Tom Regan

Tom Regan (28 November 1938 - 17 February 2017) was an American moral philosopher and, for thirty-four years, a professor of philosophy at North Carolina State University. His 1983 treatise The Case for Animal Rights supplied the movement with the book-length deontological argument that Peter Singer’s utilitarian Animal Liberation (1975) had deliberately avoided, and the two works are still taught together as the twin theoretical pillars of modern animal ethics.

Argument

Regan’s central claim is that mammals of a year or more are “subjects-of-a-life”: beings with beliefs, desires, memory, a sense of the future, and a welfare that matters to them whether or not it matters to anyone else. Creatures with this property possess equal inherent value and, with it, the basic moral right not to be treated as mere resources. From this he drew three practical conclusions — the total abolition of animal agriculture, the total elimination of commercial and sport hunting and trapping, and the total abolition of animal experimentation — positions he defended without compromise in Defending Animal Rights (2001) and made accessible in Empty Cages (2004).

Career and legacy

Born in Pittsburgh, Regan earned his PhD at the University of Virginia in 1966 and joined NC State in 1967, retiring as University Alumni Distinguished Professor Emeritus in 2001. He and his wife Nancy founded the Culture and Animals Foundation in 1985 to support scholarly and artistic work on the human-animal relationship; it still funds grants today. Regan received NC State’s Alumni Association Outstanding Research Award and was named one of the university’s Distinguished Professors.

He adopted a vegetarian diet in the early 1970s and a vegan one soon after, and was, until his death from pneumonia in Raleigh, one of the most cited philosophers writing on animal rights and applied ethics. For the movement he helped build, see veganism.