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How Tom Regan destroyed Peter Singer’s position in under three minutes
How Tom Regan destroyed Peter Singer’s position in under three minutes
A caged life - the cost of someone else’s pleasure.
This essay challenges the utilitarian ethics popularised by Peter Singer and argues for a rights-based approach rooted in justice, not calculation. Drawing on Tom Regan’s critique, it exposes the moral failures of cost-benefit reasoning and calls for a deeper ethical reckoning in our treatment of nonhuman animals.
This website edition includes light framing and internal links to help readers explore related essays on personhood, justice, and the philosophical foundations of animal rights. The main text remains as originally published.
Peter Singer’s classic book ‘Animal Liberation’ was one of the main reasons I went vegan. That book has changed the way countless people think about our relationship with other animals. For that reason, Singer has been dubbed the ‘Godfather’ of the animal rights movement. But despite his historic influence on so many people, his philosophy of utilitarianism leaves a lot to be desired.
Nowadays, many animal liberationists distance themselves from Singer, and it’s not only due to the fact that he stopped being vegan several years ago.
It’s not just that he has claimed that the meat industry might be justifiable if farms were to really give the animals good lives, and then ‘humanely’ kill them (as if there was such a thing as humane exploitation or humane murder).
It’s the entire utilitarian basis of his philosophy, a philosophy based on the premise that the ethics of our behaviour should be weighed and measured in terms of “the greatest good of the greatest number”.
Fundamentally, this involves looking at any given situation and weighing up all the pros and all the cons, all the pleasures and all the pain, all the costs and all the benefits. If the overall outcome is net pleasure, then that counts as a moral act, if the overall outcome is net suffering, then the course of action should be avoided.
When many of us first come across this premise, it sounds like a reasonable basis for making ethical decisions. If action A causes more net suffering than action B, then we should choose action B.
Scratch the surface of this philosophy, however, and the whole thing falls apart. This was illustrated in a nutshell by Tom Regan, the real Godfather of the animal rights movement.
Tom Regan was another animal rights philosopher, one of Singer's contemporaries, who was far less well-known than Singer. Perhaps it was that his work was less accessible, perhaps he was less appealing to the masses or perhaps Singer was just better at marketing. I don’t know.
It was Regan who long ago argued that being vegan is not about being ‘kind’ to animals (although kindness is not necessarily a bad thing and we could all do with a bit more of it in the world). Respecting other animals is, rather, an issue of justice.
“It is not an act of kindness to treat animals respectfully. It is an act of justice.” — Tom Regan
For whatever reason, not so many people have heard of Tom Regan, but of the two philosophers, it is Regan who is perhaps far more deserving of the title ‘Godfather of the animal rights movement’.
To illustrate this, I’ll use an example of something Regan said when he was asked in an interview about the difference between his own philosophy and Singer’s. In three minutes flat, he completely destroyed Singer’s position.
He starts off by outlining Singer’s utilitarian position, as I’ve done above, as a cost-benefit analysis of suffering and pleasure, weighing “all the plusses and all the minuses, all the pleasures and all the pain.” Then he goes on to quote a real life example of a horrific story which happened in Boston many years ago.
A group of boys kidnapped a mentally disadvantaged girl from the local neighbourhood and gang-raped her using a baseball bat and various other objects. They took her into a basement and viciously abused her, almost to the point of death.
I don’t think anybody reading this would even attempt to argue that such an act is abhorrent and wrong. It cannot be justified. There is no argument to support such a terrible act of abuse.
As Regan points out, though, from Singer’s utilitarian perspective, we shouldn’t be so quick to judge. Yes, of course, we need to pay full heed to the awful suffering of the young girl and what she went through — the pain, the terror, the terrible sense of shame.
Then there were the girl’s parents, who also must have suffered terribly. Add to their pain the increased fear that other girls in the neighbourhood will have suffered, and the worry of all their parents, and the negative side of the balance sheet looks pretty grim.
But Singers position then says, what about the boys?
WTF!?
According to the utilitarian perspective, we cannot decide whether the act was good or bad, right or wrong, before we also consider the ‘plusses’ or ‘benefits’ for the boys who committed this act. Until we factor their pleasure into the equation.
As Regan said at the time, “I just find that morally obscene.”
I think we all do.
Any pleasure that the boys derived from raping that young girl so violently and cruelly can never justify their act. The fact that the boys enjoyed their act of cruelty, that they derived sick, sadistic pleasure from the girl’s suffering, makes it worse, not better.
Yet utilitarianism, as espoused by Peter Singer, demands that we must factor the boys’ pleasure into the equation. Singer, says Regan, has no way of accounting for why raping that girl was wrong.
“And if he has no way of accounting for why raping a girl is wrong,” says Regan, “then I don’t think he has an adequate way of explaining how we should be treating other animals.”
If Singer has no way of accounting for why raping a girl is wrong, then I don’t think he has an adequate way of explaining how we should be treating other animals.
BOOM!
This same utilitarian cost-benefit analysis is used frequently by meat-eaters, albeit unknowingly, in a pathetic attempt to justify why they’re not vegan.
You talk to them about the many extreme ways that farmed animals are cruelly neglected, abused, beaten, electrocuted and finally hung upside down by their legs to have their throats slit, often while fully conscious.
These animals have to hang there, thrashing in unimaginable terror and pain, watching their friends and family members dying in the same manner all around them, while they choke on their own life-blood.
And these carnist apologists, like Singer, have the temerity to say, “But what about my pleasure? I like the taste of meat”
It’s abhorrent. When we are talking about the deliberate exploitation, abuse and murder of innocent victims who suffer more terribly than we could ever imagine, to turn around and attempt to justify that suffering on the grounds that you like the taste of their flesh is as messed up as a utilitarian trying to justify the brutal gang-rape of that young girl by arguing that it gave the boys great pleasure.
And that, my friend, is why I’m vegan, and why you should be, too.
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