QuestionsDo animals matter as much as we do?The subject-of-a-life: animals have rights, not just interests
Do animals matter as much as we do?They have rights

The subject-of-a-life: animals have rights, not just interests

Animal rights; subject-of-a-life; inherent value

Tom Regan 1938 · 2017An animal whose life matters to it is a subject-of-a-life: it has rights, and it cannot be used as a resource.
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What it claims

These uses of animals violate their right to respect: they are morally wrong and must end, not just be reformed.

Why

Animals who are subjects of a life have a value of their own and must never be treated as mere resources.

The same idea through history
Immanuel Kant1785Kant: humanity must never be treated merely as a means, but always also as an end. Regan keeps the idea but parts company with Kant on who benefits: not only beings capable of morality, but all subjects-of-a-life, including young children and animals.
Tom Regan1983In The Case for Animal Rights, Regan examines the moral theories that deny rights to animals (indirect duties, cruelty and kindness, utilitarianism) and argues the rights view is the best. The book made him the leading philosopher of animal rights.
Tom Regan1985A shorter text of the same title, in the collection In Defense of Animals edited by Singer, for a wider readership.
In short

"The subject-of-a-life: animals have rights, not just interests" is an argument by Tom Regan (Regan, "The Case for Animal Rights", 1985; The Case for Animal Rights, 1983, 1983) on the question "Do animals matter as much as we do?" (answer: they have rights). Its claim: These uses of animals violate their right to respect: they are morally wrong and must end, not just be reformed. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 4 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Regan, "The Case for Animal Rights", 1985; The Case for Animal Rights, 1983
Valid with an implicit premise

Peter Singer asks us to count animals' suffering. Tom Regan goes further, and in a different way. He thinks weighing pleasures and pains is not enough, because a calculation can always be found to justify sacrificing someone. He looks at what an animal is: many mammals see, hear, believe, desire, remember, anticipate, and what happens to them matters to them. Regan calls them "subjects-of-a-life". A subject-of-a-life is not a container of pleasure: it is an individual with a value in itself, the same as any other subject-of-a-life, and it may not be treated as a mere means for the benefit of others. He concludes that farming should not be made gentler: it should be ended.

P1Some animals are subjects-of-a-life: they have senses, beliefs, desires, memory, a sense of the future, emotions, and what happens to them matters to them. As a cautious policy, Regan draws the line at mentally normal mammals of a year or more, leaving open the question of birds and fish.
P2All subjects-of-a-life have inherent value, and the same value: it does not depend on their usefulness, talent, happiness or merit, and it does not come in degrees.
P3What has inherent value has the right to be treated with respect: it must never be treated as a mere resource for others, and harm done to one cannot be justified by adding up the benefits to several.
P4 · implicit premiseFarming for meat, hunting for sport, experimentation, fur and shows treat animals as resources for humans, and harm them by confining, injuring or killing them.
P5A practice that consists in treating subjects-of-a-life as resources cannot be fixed by making it gentler, for example with larger cages or "happy" cows: it violates the right by its nature, so it must be abolished.
So these uses of animals violate their right to respect: they are morally wrong and must end, not just be reformed.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world where animals have rights but our current practices do not treat them as resources: there would then be nothing to abolish.
Valid with P4. If some animals are subjects-of-a-life (P1), they have inherent value (P2). P3 says treating someone with this value as a resource violates their right; P4 says these practices do so; P5 says such a violation, by its nature, calls for abolition.
Analogy.

Objections

4

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

J
Jan Narveson 1987 · attacks premise 3

Summary: Narveson defends contractualism. Rights arise from an agreement among rational beings, who promise to respect each other's interests because each gains by it. An animal cannot make an agreement or keep its rules: it therefore has no rights, and we do not owe it what Regan demands. One may be kind to animals out of sympathy, but this is not a duty of justice. Narveson calls Regan a "starry eyed radical".

a defender replies
Regan did reply, but that text is not yet in our corpus.
Tom Regan defender of the argument · 1983
Summary: Regan replies in his book (chapters 5 to 7) that theories denying rights to animals are unsatisfactory: inconsistent, needlessly complicated, or at odds with our best-considered moral judgements. He holds that humans without moral capacity (young children, people with severe disabilities) have the same right to respect as others. In his view a theory that reserves rights to those who can enter an agreement struggles to account for this, and the right must also go to animals who resemble them on this point.
Peter Carruthers 1992
Summary: Carruthers defends a version of contractualism and holds that humans without reason remain protected indirectly: because contractors care for their children and loved ones, and because abandoning the weakest would weaken everyone's protection. This protection does not apply to animals: it does not come from a right they would have, so it need not extend to them.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: the basic disagreement is about where rights come from. For contractualists they come from an agreement among rational beings, so humans without reason are protected indirectly. For Regan they come from the individual's value, so they extend to animals who resemble those humans. Each camp charges the other with an arbitrary test.
Peter Singer (1974 position) 1974 · attacks premise 3

Singer holds that we do not need rights to condemn what we do to animals. It is enough to count their interests: raising and killing animals for the pleasure of eating them sacrifices their most important interests to our most trivial ones. This position, set out before Regan's book, makes rights unnecessary in practice, in his view.

Regan replies
Regan did reply, but that text is not yet in our corpus.
Tom Regan 2004
Regan calls himself "anti-utilitarian". For him, harm to an individual cannot be justified by adding up the benefits to others, which is exactly what the calculation does. Reforming farming ("happy" cows) is therefore not enough: "abolition is required".
Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: in practice the two authors want an end to factory farming, but differ on borderline cases. For Singer, a sacrifice can be justified if the gain is very large and certain. For Regan, never, because the individual must not serve as a means.
R
R. G. Frey 1987 · attacks premise 2

Frey disputes that all lives have the same value. In his view, the value of a life depends on its quality, its richness, its possibilities. A severely disabled human, or one deeply affected by dementia, leads a less rich life than a normal adult, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise.

Regan replies
Regan did reply, but that text is not yet in our corpus.
Tom Regan 2004
Regan replies that Frey confuses two things: an individual's quality of life, which can vary greatly, and that individual's inherent value, which does not. He agrees that some lives are richer than others. But the value of the one who lives is not the value of the life. Disabled subjects-of-a-life have a life of lower quality, but not a lower inherent value.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: the disagreement is about the value of a being. For Frey it depends on what the life contains. For Regan it does not depend on such degrees, or the equality of humans could no longer be defended. The question remains why an all-or-nothing value should be granted to subjects-of-a-life and not to less.
Peter Singer 1985 · attacks the conclusion

Singer charges Regan with an inconsistency, using the lifeboat case. In a lifeboat with too little room, Regan accepts throwing a dog overboard rather than a human. Then, says Singer, he should also accept experimenting on a diseased dog to save humans suffering from the same illness. And if he accepts it in that case, he can no longer oppose all animal experimentation.

Regan replies
We have not yet found a direct reply by Regan in the texts.
Tom Regan 2004
Regan replies that the lifeboat and the laboratory are not comparable. In the lifeboat, none of the survivors is there because his or her rights were violated or because of a lack of respect. In a laboratory, on the contrary, as soon as a single animal is brought in to serve humans, its right to respect has already been violated. It is therefore not inconsistent to accept the lifeboat and refuse all vivisection.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: Regan admits that in an emergency where everyone is equally innocent, a human may come before a dog. He sees this as an exception of distress, not a rule. For Singer, the fact that such a choice can be made shows that values can be compared, so the scales are back. A disputed point.