The philosopher who devoted his studies to animal rights and the rights of the defenceless, developing an original theory of respect and author of 'I diritti animali', has passed away. His challenge, his key question, still as powerful as ever, lives on.
I hate cages too. Everything that is caged suffers. If you stop to notice, wherever there is a cage, something inhuman, cruel, or unnatural is taking place.
Whether it is medieval torture, scientific experiments, the farming of mink for their fur, or of calves for pale, anaemic steaks.
Tom Regan's last book was entitled Empty Cages: Facing the Challenge of Animal Rights. An encyclopaedic book, in the sense that it addresses animal rights issues across a myriad of facets. The first was The Case for Animal Rights (The Case for Animal Rights, 1983), with which he introduced a highly interesting perspective that generated a great many campaigns against all forms of animal abuse that until the 1970s had passed unnoticed, and that advanced common understanding.
'The Case for Animal Rights', published for the first time in 1983, is a foundational philosophical text on animal rights. A substantial essay (of over 500 pages) that presents, through structured and coherent argumentation, what would become one of the most revolutionary, debated and criticised ideas of our time: the recognition of rights for animals.
Starting from Descartes' concept of animals as machines, Tom Regan led us, from the very first pages, towards an original reflection on the complexity of animals' mental lives: they are not machines driven by gears, "brutes devoid of thought" whose cries of pain are merely the creaking of cogs, but rather subjects of a life, endowed with awareness, ideas, purposes, desires and preferences. The book continues with a critical analysis of the principal theories of duties towards animals, passing through Kant and arriving at the utilitarianism of Peter Singer — with whom he co-authored a book, but from whom he often held divergent views.
The concept of the equal inherent value of individuals is presented by Tom Regan in the final section of the work. According to the principle of respect, we have an obligation to treat individuals endowed with value — inherent value being that which an individual possesses in and of themselves — with the respect owed to them. In cases of conflict, our duty is to minimise it.
Here lies the disruptive quality of his proposal. Among individuals endowed with inherent value there are not only moral agents — those who, like us, possess the capacity to act according to precise moral principles, as almost all human beings do — but also moral patients, that is, those who lack the capacity both to formulate moral principles and to be guided by them in determining morally right or wrong actions.
These groups may include young children, human beings of any age with mental disabilities, and people deprived of their faculties of choice. And animals, of course.
Who, however, by virtue of the very fact of being alive, sentient, capable of experiencing emotions and love and of forming ideas, must be respected in themselves.
In Tom Regan's definition, all are entitled to the same respect.
Yes, this is the greatest philosophical challenge. Compelling for two reasons.
This is why the philosophical theory elaborated by Regan is not an animalist one. It is a theory of rights in the broadest sense, embracing moral considerations towards others, whether human or non-human.
Our fundamental mistake is not that we mistreat animals, causing loneliness and anguish, or that we inflict suffering, or that we ignore their rights. Clearly all of this is wrong, but it is not our fundamental mistake. These are all consequences of our fundamental moral mistake, which consists in seeing animals and others as beings that have no value, as instruments for our benefit.
Salvatore Veca, in the preface to an Italian edition, frames his contribution as follows.
Tom Regan's book is a passionate, rigorous and careful philosophical attempt to formulate a comprehensive normative theory that sheds the clearest light on the reasons in favour of treatments, practices and institutions shaped by (and consistent with) the principle of equal respect owed, for compelling reasons of justice, to our fellow travellers on earth, non-human animals.
So much so that, as Holmes Rolston III has observed:
Tom Regan's now classic 'Animal Rights' carefully blends elements of argument with intense moral concerns. For decades, wherever Regan has been taken seriously, animals have fared better, and people have become better people.
Tom Regan's personal trajectory is an interesting one, bearing in mind that he worked, for a brief period of his life, even as a butcher. The last time he was in Italy, in 2011, Venice presented him with a winged lion, as professor emeritus of North Carolina State University. He had arrived accompanied by his wife, after having given a lecture on animal rights at the Modena Philosophy Festival.
The national president of Lav, Gianluca Felicetti, attended the award ceremony in Venice. On 17 February 2017, the day the American philosopher passed away, he wrote:
"The case for animal rights", devoured in a few days, despite my approximate English of thirty years ago, enlightened me with that "inherent value" which I held within me as a belief, as a demand, but to which I had been unable until then to give a name and which I could not explain.
From that day on, for that value and for all the other pages written by Tom Regan, we were all stronger, throughout the world, in the assertion of animal rights.
And we were even stronger when we had the opportunity to meet him, to listen to him, to accompany him around Italy, every time he gave of himself in our country too, alongside his tireless wife Nancy. From the conferences organised by our local branches to the one for veterinary students in Turin, from our 30th anniversary Congress at the Faculty of Law in Palermo, to the prize awarded to him by the Municipality of Venice and the Modena Philosophy Festival. "When I was young I was even a butcher, and my first gift to my fiancée was a fur hat" — it was his mantra — "if I could change, anyone can."
When in 2010 I had the honour of being invited to the annual North American meeting of his Culture and Animals Foundation Regan, he came to pick me up at the airport in his battered car. It bore just one sticker, nothing to do with animal rights (after all, with him inside, the message for animal liberation was already there…) and I asked him what it meant. It was the Pittsburgh Steelers, the American football team from his home city. Good grief, I told him, so you're a "normal" person, like me with my own favourite team. He smiled at me, making me understand that it is passions, shared experiences, and therefore compassion, that keep the world alive — the normality, then, of being for animal liberation and being part of the human society that fights for it.