Philosophical Vegan Forum

i plan to purchase some of Tom Regan's books in the future, i personally adhere to his views on defending animal rights. his methods appears to be more so a deontological outlook, and over the last few days i've come to notice that his system for defending animal rights can help overcome some issues such as "magical happy humane farms" via the protection of rights that we afford animals. i subscribe to Peter Singer's principle of equal consideration, but once we reach the magical happy human farm levels (which Singer would have to concede to under that system as permissible) i think Tom Regan's system is far more effective in order to deal with the unethical issue. i should add, i do not hold this view in extreme deontological ways because i think there can be some absurdities that arise where it may become necessary to violate/deny animals those afforded rights for some justifiable reason (gray area).

what are your thoughts on Tom Regan? especially in contrast to somebody like Peter Singer? if you have any other great work recommendations i would like to hear.

i would like to understand why you may/may not think his work is effective, and some of his possible weaknesses (and how to maybe overcome them).

I would not recommend him.

The "happy farm" conclusions can be avoided by accounting for preferences (rather than crude hedonistic experience), and looking at opportunity cost.
See this thread for more discussion on this: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2583&p=26377#p26377

Singer is a hedonistic "classical" utilitarian. That's his mistake. But we shouldn't make the mistake of going to another extreme with the deontological sort.

It's also worth mentioning a couple practical points:

1. Legitimately "happy meat" is impossible to guarantee as long as there's a profit incentive; people will cut corners.

2. Even if the profit incentive were removed, it would be so expensive as to be virtually unheard of. So maybe that herd of 100 happy cows and a few people eating meat once a decade is an important compromise to accept for intellectual consistency.

That's understandable. I'll have to go through that discussion and read through some of your thoughts.

I was personally sold on the whole idea of affording basic negative rights to these animals, much like how we can apply it to humans, and it would help overcome those sorts of issues. It did seem like a rather good way to overcome those obstacles, but for the most part I wouldn't say it would be a necessary thing to go to all the time as Singer's method would be useful in other scenarios. Establishing that these beings are of inherent value as ends in of themselves seemed to be a good way to really tackle any possible weasel tactic some might use in order to deny animals value when appealing to the extrinsic value of marginal case beings to other people (your thoughts there?).

There's also something in regards to NTT I wanted to ask, more so a thought, really. Recently there's been a bundle of NTT fiasco going on, several replies from smaller channels that aim to strike Ask Yourself down. It seems to be focusing more on the issues of NTT (which it does have) and a continuous battle back and forth based on this from both sides, evidently so that there's no productive push being made in terms of progress for conversation on the ethics.

A lot of this is heavily based on the syllogism, for starters, and a push on P1 of his argument. I think NTT 2.0 syllogism would definitely add more clarification, a better one to use, however, one of the main criticisms that arises is the "single cause fallacy". The carnist proponent points out that NTT tries to oversimplify things to the point where a single trait can only be used (false, the opponent can name multiple), and on top of this, the carnist says that once they have already accepted P1 it does not matter what trait is used against humans because humans will be of moral value, so killing retards will be wrong because of this.

Do you think there is a way to simplify NTT even more to overcome these issues? Or would there be some better ethical arguments to use in order to point out contradictions?

Frank Quasar wrote: ↑Tue Jul 03, 2018 4:19 pm I was personally sold on the whole idea of affording basic negative rights to these animals, much like how we can apply it to humans, and it would help overcome those sorts of issues.

It doesn't really make moral sense for humans either; think about violating the rights of one person to save a billion people (something most people would agree with).
Rights are absolute and they don't let you do that no matter what.

The reason we use rights in practice is more for social utility (because governments trampling on individual rights tend to do a lot of evil, not because it is inherently essential to have those inalienable rights or always wrong to violate them).
We need rights as a fail-safe of sorts from governmental corruption and abuse.

Frank Quasar wrote: ↑Tue Jul 03, 2018 4:19 pmEstablishing that these beings are of inherent value as ends in of themselves seemed to be a good way to really tackle any possible weasel tactic some might use in order to deny animals value when appealing to the extrinsic value of marginal case beings to other people (your thoughts there?).

You just don't need to do that 99% of the time, because things like animal agriculture are lose-lose.
We're destroying the environment we rely on, harming our own health, making antibiotics useless, etc.

Value to humans applies to some animal testing to research life saving medicine, but that makes up a fraction of a percentage of animal use, and there are new models being created which are superior (like organs on chips), so that won't be a thing that much longer.

There are enough pragmatic reasons to go vegans for human beings to make rights based arguments unnecessary.

Frank Quasar wrote: ↑Tue Jul 03, 2018 4:19 pmThere's also something in regards to NTT I wanted to ask, more so a thought, really. Recently there's been a bundle of NTT fiasco going on, several replies from smaller channels that aim to strike Ask Yourself down. It seems to be focusing more on the issues of NTT (which it does have) and a continuous battle back and forth based on this from both sides, evidently so that there's no productive push being made in terms of progress for conversation on the ethics.

That's why I won't debate him, the conversation so far as been very unproductive. I'm talking with Avi about it, though, hopefully that will go better.

Frank Quasar wrote: ↑Tue Jul 03, 2018 4:19 pmThe carnist proponent points out that NTT tries to oversimplify things to the point where a single trait can only be used (false, the opponent can name multiple), and on top of this, the carnist says that once they have already accepted P1 it does not matter what trait is used against humans because humans will be of moral value, so killing retards will be wrong because of this.

Like you said, sets of traits can be named, so that part is not a valid criticism.
As to the second point, this is why we switched it to a copy of a human minus that trait.
Avi probably also fixed that by dealing with conceptualizations instead of fact. It seems Isaac approves that usage. However, that may have made the argument question begging.

Frank Quasar wrote: ↑Tue Jul 03, 2018 4:19 pmDo you think there is a way to simplify NTT even more to overcome these issues? Or would there be some better ethical arguments to use in order to point out contradictions?

I think the better argument is to get into metaethics and talk about the source of morality and the importance of sentience.

Frank Quasar wrote: ↑Wed Jun 27, 2018 4:53 pm i plan to purchase some of Tom Regan's books in the future, i personally adhere to his views on defending animal rights. his methods appears to be more so a deontological outlook, and over the last few days i've come to notice that his system for defending animal rights can help overcome some issues such as "magical happy humane farms" via the protection of rights that we afford animals.

We'll I'm not vegan and think "animal rights" are incoherent but I will still recommend that you read his books. He is a thoughtful philosopher and one of the few that have written about animal ethics. I'd suggest the book "The Animal Rights Debate", it is a debate between him and another philosopher who argues against animal rights. The book "Animal rights" is also good, its a collection of essays on animal rights from various authors.


But why do you need to "overcome" the issue of humane farms? That sounds dangerously like you're just trying to find justifications to fit uphold an ideology rather than exploring the issues openly.

Thanks, I may potentially buy those in the future, should add it to a list so I remember. The only reason why I even pondered these ideas about him was due to a small YouTuber called "Indy". I think he came onto this forum some time ago, and he has made some videos in regards to Tom Regan's views in contrast to the likes of Jeremy Bentham/Peter Singer. It essentially deals with the "humane farms" point.

I only mean it in regards to the standard justifications that carnists try to deploy, I thought Tom's views seemed to be a good way to address it, but I wanted to get some opinions from others on the forum. Regardless, I'm over that, Brim has raised good points that I may just bring up instead.

Frank Quasar wrote: ↑Mon Jul 09, 2018 3:24 pm The only reason why I even pondered these ideas about him was due to a small YouTuber called "Indy".

I'd highly suggest you read the books rather than listen to poorly educated people pontificating on you-tube for views.

Frank Quasar wrote: ↑Mon Jul 09, 2018 3:24 pm I only mean it in regards to the standard justifications that carnists try to deploy, I thought Tom's views seemed to be a good way to address it, but I wanted to get some opinions from others on the forum. Regardless, I'm over that, Brim has raised good points that I may just bring up instead.

You're really just saying the same thing here, you're trying to build justifications for a belief you already hold. Your comment about "carnist" is really just a statement of tribalism, that is to say, the term "carnist" is just a way to create us vs them distinction between vegans and a diverse group of non-vegans.

What I'm suggesting is that you approach the issues in an intellectually honest way rather than with tribalism, read books from a variety of philosophers (or otherwise well educated authors) regardless of whether they agree with you or help justify your existing position to "carnists".

@brimstoneSalad Sorry to revive this dead thread, but I forgot to ask you this quite some time ago, and it has been kind of on my mind for some time now.

I've looked into what preference utilitarianism is, and quite frankly, I was pushed off of pure hedonistic forms of consequentalism because of the whole "take the pill" thought experiment that renders one into a mindless zombie that is in maximal pleasure. At that point I realized that interests actually really matter when considering things, and so do hedonistic elements. You essentially take on board both of these things when weighing/considering decisions, it's not just pure hedonistic elements alone.

However, upon reflection I was unaware of how to address hypothetical scenarios like this:

Let's say 5 guys rape 1 girl in a hidden secret cabin deep in the forest (they kidnapped and took her to this destination) and all 5 of these men generate more pleasure from raping this one female whereas her pain is trumped in comparison. I find it morally wrong to do so, but how do you essentially make a case for this under preference utilitarianism?

A hedonist might have to bite the bullet on this since they are generating more pleasure in comparison to her pain, but how do you address this in terms of interest? How will you weigh the interests of that 1 girl against the 5 men?

Frank Quasar wrote: ↑Thu Aug 16, 2018 3:59 pm Let's say 5 guys rape 1 girl in a hidden secret cabin deep in the forest (they kidnapped and took her to this destination) and all 5 of these men generate more pleasure from raping this one female whereas her pain is trumped in comparison. I find it morally wrong to do so, but how do you essentially make a case for this under preference utilitarianism?

A hedonist might have to bite the bullet on this since they are generating more pleasure in comparison to her pain, but how do you address this in terms of interest? How will you weigh the interests of that 1 girl against the 5 men?

1. In consequentialism period (regardless of type) these are false dilemmas.

You have to lay out ALL of the options and opt for the best. It's very unlikely that choosing to rape this girl was the only way they could get off.

You can come up with a lot of hypothetical lose-win scenarios where the win is marginally larger than the loss, but that doesn't make these good when there are win-win scenarios available.

2. I don't think the pleasure to suffering ratio is realistic there, and I think that's where a lot of these analogies have problems; they present cases where we feel the suffering is very large and there's no conceivable way the nominal pleasure of a few orgasms makes up for that. We're talking about intense fear for life and ongoing PTSD (unless they kill her, then we're talking about loss of an entire life too).

You can't just look in the moment, long term is meaningful too.

3. Thought experiments dealing with hedonism usually involve drugs/amnesia for the victim.
If they roofied her and she didn't know it happened, and she didn't get any diseases/tearing (they were nice rapists and used condoms and lube), then where's the harm?

This is not as relevant to preference based consquentialism, because whether she remembered it or not she'd probably prefer not to be gang raped.


Consider a more realistic pleasure vs. harm scenario, like a group of guys stealing a girl's underwear from her gym locker and masturbating on it (where the harm is more on the same level as the pleasure) and I think it's possible to have a more level discussion about it that doesn't set off alarm bells in emotional intuition that slant the conversation.

Okay, that makes more sense. Thanks for the reply, and yeah, these kinds of hypotheticals (as well as vacuum cases) are quite extreme, but nonetheless this gave me something more to think about.