Tom Regan The Case For Animal Rights

Is it possible to respect the rights of animals and eat them for dinner too? According to animal equality website, with the exception of fish, “over 56 billion farmed animals are slaughtered every year by humans.” Tom Regan writes in The Case for Animal Rights, what’s “fundamentally wrong with the way animals are treated” [….] “is the system that allows us to view animals as our resources, here for us — to be eaten, or surgically manipulated, or exploited for sport or money.” (Regan 13) With this harsh reality in mind, Regan calls for a total abolition of the use of animals in science, commercial animal agriculture, and commercial sport hunting and trapping. But unfortunately, Regan’s desires of abolishing this system is not practical. This
Although humans do have empathy for animals, animal inequality still remains and this is due to speciesism. In the ‘Equality for Animals?’, Peter Singer defines a speciesist as “anyone who gives greater weight to the interest of her own species than to the interests of other species, just as a racist is one who gives greater weight to the interest of her own race.” (Singer) Since animals lack the capacity for language and abstract reasoning, they cannot voice their terms of equality and this inherently allows discrimination to thrive. But the equality of animals should not depend on the intelligence or moral capacity of animals, but instead, depending on the intelligence and moral capacity of human
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy website disclosed that Immanuel Kant believed “the supreme principle of morality is a standard of rationality” […] “rationally [is a] necessary and unconditional principle that we must always follow despite any natural desires or inclinations we may have to the contrary”. To put it differently, without reason, morality is nothing and since we are human animals capable of reason, we are obligated to honor said reason. The majority of humans do acknowledge that there’s no moral difference between humans and animals, because of them both 'subjects-of-a-life’. Both plan their lives, care about the quality and length of life and both are aware that they are alive but because animals lack the capacity for free moral judgment, humans can’t confidently express that animals deserve a full ethical consideration. This is important because the value of morality depreciates when moral acts are done at the convenience of humankind. To act out of respect for the moral law, in Kant’s view, is to be moved to act by moral requirements even when you are not moved by the moral law itself. Morality begins to depreciate when moral acts are done at the convenience of humankind, because the moral self, starts to lose sight of the importance of others, and what is the point of morality if it is not to enrich our own lives by helping