Tom Regan and Animal Rights — The Deontological Case

What it is

While Peter Singer makes the case for animal consideration on utilitarian grounds — what matters is the balance of suffering and well-being — Tom Regan (1938–2017) argued that animals have rights in a much stronger sense: they are beings with inherent value, and this value cannot be traded off against the interests of others, human or animal. Regan's The Case for Animal Rights (1983) is the other great foundational text of modern animal ethics, and its disagreements with Singer reflect a genuine and important difference in ethical framework.

History & domestication

Regan was Professor of Philosophy at North Carolina State University for most of his career. He came to animal rights philosophy through a combination of personal experience (he describes becoming vegetarian after reading Gandhi and coming to see the consistency between his own moral commitments and a refusal to participate in animal exploitation) and sustained philosophical engagement with the major traditions of ethics. His The Case for Animal Rights is a work of serious technical philosophy — dense, careful, and long — and it engages meticulously with the history of ethical theory, from Kant to Singer, before arriving at its own conclusions.

Cultural significance

Regan's work has been particularly influential in the more radical wing of animal advocacy, including those who argue for the complete abolition of all forms of animal agriculture and experimentation rather than incremental welfare reform. His insistence that reform is not enough — that the problem is not how animals are treated but that they are treated as property and resources at all — has been taken up by "abolitionist" animal rights organizations and activists.

The specific responses

Roger Scruton, the conservative philosopher, offered one of the most interesting responses to the animal rights tradition. Scruton (1944–2020) argued that animal rights advocates had fundamentally misunderstood the nature of rights: rights arise from and within communities of mutual obligation, and only beings capable of entering into such communities — capable of bearing duties as well as rights — can be genuine rights-bearers. Animals, on Scruton's view, cannot have rights because they cannot have duties; they exist outside the moral community in which rights make sense. Scruton was not dismissive of animal welfare — he explicitly condemned cruelty and factory farming — but he grounded the obligation to treat animals well in virtues (human kindness, proper stewardship of creation) rather than in animal rights.

Ethical dimensions

Regan's key concept is the "subject of a life." A being is a subject of a life if it has: - Beliefs and desires - Perception, memory, and a sense of its own future - An emotional life including feelings of pleasure and pain - Preference and welfare interests - The ability to initiate action in pursuit of its goals - A psychophysical identity over time - An individual welfare that can go better or worse

Regan argues that all mammals of at least one year of age satisfy these criteria, and probably most birds and some fish do as well. Beings who are subjects of a life have inherent value — a kind of moral worth that does not depend on their usefulness to anyone else, that cannot be aggregated or traded off, and that entails rights: specifically, the right not to be used merely as a means to others' ends.

This is a Kantian move: Regan is taking Kant's principle that rational beings must be treated as ends in themselves, never merely as means, and extending it to animals on the grounds that the morally relevant characteristic is not rationality narrowly construed but being a subject of a life. The move from "rational being" to "subject of a life" is what allows animals in.

The disagreement with Singer

Regan and Singer agree on many practical conclusions — both oppose factory farming, both believe animals deserve moral consideration far beyond what most contemporary societies give them — but they disagree fundamentally on the underlying ethical framework, and these disagreements matter.

Singer's utilitarian framework is consequentialist: what matters is outcomes, particularly the balance of well-being and suffering. This means that in principle, animal interests can be traded off against human interests if the calculus works out. If eating an animal would produce a sufficiently great benefit for a sufficiently large number of people, it might be justified. Singer himself does not think this calculation generally works out in favor of eating factory-farmed animals, but the framework allows for it in principle.

Regan's rights-based framework is deontological: rights are not traded off. If an animal has a right not to be used merely as a means, that right cannot be overridden by the fact that using it would benefit many people. Regan is explicit: "the rights view... does not... morally allow us to harm the innocent individual merely because doing so would produce the best aggregate consequences." This is the position known as an "absolute" rights view, and it leads to more radical practical conclusions than Singer's: not reform of animal agriculture but its complete abolition, because no use of animals as mere means — however humanely conducted — is compatible with respecting their rights.

The Regan-Singer debate is the central debate in contemporary academic animal ethics, and it maps onto a much older debate in general ethics: are there moral constraints that cannot be overridden by good consequences (deontology), or is the right action always the one that produces the best overall outcome (consequentialism)? The specific question of animal ethics makes this abstract debate concrete and practically significant in a way that other debates often do not.

The future

Regan's rights framework remains influential, particularly in abolitionist animal advocacy. The practical question of how to achieve the radical reduction in animal use that both Singer and Regan advocate — through incremental reform, through technological innovation (cell-cultivated meat), through education and cultural change, or through some combination — is the most important open question in the field.

Reference notes

Cross-link to: Peter Singer and Animal Liberation, Abolitionism in Animal Ethics, Roger Scruton on Animal Welfare, Factory Farming, The Case for Animal Rights (book entry). Tags: Philosophy > Modern, Ethics > Rights-Based.

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