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Tom Regan on the Animal-Rights Movement

Animal Ethics

The animal rights movement is not for the faint of heart. How we change the dominant misconception of animals—indeed, whether we change it—is to a large extent a political question. To overcome the collective entropy of these forces-against-change will not be easy.

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Tom Regan on Utilitarianism

Animal Ethics

Because animals are sentient (i.e., can experience pleasure and pain) and because they not only have but can act on their preferences, any view that holds that pleasures or pains, or preference-satisfactions or frustrations matter morally is bound to seem attractive to those in search of the moral basis for the animal rights movement.

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Tom Regan on the Use of Animals in Science

Animal Ethics

There are also some things we cannot learn by using humans, if we respect their rights. The rights view merely requires moral consistency in this regard. ( Tom Regan , The Case for Animal Rights , updated with a new preface [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004], 388 [first edition published in 1983])

Science 40
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Tom Regan on Wild Animals

Animal Ethics

halting the destruction of natural habitat and closer surveillance of poaching, with much stiffer fines and longer prison sentences), the rights view sanctions this intervention, assuming that those humans involved are treated with the respect they are due. Too little is not enough. (

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Tom Regan on Human Chauvinism

Animal Ethics

With the argument of the present chapter serving as the backdrop, the conclusion we reach is that to deny consciousness or a mental life to mammalian animals is an expression of human chauvinism. (

Humane 40
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Tom Regan on Endangered Species

Animal Ethics

The mere size of the relative population of the species to which a given animal belongs makes no moral difference to the grounds for attributing rights to that individual animal or to the basis for determining when that animal's rights may be justifiably overridden or protected. (

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Tom Regan on Kant's View of Animals

Animal Ethics

Tom Regan , The Case for Animal Rights , updated with a new preface [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004], 174-5 [italics in original; ellipsis added; endnote omitted] [first edition published in 1983]) Moral agents are not nonrational, do not have "only a relative value," and are not things.