view that it exemplifies. How far its conclusions must be revised once these other matters are understood cannot be decided in advance.

A fair assessment of Rawlsian contractarianism from an animal-rights perspective would therefore be:

It is speciesist because it restricts contracting parties to humans, and the veil of ignorance does not conceal species.
But Rawls does not advocate speciesism. He explicitly acknowledges that his theory of justice is limited to human relations, that animals and nature are very important subjects, and that addressing them may require revising his theory.

Chapter 5. Direct Duty Views

Chapter 5 examines two direct duty views: the cruelty-kindness view and utilitarianism. Both recognize nonhuman animals, like humans, as beings toward whom moral duties are owed.

The cruelty-kindness view holds that humans have direct duties to treat animals kindly and not cruelly. All living beings capable of being treated cruelly or kindly receive moral consideration, including animals and human infants. But there are two problems. First, kind actions and right actions differ: kindly helping a child abuser is wrong. Second, judging a person’s kindness differs from judging their actions. An abortion is not immoral simply because the doctor performing it is cruel and enjoys abortions. Its moral rightness or wrongness is independent of the doctor’s character.

The second view is utilitarianism. With slight exaggeration, there are as many varieties as utilitarians, with much debate among them. Regan therefore introduces only preference utilitarianism (hereafter simply utilitarianism), because the most influential utilitarians in ethics and animal issues, R. G. Frey and Peter Singer, both held it. However, after almost a lifetime as a preference utilitarian, Singer announced a shift to hedonistic utilitarianism in his 2014 coauthored book The point of view of the universe.

Utilitarianism has two principles:

Equality: Preferences producing equal satisfaction receive equal weight, whoever holds them. This avoids simple contractarianism’s racism and Rawlsian contractarianism’s speciesism.
Utility: Act to maximize overall preference satisfaction and minimize dissatisfaction.

Morally right actions produce the greatest overall preference satisfaction and least dissatisfaction; others are relatively less right (more wrong). For utilitarians, actions resemble shots at a target: hitting the bull’s-eye (maximum overall preference satisfaction) is most right, with increasing distance from it making an action less right.

Regan identifies these strengths:

All beings with interests receive moral consideration, and equal satisfaction receives equal weight, avoiding contractarian discrimination.
Judging only consequences avoids the cruelty-kindness view’s problems. Kindly helping a child abuser is wrong because it results in more abused children.

Some aspects nevertheless seem puzzling:

Utilitarianism locates moral value only in individuals’ satisfied preferences, not the individuals themselves. Individuals are merely receptacles; only their contents have value. (Regan used this analogy in The Case for Animal Rights in 1983. In Animal Liberation or Animal Rights in 1987, Singer replied that unlike receptacles and contents, individuals cannot be separated from their experiences, and experiences cannot be conceived as existing independently of individuals. It is disappointing that the discussion has not advanced and merely repeats itself. —ak)
To produce the best overall consequences, one must 1) identify everyone affected, 2) calculate and sum their satisfaction, and 3) choose the highest-scoring action. Moreover, this may not yield the best result for the agent. (In The most good you can do, Singer presents calculations sufficient to guide judgment even in apparently difficult cases. And there is no reason an action’s maximizing my interests should coincide with its moral rightness. Judging independently of my interests—disinterestedness—may be a better criterion. —ak)

Regan identifies these problems with utilitarianism:

Evil preferences: If many abusers enjoy abusing one child, even their satisfied preferences must enter the calculation. Evil preferences cannot be excluded.
Evil conclusions: There is no basis to criticize young people joining together to kill older people simply because they are burdens. Evil conclusions cannot be excluded.

(According to Why Peter Singer abandoned preference utilitarianism, Singer and his teacher Richard Mervyn Hare believed ethics contains no objective truth, so anyone can prescribe any moral ought. Nevertheless, Regan’s evil conclusions criticism is inappropriate because it ignores the requirement that prescriptions about preferences be universal. One may prescribe “all older people should be expelled,” but must maintain that one should oneself be expelled upon reaching that age. The evil preferences criticism is valid, and indeed helped lead Singer to abandon preference utilitarianism. He admits that the inability to exclude someone’s evil preferences from utilitarian calculations posed a serious problem. —ak)

Regan points out problems in applying utilitarianism to animal rights.

First, Singer says private human–animal sex is unproblematic if mutually satisfying. Extending that reasoning, private sex between human adults and children would also be unproblematic if mutually satisfying. Second, considering the preferences of everyone involved in factory farming (McDonald’s employees, the meat-eating majority, and so on) might require maintaining meat consumption.

(Singer’s argument appears in Heavy Petting. He gives the example of performing oral sex on a sexually aroused dog rubbing against a person’s leg. Setting aside emotional discomfort and reasoning through it, the adult human’s preference is certainly satisfied; the question is whether the dog’s is. Sexual acts with children are illegal even when they participate willingly because they have not reached the age of consent, making mutual consent impossible in principle. Accepting that children cannot give rational consent makes it reasonable to say the same of dogs. To maintain that oral sex between a human and an aroused dog is unproblematic, I think Singer must either 1) argue that sexual acts with willing children are also unproblematic, or 2) provide a nonspeciesist basis for claiming that, unlike with children, mutual consent is unnecessary with dogs. If he can do neither, he should retract the claim that intercourse with a dog might be unproblematic. —ak)

(I do not find persuasive the claim that utilitarian calculations cannot abolish meat-eating culture because so many people participate directly or indirectly and their preference interests sum to so much. The sheer number of farmed animals suffering and dying each year would easily outweigh humanity’s total preference interests. —ak)

Chapter 6. Human Rights

Where utilitarianism values interests held by individuals, Regan says we should value the individuals holding interests. Kant called this worth; Regan calls it inherent value. Inherent means belonging to the individual originally, rather than being conferred as a consequence of something. Value means the essence of moral equality itself, rather than a factual characteristic individuals share, such as wings or reasoning ability. (Singer rejects Regan’s receptacle analogy because individuals and interests are inseparable.)

Regan proposes the duty of respect as his theory’s central foundation: a direct duty to respect all beings with inherent value. Morally right actions respect them. Using such beings as means is wrong even for good ends.

He presents an actual case to illustrate the difference from utilitarianism. Starting in 1932, Tuskegee University received government support for a 40-year experiment on poor Black men with syphilis. To study what happens when syphilis goes untreated, researchers falsely promised free treatment but prescribed placebos. Many died, spouses became infected, and newborns were infected. (See Tuskegee Syphilis Study.)

Utilitarians would call the experiment immoral because it produced terrible consequences. The duty of respect calls it immoral independently of consequences, simply because subjects were used as tools.

Advantages of the duty of respect:

Unlike simple contractarianism, it does not discriminate.
Unlike the cruelty-kindness view, it distinguishes judging agents from judging actions.
Unlike utilitarianism, 1) it excludes “satisfaction of evil preferences” because it does not assess individuals’ preference satisfaction, and 2) it avoids sacrificing a minority for the majority’s benefit.

However, Singer points out in The Dog in the Lifeboat that refusing to sacrifice a minority for a majority can sometimes be a disadvantage: it may justify killing infinitely many dogs to save one human.

Returning to the book, Regan’s moral theory rests on two core ideas:

Individuals’ inherent value
The duty of respect

Claiming differences in inherent value between individuals leads to Aristotelian elitism. Aristotle, for example, considered women to have lower inherent value. Avoiding this discrimination requires recognizing equal inherent value.

The view that all individuals with inherent value are owed a direct duty of respect, and that their inherent value is equal, is called the rights view. Its rights satisfy the principal characteristics defined in Chapter 3: no trespassing, trump, equality, and justice. A rigorous proof is difficult, but this view can be said to have comparative advantages over others.

Which beings have inherent value?

Kant calls rational, autonomous humans “persons,” and says only persons have worth. Reason provides the capacity for critical choice; autonomy provides the freedom to choose. For Kant, responsibility and rights are reciprocal: only responsible persons have rights, and responsibility requires rights.

Regan identifies a weakness in Kant’s moral philosophy: fertilized eggs, embryos, fetuses, infants in their first few years, and comatose humans are not persons and therefore lack moral standing. This would not condemn cruel experiments on nonperson humans (as actually occurred at Willowbrook State Hospital).

Regan argues that “human” is too broad and “person” too narrow; a category somewhere between is needed. He calls it subject-of-a-life. All subjects-of-a-life are morally equal, possess inherent value, are owed the duty of respect, and have moral rights.

Before closing Chapter 6, Regan asks readers to recognize that human rights are his foremost concern and that his commitment to them exceeds his commitment to animal rights. The next chapter’s animal-rights argument should be assessed separately: any flaw there would not undermine this chapter’s human-rights argument.

Chapter 7. Animal Rights

People may disagree about four kinds of questions in controversial moral issues:

Questions of fact
Questions of value
Questions of logic
Questions of practice

This chapter considers these four questions for animal rights.

Questions of fact concern animal psychology. As discussed in Chapter 4, Regan says at least mammals and birds have preference and welfare interests, strongly supported by scientific evidence including behavioral, physiological, and anatomical similarities.
Questions of value concern nonhuman animals’ moral standing. Regan calls it speciesist to give moral standing to all humans and no animals. Human or animal, every subject-of-a-life has moral standing, and all subjects-of-a-life have equal inherent value.
Questions of logic concern whether conclusions follow validly from premises. Eight premises lead to two conclusions about animal rights. Every moral theory must 1) recognize direct duties to animals, 2) recognize the moral importance of nonhumans’ interests, 3) distinguish judging an agent’s character (cruelty or kindness) from judging actions, 4) recognize human rights, including the right to respect, 5) recognize the inherent value of humans who are not persons in Kant’s sense, 6) recognize nonhuman animals’ experiential welfare, 7) recognize that all beings with experiential welfare matter morally regardless of species, and 8) prefer theories recognizing the inherent value and rights of human subjects-of-a-life over those denying them. / Two conclusions follow: nonhuman animals also possess inherent value, and nonhuman animals also have equal moral rights.
Questions of practice concern the animal-rights movement’s goals. The rights view entails complete abolition of animal experimentation and commercial animal agriculture, rather than welfare improvements. (Regan says utilitarians advocate welfare improvements, but utilitarian Singer, like Regan, advocates complete abolition. —ak)

Finally, Regan says human–animal sex cannot presuppose mutual consent, fails to respect animals, and is therefore coercive and wrong. However pleasurable the consequences, an intrinsically wrong act remains wrong.

Chapter 8. Objections and Replies

Chapter 8 presents and answers objections in three categories: common, religious, and philosophical. I omit familiar ones such as “animals are not humans” or “why eat plants?” and select some interesting points.

Common objections:

Animals are not humans: omitted.
The idea that animals have rights is strange: omitted.
Do amoebas have rights too? Omitted.
What about plants? Omitted.
Animals do not understand rights: some humans with severe intellectual disabilities do not either, but still have rights.
Animals do not respect our rights: the same applies to some humans with severe intellectual disabilities; the rest is omitted.
Animals eat animals: carnivores must eat meat to survive, but humans can live without it.
We do not know the exact boundary between subjects-of-a-life and other beings: omitted.

Religious objections:

Animals have no souls: 1) lacking a soul is unrelated to lacking rights, and 2) even without an afterlife, there is no reason not to respect animals while alive.
God gave rights only to humans: nowhere does the Bible say God granted moral rights only to humans.
God told humans to dominate animals: Genesis does say this, but other interpretations are possible. Regan understands it as giving humans a moral responsibility to love and care for animals.

Philosophical objections, focusing on the best-known self-described proud speciesist, Carl Cohen:

Animals have no moral duties toward one another or humans, so humans have none toward animals: there is no logical basis to infer our lack of duties from theirs.
Only beings leading essentially moral lives have moral rights, and only humans do so: even accepting that humans lead essentially moral lives, we do not know that only humans do. (I do not understand this reply. Refuting the second objection need not require accepting that some animals may lead moral lives, and I do not know whether this response is useful. —ak)
Rights belong only to beings in the community that originated the concept, and only human communities did so: a concept’s origin is logically unrelated to its scope of application. Humans created the concept of genes, for instance, but are not the only beings with genes. (The reply itself seems valid, but I am unsure about the gene example. Rights are abstract concepts, while genes were not “invented”; existing physical entities were named. It seems odd to say there is no conceptual difference between these. —ak)

Chapter 9. Moral Philosophy and Change

According to the rights view, the world is much more evil than conventional standards suggest, including everyday industries such as food, fashion, and research. But Regan says not everyone with evil preferences, such as eating meat, is evil. Calling someone evil requires 1) habitual violation of others’ rights and 2) enjoyment of, or indifference to, the resulting suffering or loss. In this sense, most people are not evil.

(“Evil” feels much stronger than “immoral.” But wouldn’t most people count as evil by these two criteria—Regan’s own criteria? —ak)

Research suggests most people live comfortably despite recognizing inconsistencies or contradictions. Regan nevertheless suspects there is a threshold of tolerable contradiction. His own experiences in Chapter 1—the Vietnam War, studying Gandhi, and his dog’s death—suggest that once this threshold is crossed, change becomes inevitable. One purpose of this book is to make problems more visible and help people cross that threshold.

The “radical” social change required by the rights view demands many people’s imagination and dedicated effort, inevitably taking time and individual contributions. Individuals should do what they can, for example stopping meat consumption and consumption of animal products such as leather and fur.

Finally, he offers reasons for hope.

The U.S. fur industry served 17 million people annually in the 1980s, declining to 10 million in the 1990s and 4 million in the 2000s.
U.S. meat consumption is also declining.
American public attitudes toward animal rights are changing too.

For these reasons, Regan says the seeds of social change are slowly sprouting.