汤姆·雷根

立场

“The Case for Animal Rights” is the classic statement of a rights-based, as opposed to utilitarian, animal ethics. Utilitarians such as Singer argue that animal suffering counts equally in the sum of good and bad consequences; Regan objected that this treats individuals as mere receptacles of value, who could be sacrificed whenever the totals came out better. Instead, every being that is the “subject-of-a-life” – that has beliefs and desires, perception and memory, a sense of its own future, an emotional life and a welfare that matters to it – has inherent value, and inherent value is equal: one either has it or not. Such beings have a right to be treated with respect, never merely as means to the ends of others. Regan thus extended Kant’s principle of respect to animals, against Kant’s own view that we have only indirect duties concerning them. His conclusion is abolitionist – “not larger cages, empty cages”: an end to animal agriculture, to animal experimentation and to commercial and sport hunting.

生平与背景

Tom Regan (1938–2017) was born in Pittsburgh, studied at Thiel College and took his doctorate at the University of Virginia in 1966. From 1967 he taught at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where he headed the department of philosophy and religion in the late 1990s and became professor emeritus on his retirement in 2002. Besides moral philosophy in general he wrote on G. E. Moore; from the 1970s the moral status of animals became his central theme, and in 1976 he co-edited an influential anthology with Peter Singer. With his wife Nancy he founded the Culture & Animals Foundation in 1985, and he remained active in the animal-rights movement until his death in Raleigh.

主要作品

• Animal Rights and Human Obligations (ed. with Peter Singer, 1976)
• All That Dwell Therein (1982)
• The Case for Animal Rights (1983)
• Bloomsbury’s Prophet (1986)
• Empty Cages (2004)

出现在

• 争论 ‘动物与工厂化养殖’
• 争论 ‘动物有权利吗？’
• 争论 ‘动物实验’