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The Abolitionist Positions in Animal Rights

2/4/2016

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I recently wrote an article about Gary Francione's Abolitionist Approach to Animal Rights and Tom Regan's Abolitionist Position of Animal Rights.

It has been published HERE by Animal Rights Zone, and HERE by VegFestUK.

This blog entry is to clarify why I wrote it. It is not part of a "personal vendetta" against Gary Francione, as someone suggested, but to put both of these abolitionist theorists into historical context. I do not regard this piece as attacking Francione at all. I am interested in social movement theory, and the history of social movements.

What really did it for me was "meeting" someone on FB who apparently knew nothing about Tom Regan, the author of The Case for Animal Rights in 1983 other than the controversial "lifeboat scenario" in which Regan says, in given circumstances, one million dogs should be thrown out of a crowded vessel to save a single human being.

The part of The Case where the lifeboat scenario is under discussion is when Regan is explaining how his "rights view" differs from both utilitarianism (Singer's) and a "perfectionist theory of justice." And he does indeed say that one million dogs may be thrown overboard. However, he makes it clear that this is based on assessments of pairs of individuals, one human and the dog, then a second human and the dog, and so on.

Regan does not spell it out clearly, but it's clear that the reverse but less likely circumstance may prevail with, as it were, a "normal" dog and human candidates who's situation means that they will be harmed less if they were killed rather than the dog.

Exactly why Regan remained somewhat unclear on this I don't know. However, in the article linked to above, when talking about Regan's subject-of-a-life criteria, I mentioned that Regan wrote in the early 1980s in a rather conservative way because the message of animal rights was so new and so very radical back then. To the extent that anyone reading this is faced by people suggesting that animal rights is "pie-in-the-sky," imagine what it was like to advance a rights-based animal rights position in the 1980s.

However, only two years later, 1985, Regan did clarify his position on the lifeboat in the New York Review of Books (April 1985). Regan writes


  • It would not be wrong to cast a million dogs overboard to save the four human survivors, assuming the lifeboat case were otherwise the same. But neither would it be wrong to cast a million humans overboard to save a canine survivor, if the harm death would be for the humans was, in each case, less than the harm death would be for the dog (emphasis added).

There are indeed some problems and issues with Regan's work - but fairness, respect, and knowledge of the history of the animal advocacy movement demands that Tom Regan is known for more than the lifeboat scenario, especially when critics seem to have forgotten that he would cast the humans overboard as much as the dogs in given circumstances.

Regan was a pioneer in establishing the rights-based animal rights position and we should never forget that and the debt we owe him. Here's some videos of Tom Regan, pioneer animal rights advocate.





4 Comments
RuaidhrĂ­
2/4/2016 05:12:11 pm

Regan's appearance on The Late Late Show in the late 90s was an embarrassment for Ireland - worth looking up on YouTube (in 4 different parts).

Reply
Tim Gier
2/5/2016 06:32:09 am

Regan's reasoning can be applied in other imagined scenarios and perhaps such applications can helpful in thinking about so-called lifeboat scenarios? For example, we may imagine the harm done to one million people by one million paper cuts and wonder whether, if we could miraculously prevent all that discomfort by allowing one other "normal" person to die, would we? Would all one million of those paper cuts add up to a greater harm than one death, making it better to prevent one million small harms by causing one great harm? As another example, we may imagine one million severely mentally and physically compromised human beings whose lives would be traded for one "normal" human being. Would all the harm in dying done to those million add up to less harm than that done to the one other? Before dismissing any of this as too fanciful, consider that it's often the case that, as a society or as a nation, "we" often trade some relatively few human deaths for the sake of the relatively trivially convenience of the masses (otherwise why would we accept the inevitable thousands of human deaths for the convenience of high speed motor car travel?) and we surely allow to die very, very many human beings when we haven't the resources to save every human being (there are those in catastrophic circumstances for whom care is withheld in favor of those on whom care would likely yield better and more lasting results). How many mothers choose to let a newborn die rather than go to extremes to prolong its life, when such extremes would come at the expense of her own health and happiness as well as that of her other "normal" children? Prof. Regan, because he is first and foremost a philosopher, understands the complexities of all this - that's why he's unwilling to offer a simple answer. Others, Francione for example, aren't not so concerned. Francione's solution is simple - there's no difference between a human child and a dog and should one to choose to save the child and sacrifice the dog, one's only defense is that one imagines that one knows something about the child that one doesn't about the dog, but in truth the choice is arbitrary. That is, on Francione's account there's no moral difference in letting a child or a dog die. Whatever one thinks of Regan's solution, at least he grapples seriously with the problem and doesn't offer simplistic (some would say stupid) non-solutions as other do.

Reply
imb-online.net link
6/15/2016 12:28:10 am

I do not regard this piece as attacking Francione at all. I am interested in social movement theory, and the history of social movements.

Reply
Rico
6/18/2016 06:33:03 pm

But doesn't Regan suggest that given you have normal humans and normal dogs (eg no one is has limited mental ability or is in excruciating pain), then humans always come out on top?

In the excerpt quoted, Tom doesn't even allow for the possibility that one or all of the humans might be serial murderers. All it comes down to in the excerpt is whether it would be less or more harm for the dog or human.

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    Roger Yates

    Dr. Roger Yates is a rights advocate and sociologist

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