Philosopher Tom Regan's The Case For Animal Rights

The Case for Animal Right

Recently, some philosophers began to take action on fighting for animal rights. One of them, philosopher Tom Regan, is well-known for his animal rights theories. In his book The Case for Animal Rights, Regan argues that animals should have their rights, and we should not allow speciesism to happen anymore. By using the term inherent value, which is referring to experiencing subject of a life, Regan starts his argument by saying that all of us, despite being human or non-human animals, have equal inherent value, which provides the basis for rights claims, yet inherent value and rights require equal respect. Thus, animals are deserving of equal respect. With this conclusion, he makes a movement to fight for the total

His first premise is that all of us, human and non-human animals, have equal inherent value. According to Regan, all human beings, regardless of sex, race, religion, birthplace, etc., altogether have inherent value, possess it equally, and have an equal right to be treated with respect. He states that we should not limit this inherent value only to human, but to non-human animals as well even though animals lack many abilities that humans possess; for examples, they are not able to read, to use technology, to write a philosophy paper. In this case, the fact is that some humans, such as feral children and people with mental disabilities, are also incapable of performing these acts, yet we should never say that they have less inherent values than the others. That is, we should apply the similar condition to animals, which implies that humans and animals, both of who experience the subject of life, have inherent value. As a consequence, this indication leads to the next part of his argument for animal

Nevertheless, his argument has some weak points. In this section, I will present my strongest objection to his argument, that humans and animals need to follow the social contract altogether in order to have rights claims, in response to the second premise that equal inherent value provides the basis for rights claims. In fact, a right claim requires responsibilities, duties, and obligations of the parties that take part in the event of the rights claim. As a result, if we apply the same basis for rights claims to animals, they should also hold responsibilities for these right claims, which is impossible in this case. Let’s see an example, if we don’t “touch” animal at all, I wonder whether all of them will act the same with us or not. The answer is obvious, that we still have to avoid the carnivores. Therefore, my points show that this premise is weak, which leads to the invalidation of the conclusion that animals are deserving of equal