Tom Regan Case For Animal Rights

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Animals have rights. It may be to some degree because of the traditional belief that animals only have instrumental value. According to Tom Regan’s essay Case for Animal Rights, all animals have moral value. If animals can feel pain, they should have moral consideration. This is the utilitarian view, which focuses on the suffering and/or pleasure of beings as morally valuable. Animal cruelty has been an issue for many years, and it has only gotten worse through technological advances and meat industries. Most people can agree that animals are not just mechanisms without feelings (which is what Descartes believed) and being cruel to animals/unnecessarily causing them pain or misery is wrong. But, unfortunately, it is also commonly believed that animals do not have moral status because they lack souls, strong family bonds, language, humanness and personhood. Scientifically-speaking, they may lack a few of those things, but so do some humans. Who are we to say that other animals do not have their own means of language/communication, family bonds, souls, etc. that they should be deemed as being instrumental value to us? If that is the case, humans who lack these capabilities should not have moral consideration either but because they are human, they do. …show more content…

We are not entitled to demean other living beings just because they are not like us. This is speciesism, which is discrimination against nonhuman animals just because of their species. This is just like racism and sexism. Many humans are guilty of specieism because they do not give moral consideration to other animals, just like many humans are guilty of being racists and sexists towards their own species. Humans are the most judgmental species on this

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