Tom Regan: Animal Rights as Natural Rights

Abstract

In his seminal work The Case for Animal Rights, justifiably regarded as a classic of the animal liberation movement, Tom Regan presents aforceful and, in someways, compelling account of why non-human animals should be regarded as making direct moral claims upon us. The reason, according to Regan, is that non-humans possess moral rights; and he presents an elegant and systematic theoretical underpinning for this claim. I think it is fair to regard Regan’s case as proceeding from within the framework of natural rights approaches to morality. This is for three reasons. Firstly, Regan argues that many kinds of non-human animals possess moral rights in virtue of their nature; in virtue of the fact that they are, as he puts it, subjects-of-a-life. Secondly, his argument appeals quite centrally to the concept of inherent value, viewed as an objective moral property which attaches to certain things, and which does so irrespective of whether those things happen to be valued or not. Thus, Regan views at least some non-human animals as possessors of moral rights which are objective in the sense that they do not depend on whether they are recognized as rights. Thirdly, these rights are logically prior to any contractual arrangement, since they stem from the nature of the individuals and not from the agreements such individuals might enter into.