Notes on Regan's "The Case For Animal Rights"

1. Do non-human animals have moral rights? In other words, do we have obligations to them such that we wrong them if we violate those obligations? Or is poor treatment of non-human animals wrong merely in the sense that it might be wrong e.g. to destroy the Grand Canyon (violating at most obligations to other people, but not to the thing itself)?

2. If non-human animals do have moral rights, what kind do they have? Rights against what? (Being killed? Having pain and suffering inflicted on them? Being used in any way that decreases the quality of their lives?)

3. If non-human animals have rights against cruel and inhumane treatment, especially in the absence of compelling reasons, do our current practices respect those rights?

• I'll show a short documentary on factory farming to put some of the facts into vivid perspective. To supplement the video, here's a short selection from Michael Pollan's article, "An Animal's Place" (The New York Times, 11/10/02). (Note: Pollan does not come at the issue from the perspective of an animal rights activist or a vegetarian; he is in fact an avid meat eater, who nonetheless finds grave problems with the industry.)

"From everything I've read, egg and hog operations are the worst. Beef cattle in America at least still live outdoors, albeit standing ankle deep in their own waste eating a diet that makes them sick. And broiler chickens, although they do get their beaks snipped off with a hot knife to keep them from cannibalizing one another under the stress of their confinement, at least don't spend their eight-week lives in cages too small to ever stretch a wing. That fate is reserved for the American laying hen, who passes her brief span piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage whose floor a single page of this magazine could carpet. Every natural instinct of this animal is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioral "vices" that can include cannibalizing her cagemates and rubbing her body against the wire mesh until it is featherless and bleeding. Pain? Suffering? Madness? The operative suspension of disbelief depends on more neutral descriptors, like "vices" and "stress." Whatever you want to call what's going on in those cages, the 10 percent or so of hens that can't bear it and simply die is built into the cost of production. And when the output of the others begins to ebb, the hens will be "force-molted" -- starved of food and water and light for several days in order to stimulate a final bout of egg laying before their life's work is done.

Simply reciting these facts, most of which are drawn from poultry-trade magazines, makes me sound like one of those animal people, doesn't it? I don't mean to, but this is what can happen when . . . you look. It certainly wasn't my intention to ruin anyone's breakfast. But now that I probably have spoiled the eggs, I do want to say one thing about the bacon, mention a single practice (by no means the worst) in modern hog production that points to the compound madness of an impeccable industrial logic.

Piglets in confinement operations are weaned from their mothers 10 days after birth (compared with 13 weeks in nature) because they gain weight faster on their hormone- and antibiotic-fortified feed. This premature weaning leaves the pigs with a lifelong craving to suck and chew, a desire they gratify in confinement by biting the tail of the animal in front of them. A normal pig would fight off his molester, but a demoralized pig has stopped caring. "Learned helplessness" is the psychological term, and it's not uncommon in confinement operations, where tens of thousands of hogs spend their entire lives ignorant of sunshine or earth or straw, crowded together beneath a metal roof upon metal slats suspended over a manure pit. So it's not surprising that an animal as sensitive and intelligent as a pig would get depressed, and a depressed pig will allow his tail to be chewed on to the point of infection. Sick pigs, being underperforming "production units," are clubbed to death on the spot. The U.S.D.A.'s recommended solution to the problem is called "tail docking." Using a pair of pliers (and no anesthetic), most but not all of the tail is snipped off. Why the little stump? Because the whole point of the exercise is not to remove the object of tail-biting so much as to render it more sensitive. Now, a bite on the tail is so painful that even the most demoralized pig will mount a struggle to avoid it.

Much of this description is drawn from "Dominion," Matthew Scully's recent book in which he offers a harrowing description of a North Carolina hog operation. Scully, a Christian conservative, has no patience for lefty rights talk, arguing instead that while God did give man "dominion" over animals ("Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you"), he also admonished us to show them mercy. "We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality but . . . because they stand unequal and powerless before us."

Scully calls the contemporary factory farm "our own worst nightmare" and, to his credit, doesn't shrink from naming the root cause of this evil: unfettered capitalism. (Perhaps this explains why he resigned from the Bush administration just before his book's publication.) A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency and the moral imperatives of religion or community, which have historically served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is one of "the cultural contradictions of capitalism" -- the tendency of the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward animals is one such casualty.

More than any other institution, the American industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism can look like in the absence of moral or regulatory constraint. Here in these places life itself is redefined -- as protein production -- and with it suffering. That venerable word becomes "stress," an economic problem in search of a cost-effective solution, like tail-docking or beak-clipping or, in the industry's latest plan, by simply engineering the "stress gene" out of pigs and chickens. "Our own worst nightmare" such a place may well be; it is also real life for the billions of animals unlucky enough to have been born beneath these grim steel roofs, into the brief, pitiless life of a "production unit" in the days before the suffering gene was found."

4. Is the treatment of the animals in the film (or as described above) morally justified? What kind of attitude does it express toward other forms of sentient life on our planet, and is that a morally appropriate attitude to take? Are we indirectly supporting that attitude and treatment as consumers?

5. Into what category did Kant apparently place non-rational animals?

6. Regan's View: Extension of Kant's idea of ends-in-themselves to a broad range of non-human animals. What matters for having intrinsic value and being an end-in-yourself with a full right to life and respect, according to Regan, is not being a rational being, but being "an experiencing subject of a life, a conscious creature having an individual welfare that has importance to [it] whatever [its] usefulness to others."

7. Does this go too far in the right direction? An alternative suggestion: Perhaps we should add a third category to Kant's two categories: There are (1) mere things (with no intrinsic value), (2) full-blown ends-in-themselves (with both intrinsic value and all the dignity and rights appropriate to an autonomous being capable of designing and freely pursuing its own reasoned conception of a good life--such as the right to be left alone and to make one's own decisions), and (3) "morally significant beings" (which are more than mere things, since they possess intrinsic value and rights against inhumane treatment, but less than ends-in-themselves, since they don't possess genuine autonomy). We might place animals in the third category, which would be a moderate position. (Question: Don't we need even further refinements to deal with children? Surely they possess full moral status as persons, yet they are not yet autonomous, and certain kinds of paternalism are appropriate when dealing with children, which are not appropriate when dealing with adults.)

8. Regan's Conclusions: Since Regan takes the view in 6 rather than the one in 7, he concludes that morality demands (1) the total abolition of the use of animals in scientific research—just as we refuse to allow humans to be forcibly used for research; (2) the total dissolution of commercial animal agriculture; and (3) the total elimination of commercial and sport hunting and trapping.

9. In fact, Regan argues that all animals that are "experiencing subjects of a life" have an equal inherent value (i.e. equal to ours) and an equal right to life. To think otherwise, he thinks, is mere "speciesism".

10. Regan's Central Argument: The Argument from Marginal Cases

(1) A being's moral status (the kind of value and moral rights it possesses) depends on its own properties, such as its mental capacities.

(2) But mentally deficient humans (e.g. the severely retarded, the senile) have the same inherent value as normal humans, and so equally possess a full right to life.

(3) Therefore, what matters for possessing full inherent value and a full right to life must not be the possession of normal human mental faculties, but instead the possession of some set of properties that are common to all humans with full inherent value and rights.

(4) The only plausible candidate for this set of properties is this: being "the experiencing subject of a life, a conscious creature having an individual welfare that has importance to [it] whatever [its] usefulness to others."

(5) But many non-human animals satisfy this criterion no less than these deficient humans. E.g. a normal chimp may possess far greater intelligence and emotional capacity than a severely retarded child or an Alzheimer's victim, and is at least as much of an experiencing subject of a life.

(6) Therefore, given 1, 2 and 5, many non-human animals--in fact, all who count as "experiencing subjects of a life"--have the same, full inherent value and basic natural rights as human beings.

11. If you reject the conclusion, then which premise of the argument do you reject, and why? If you can't find a premise to reject, then you'll be stuck with the conclusion. I'll discuss the premise I myself reject in lecture, and why, either this time or next.