Prompt 12

For this post I have chosen to evaluate posts 5 and 6

Prompt 5 is a reflection on Regan's text: The Radical Egalitarian Case for Animal Rights.  As suggested by the title Regan gives a radical defense of animal rights citing that all animals with inherent value should have equal rights as humans, because inherent value is the same in all creatures that possess it.  I struggled with this concept and even found myself struggling even more with the idea that he draws a line of which creatures should receive these rights and which shouldn't without going into any great detail.  Regan also fails to fully justify his idea of 'inherent value' and does not describe what it is but rather only defines the term negatively in terms of what it is not.  Prompt 6 is a reflection on Warren's text: A Critique of Regan's Animal Rights Theory.  In this post I sided with Warren on her critique of Regan's text.  I cited several examples in Warren's text that troubled me about Regan's, and it helped me to develop more of an understanding on where I stood on the animal liberation issue.

One of the issues the issues that frustrated me about Regan's article was his classification of creatures with 'inherent value'.  Regan pointed out that any creature who is a subject-of-a-life qualifies for inherent value.  I found myself frustrated by this claim while writing Prompt 5 however, I was unable to rebut the argument in any sort of legitimate matter.  I found the answer to my question through Warren's work.  She pointed out that Regan draws a sharp line in this determination, however, in reality we do not know for sure which animals are subjects-of-a-life to which Regan responds that we must extend a benefit of the doubt to any arguments animals which it is unclear.  Warren response to this argument is that we can make arguments for creatures as small as paramecium because we cannot know for sure.  With this being said Warren then references that we could never swat at a mosquito and that we would need to sweep every walkway before we walked on it to make sure that we did not harm any creatures with inherent value.

Another issue that bothered me about Regan's text was his reference to including mentally handicapped and infants in our argument for rational beings.  This bothered me because prior to this article my cutoff between animals and humans had been that we are superior because of our rationale and ability to problem solve in more than one method.  It is then tough to include these two categories of humans into our qualification of rationale.  Warren provides more than adequate responses for both of these cases, arguing for infants that it is a temporary state that all humans go through and for mentally handicapped that we extend to them equality because of the relationship that we have to them created by our ability as humans to feel compassion.  I found that these explanations helped me to build my understanding and foundation for my moral on animal liberation.

Both of these posts were instrumental in my development of my stance on animal liberation.  While I found that I do not agree with most of Regan's points, his article was helpful for me in establishing upper limit on the extremely liberal side of animal liberation.  It helped me to see some of the arguments for animals as well as helped me to see some of the fall backs in my own interpretation of the subject.  Warren's text was equally if not more important in developing my current stance because she helped me to find the flaws in Regan's argument and provide logical answers where his argument fell short.  Overall, both of these texts were instrumental in determining my current stance on animal liberation.