Tom Regan: Animals Have Rights?

Question

Tom Regan writes,"Routine use of animals in research assumes that their value is reducible to their possible utility relative to the interests of others." What is the point he is trying to make and his position on our treatment of animals?

Answer 1

The point he is making is that the use of animals for reasearch reduces the animal to the equivalent of an inanimate object -- just a "thing" rather than a living creature.

A "thing" has no value other than the value which it has in terms of being useful to people. A hammer sitting out on the ground has no value unless someone needs a hammer. If no-one ever needs to drive a nail, there is no need to have the hammer at all. If you are cold you might as well burn the hammer since then it would be doing something for you. Even something you might think of as being extremely valuable, such as a half-million-dollar sports car, has no value unless someone wants it for some purpose -- if nobody wanted to drive it or look at it, it would not be valued at all, and it would be better to destroy it and make needed usefull items out of the parts.

The value which human beings place on human life in civilised societies is different however. We assume that a human life has value even if that person is doing NOTHING for us or is INCONVENIENT for us personally. The homeless guy down the street may not be doing anything for me personally, he may even be annoying because he sleeps on the sidewalk and pees on the side of my shop, but he is STILL a human being and has value because of it. This was in fact the crux of the issues of slave-holding and naziism: those outlooks held that certain people did not have intrinsic value but only had value as slave labor. It is also at the heart of the modern debate over abortion, whether or not an unborn baby has inherent value as a human being that must be protected, or is simply a "thing" which can be kept or destroyed at the will of the mother.

This is also the real center of the argument over animal testing -- whether animals have no value beyond their utilitarian value (the extreme traditional or "speciesist" view), have absulute value as living creatures equal to that of humans if not possibly even greater than that (the extreme animal-rights view), or somewhere in between such that it is morally acceptable to use animals in ways intended to reduce the overall suffering of humans and other animals, but that the welfare of the animals used must be protected as much as is reasonably possible (the "humane" view).

Tom Regan's position then is this: IF we are routinely performing experiments, product testing, and so on using animals, THEN we must be looking at these animals only as "things" with no value beyond that of what they can do for us. He is declaring that if we truly felt that animals had any intrinsic value as living creatures, we could not morally use them in this way -- it would be equivalent to the use of slave labor where the slave's only value is what can he produce or do FOR US. That the animals must have been totally devalued by us in order for us to use them in such a way.