Why am I passionate about this?
Before there was an interdisciplinary academic field called “Animal Studies,” I was involved in these issues as an animal rights activist. Back then, the question of the animal was not taken seriously in academia as a free-standing problem (like gender or sexuality or race). It was important to me to build that—not just to take seriously the lives of animals, but also to show how the animal issue opens onto a much broader set of fundamental questions about the human and its place in relation to ecology, technology, and the non-human world. That’s why the book series I founded is devoted not to Animal Studies, but to Posthumanism.
Cary's book list on philosophy, ethics, animals, and us
Why did Cary love this book?
Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation is usually taken to be the founding philosophical text for the animal rights movement, but I think Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights presents the more compelling, more multi-dimensional argument.
Where Singer grounds moral standing in the fundamental interest in avoiding suffering, Regan foregrounds the “inherent value” of being the “experiencing subject of a life,” for whom avoiding suffering is only part of the question.
There’s plenty of disagreement about whether the rights framework is the best way to think about our moral duties to animals (cf. Derrida above). And Regan’s position is available in less rigorous and scholarly form in some of his other books. But for the full walk-through of the best argument for animal rights, this is the text.
1 author picked The Case for Animal Rights as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
More than twenty years after its original publication, The Case for Animal Rights is an acknowledged classic of moral philosophy, and its author is recognized as the intellectual leader of the animal rights movement. In a new and fully considered preface, Regan responds to his critics and defends the book's revolutionary position.
- Coming soon!