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Tom Regan Quotes

Tom Regan was an American philosopher who specialized in animal rights theory. He was professor emeritus of philosophy at North Carolina State University, where he had taught from 1967 until his retirement in 2001.Regan was the author of numerous books on the philosophy of animal rights, including The Case for Animal Rights , one of a handful of studies that have significantly influenced the modern animal rights movement. In these, he argued that non-human animals are what he called the "subjects-of-a-life", just as humans are, and that, if we want to ascribe value to all human beings regardless of their ability to be rational agents, then to be consistent, we must similarly ascribe it to non-humans.From 1985, he served with his wife Nancy as co-founder and co-president of the Culture and Animals Foundation, a nonprofit organization "committed to fostering the growth of intellectual and artistic endeavors united by a positive concern for animals."The Vegan Society remembers him as "a stalwart vegan and activist." Wikipedia  

✵ 28. November 1938 – 17. February 2017
Tom Regan photo

Works

Empty Cages
Empty Cages
Tom Regan
Tom Regan: 9   quotes 1   like

Famous Tom Regan Quotes

“From my reading of Gandhi I had learned how some people in India regard eating cow as unspeakably repulsive. I realized I felt the same way about cats and dogs: I could never eat them. Were cows so different from cats and dogs that there were two moral standards, one that applies to cows, another that applies to cats and dogs? Were pigs so different? Were any of the animals I ate so different?”

Tom Regan book Empty Cages

Source: Empty Cages (2004), Ch. 2

“People like me, people who believe in animal rights, feel the same way about eagles and elephants, pigs and porpoises, as most people feel about cats and dogs. Don't get me wrong. Animal Rights Advocates (ARAs) don't want pigs sleeping in our beds or elephants riding in our cars. We don't want to make “pets” of these animals. What we want is something simpler: we just want people to stop doing terrible things to them.”

Tom Regan book Empty Cages

Prologue
Empty Cages (2004)

“The task facing ARAs is daunting: we must empty the cages, not make them larger.”

Tom Regan book Empty Cages

Source: Empty Cages (2004), Ch. 4

“Then there are those proverbial “bird brains” of the barnyard, chickens, surely the most maligned and abused animal on the face of the earth, and—just as surely—among the brightest, most social birds we'll find anywhere. … Chickens not only are capable of learning, they are also capable of teaching one another. It turns out that chickens are not as dumb as popular mythology makes them out to be.”

Tom Regan book Empty Cages

Source: Empty Cages (2004), Ch. 6

“I would never have become an animal rights advocate if I had not first been a human rights advocate, especially for those humans (the very young and the very old, for example) who lack the understanding or power to assert their rights for themselves.”

Tom Regan book Empty Cages

Prologue
Empty Cages (2004)

“What I had learned about human rights proved to be directly relevant to my thinking about animal rights. Whether any animals have rights depends on the true answer to one question: Are any animals subjects-of-a-life? This is the question that needs to be asked about animals because this is the question we need to ask about us.”

Tom Regan book Empty Cages

Source: Empty Cages (2004), Ch. 4

“No wonder Muddlers initially think that becoming a vegetarian is like taking a vow of culinary abstinence mixed with voluntary poverty.
Of course, in time Muddlers discover that there is an incredibly delicious, colorful, and nutritious animal-free cuisine out there to be discovered, a menu of possibilities that includes foods from every nation and ethnicity in the world. It is the great new food we gain, not the customary old food we lose, that is the real surprise, something all of us have to discover for ourselves.”

Tom Regan book Empty Cages

Source: Empty Cages (2004), Ch. 6

“The less gifted do not exist to serve the interests of the more gifted. The former are not mere things when compared to the latter, to be used as means to the latter's ends. From the moral point of view, each of us is equal because each of us is equally a somebody, not a something, the subject-of-a-life, not a life without a subject.”

Tom Regan book Empty Cages

Source: Empty Cages (2004), Ch. 3

“From my reading of Gandhi I had learned how some people in India regard eating cow as unspeakably repulsive. I realized I felt the same way about cats and dogs: I could never eat them.”

Tom Regan book Empty Cages

Were cows so different from cats and dogs that there were two moral standards, one that applies to cows, another that applies to cats and dogs? Were pigs so different? Were any of the animals I ate so different?
Source: Empty Cages (2004), Ch. 2

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