The Value of the Experiencing Subject in Tom Regan’s “The Case for Animal Rights”
In his essay “The Case for Animal Rights,” Tom Regan begins with a specific list of real world political demands: the abolition of animal testing, commercial animal agriculture, and the hunting and trapping of animals for commercial and recreational purposes. These political demands motivate the rest of the essay. When trying to find a basis for the ethical consideration of animals, it is in order to find an ethical framework that can take on the entire system that allows for these abuses to occur. He takes issue with animal rights activists who criticize large scale industrial animal agriculture but not traditional, small-scale animal agriculture. Such activists, he argues, do not address the true fundamental wrong that is committed when animals are used in agriculture: the treatment of animals as resources. He also criticizes various other perspectives on animal rights, such as the cruelty-kindness view, contractarianism, and utilitarianism, due to the fact that they fail to adequately take into account the interests and experiences of animals, and in fact often also fail to do so for human beings. Regan argues that an animal ethics needs to assign animals inherent value in that they are “the experiencing subjects of a life” (148). With this as the basis of acknowledging animals’ rights, it becomes imperative that they are viewed as equal because while they may not be our equals in terms of language, reason, or cognitive faculties, they are undeniably our equals. This “rights view,” as he calls it, would not settle for more “humane” treatment of animals in agriculture or testing, such as nicer cages or practices that are less painful. It would instead be outright abolitionist of all animal use in agriculture and science on the basis of its treatment of animals as resources instead of fellow subjects experiencing a life.
Regan’s chief strength is that he pioneers an animal ethics that overcomes the problems found in Singer’s. Regan in fact directly addresses Singer. Singer’s animal ethics, according to Regan, only values animals, and even people, in so far as they suffer. That which suffers is not what is ethically considered, only the suffering itself. Regan makes the analogy to a cup that can hold either sweet liquid or bitter liquid. Singer’s ethical framework, according to Regan, would only value the liquid in the cup, prioritizing sweetness over bitterness, all the while the cup itself is not considered inherently valuable (146). Animals and people cannot have equal value under such a framework because they cannot have value at all; only their suffering and pleasure can. Regan also criticizes Singer’s utilitarianism more broadly, taking aim at how under utilitarianism, due to its singular focus on consequences, allows for horrible actions to be performed for the sake of supposedly good ends. In doing so, Regan successfully pioneers an animal ethics that condemns the same practices that Singer condemns, animal agriculture and testing, but finds a more sound philosophical grounding for doing so, one that appreciates the full subjective experience of beings and doesn’t justify horrible actions.
One possible problem with Regan’s argument is that his notion of an experiencing subject of a life, while endearing, wants elaboration. The following is the closest he gives to a definition of this concept:
“We are each of us the experiencing subject of a life, a conscious creature having an individual welfare that has importance to us whatever our usefulness to others. We want and prefer things, believe and feel things, recall and expect things. And all these dimensions of our life, including our pleasure and pain, our enjoyment and suffering, our satisfaction and frustration, our continued existence or our untimely death-all make a difference to tr’1e quality of our life as lived, as experienced, by us as individuals.” (148)
If the examples he lists, such as expecting, recalling, believing, are meant to constitute experience, then one could easily doubt, or at least question, whether animals, or at least certain animals, really are capable of experience. Experience is already a word with a lot of baggage in the history of philosophy. For example in Kantian philosophy experience implies the presence of certain faculties in thought that make experience possible. It seems unlikely that animals would be capable of having such things, or at least we would have no way of knowing that they did. Under such a framework, it would be questionable whether animals would be capable of subjective experience at all. Even if we granted that some animals did have the faculties necessary to have experience, it still would not necessarily follow that all of them did. This would not matter at all had Regan given a firm definition of what he meant as “subject” and “experience.” As is, however, Regan’s argument leans heavily on two terms with very contentious histories without specifying what is meant by them. They are meant to be taken as a simple and fundamental grounding but become very complicated once interrogated. If this ethical standard is meant to be foundational, unambiguous, and applicable to all animals, then it must be more clearly defined, especially when it is relying on concepts that are so historically problematic.
Word Count: 847
Work Cited
Regan, Tom. “The Case for Animal Rights,” The Environmental Ethics and Policy Book: Philosophy, Ecology, Economics, Edited by Donald VamDeVeer, Thomson Wadsworth, 1994, pp. 143–149
