This blog post is my final project for my philosophy class

I hope my readership will forgive this departure from the sort of thing I usually write about. I read two books about animal rights and animal welfare, Animal Liberation Now by Peter Singer and The Case for Animal Rights by Tom Regan, and I am going to compare them because Peter Singer is a utilitarian and Tom Regan was, as far as I can tell, not really a Kantian but at least a deontologist. 

Animal Liberation Now by Peter Singer

⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Case for Animal Rights by Tom Regan

⭐⭐

I can see that The Case for Animal Rights has a purpose and I'm not upset that it exists, but Animal Liberation Now is definitely a better book from every perspective unless you are very erudite. I think Peter Singer's book is really successful in presenting the subject matter to an audience that might not have thought about it very much (or might have some subconscious resistance to veganism because no one likes being made to feel guilty about their choices). However, his book is not very philosophy-heavy; the first chapter establishes that it is morally correct to look after animals' interests. He quotes the Jeremy Bentham quote (everyone uses this quote; Tom Regan quotes Jeremy Bentham, also) (I like Jeremy Bentham because once I was assigned to present on him in high school and talk about how he impacted Western civilization, and I did talk about utilitarianism, but only for one slide because I apparently didn't think it was very important, and then I talked for 15 minutes about his ideas for English legal reform, and I would still defend that choice because English legal reform is more interesting than utilitarianism) about how it's not important from a moral perspective whether animals can think or reason, but whether they can suffer. Peter Singer (being a utilitarian) is also concerned about animals because he is interested in maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering—although, more specifically, he speaks of our moral duty to look after interests rather than speaking of pain and pleasure, although the interests necessarily are interests in avoiding suffering and experiencing happiness. He also establishes in this chapter that animals are sentient and have feelings, and I appreciate that he only takes one chapter to establish this, because Tom Regan takes three.   

The next two chapters discuss animal abuse in lab research and the meat, dairy, and egg industries. These chapters are very well-researched without being gratuitous or preachy, and I think they are especially helpful for the average reader because many people don't know about the extent of animal abuse that occurs to create the products and food we buy. The fourth chapter discusses vegetarianism and veganism (as well as a conscientious omnivorous diet, which Peter Singer is not entirely opposed to). The fifth chapter goes over the history of philosophical thought as it pertains to animals, and the sixth chapter counters common arguments against Singer's position. 

I would not recommend Tom Regan's book to any layperson, although I can see how some philosophers might find it really interesting. I don't think anyone has ever read this book and become a vegetarian or a vegan because it doesn't even talk about vegetarianism or veganism until chapter 9; the first three chapters establish that animals have feelings, and the next five chapters establish that we should respect other people's rights to be treated respectfully. I personally gained almost nothing from this because I agree that animals have feelings and that entities with feelings deserve treatment respectful of their inherent worth, and the only people who would actually not be persuaded if Tom Regan made fewer or more concise arguments are so erudite and nitpicky I don't think I would want to talk to them. 

A major relevant difference between Tom Regan and Peter Singer is that Tom Regan thinks animals have rights, and Peter Singer does not. Utilitarians generally do not believe in rights; at least, not as a thing that actually exists. Rights are a legal construct meant to encourage people to act in such a way that maximizes utility. For example, if I have a right to free speech, this is not because I was born with this right, and it does not mean that I am inherently entitled to it; it means that my life will be more pleasant if everyone acts like this right exists. On the other hand, Tom Regan believes that individuals who are subjects of a life—that is, they have feelings and preferences and interests—have certain rights inherently and should not be harmed for no reason. I am summarizing and leaving out a lot of details, but the details are basically not relevant to his conclusion that the way we treat animals is wrong. Moreover, he thinks utilitarianism is problematic because it treats beings as receptacles for utility (or preferences, because this is how Peter Singer speaks). If one wants to maximize utility (or fulfilled preferences), that means it would be permissible to kill one individual if it brought about a happier individual (when I read this in The Case for Animal Rights, I thought it was a stupid hypothetical, but I guess you could think of a couple that can only afford to have one kid, and they have a kid, and the kid has depression; could they kill that kid and have another kid who doesn't have depression? Obviously most people would not approve of this). Tom Regan is really hung up on the idea that utilitarians can justify killing people in secret (as long as no one else cares), but utilitarians don't actually kill people in secret, so I don't understand why he's so concerned. 

I guess if utilitarians are killing people in secret, I wouldn't know about it, because it's a secret. But they wouldn't necessarily be successful all the time at keeping it a secret. So, either utilitarians are really really good at killing people in secret, or they don't do it.  

For the most part, I like Tom Regan's conclusions a lot, and I think his theory of moral philosophy is extremely practical, but considering how exhaustive his line of reasoning is, I don't think it's very good. He brings up every competing theory (for instance, we have an indirect duty to animals, or rational egoism, or utilitarianism) and explains in detail what else that theory implies and why it is wrong, but he tends to fall back on the argument that other theories imply things that conflict with our intuition of right and wrong. "This feels wrong" is not a bad argument exactly, but it's very anticlimactic for how exhaustingly exhaustive he is. "This feels wrong" is the kind of argument I would use in a debate, because if the other person disagreed and had completely different moral intuitions, I would just conclude that there's no point talking to them (or they are being intellectually dishonest). Ultimately, I agree that his argument is compelling, but I also think it illustrates that morality is manmade because he can't actually explain in a convincing way how or why these rights exist. I don't really think objective morality exists; rather, I think moral philosophy is actually just a representation of what actions feel right or wrong to us. If Tom Regan is going to maintain that "this feels wrong" is a good argument that something is morally wrong, he should also acknowledge that objective morality doesn't actually exist, but he doesn't, and he's also no longer alive. 

Tom Regan's perspective is also more appealing than Peter Singer's perspective because the rights view allows us to easily conclude that killing an animal for food is wrong even if that animal was not abused, since the animal has inherent value and cannot just be treated as a vessel for good or bad experiences. Peter Singer does not talk almost at all about whether killing an animal is per se immoral because the utilitarian view that we should look after animals' interests to be happy and not suffer doesn't obviously have much to say about "humane" slaughter (I am putting humane in scare quotes because, even though I believe that painless killing is probably possible, it's not clear to me how this could ever be benevolent barring extreme cases like serious illness or rabies). Peter Singer brings up a point of disagreement between himself and Roger Scruton, a philosopher who hunts foxes and told Peter Singer that he was raising a pig named Singer that he was going to kill and eat, which is really funny and also shockingly mean. We read a book by Roger Scruton in my architecture of power class; he says weirdly conservative things about gender and interesting things about beauty. I'm not sure I like him, but he is also no longer alive, so I guess it doesn't really matter. The point of disagreement between Peter Singer and Roger Scruton is whether an animal has wasted potential if you kill it, in the same way that a 30-year-old dying is very tragic because they had a lot going on and a lot to look forward to. Roger Scruton thinks animals don't really have accomplishments or plans for the future, so you can hunt foxes and it's fine. Peter Singer responds that the dead animal might have wasted potential because it could have continued to live a happy life. This is a completely unacceptable argument, because if being alive is seen as an inherent positive good, then it implies the repugnant conclusion; that is, it must necessarily be morally obligatory to increase the size of the population so more people can experience aliveness (I believe the noun form is generally "life"), even if that means making the quality of life worse for the average person. Peter Singer attributes the idea of the repugnant conclusion to Derek Parfit, a philosopher. The repugnant conclusion ALSO features in my third-favorite book, Either/Or by Elif Batuman:

"A recurring question in the ethics seminar was how to avoid ending up at something called the Repugnant Conclusion. The Repugnant Conclusion said that it was possible to justify decreasing a population's quality of life, if you made the population bigger. It was really hard not to get there. Even if you said something inoffensive-sounding, like, 'I think we should do the most good for the most people,' that meant that, if there were a million people whose lives were 'well worth living,' and you had the opportunity to transform them into a billion people whose lives were 'barely worth living,' you would be morally obligated to do it. There you were at the Repugnant Conclusion. The phrase 'barely worth living' made a knot form in my stomach. In what country was it happening?" (95)

I think about this a lot. I was so chuffed to see it in the Peter Singer book. Animal Liberation Now is a good book, but what's really a good book is The Idiot and Either/Or by Elif Batuman, and I actually think you should read those books instead of Animal Liberation Now, although you don't actually have to choose one or the other.  

Maybe the best scene from Either/Or: 

"'Don't even get me started on Fear and Trembling,' Svetlana said. 'That book literally gave me a nervous breakdown freshman year.'

'Really?'

'I didn't leave my room for a week. Valerie and Hedge brought me little bowls of food from the cafeteria. They must have thought I was a total freak.'

'Where was I? Why didn't I bring you little bowls of food?'

'I don't remember. I felt really embarrassed about it. I probably felt too embarrassed to tell you, because I thought you'd think I was being self-important or lame. That's probably the worst part of having a Kierkegaard-related nervous breakdown.'" (121)