On Animal Rights: Tom Regan or Carl Cohen? Essay Example.
Carl Cohen, “The Case Against Animal Rights” I. Cohen’s Aim: to rebut two arguments against using animals as research subjects in medical experiments.Here for the first time in the same volume, the animal rights debate is argued deeply and fully by the two most articulate and influential philosophers representing the opposing camps. Each makes his case in turn to the opposing case.Tom Regan argues that human beings and some non-human animals have moral rights because they are “subjects of lives,” that is, roughly, conscious, sentient beings with an experiential welfare. A prominent critic, Carl Cohen, objects: he argues that only moral agents have rights and so animals, since they are not moral agents, lack rights.
Start studying Carl Cohen The Case Against Animal Rights. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools.In Animal Liberation, Peter Singer argues that animals feel pain even though they do not have language governed by rules of syntax, so animals have rights. In contrast, Carl Cohen, The Case for the Use of Animal in Biomedical Research, asserts that animals lack moral capacity and animals therefore have no rights.
Here, for the first time, the world's two leading authorities—Tom Regan, who argues for animal rights, and Carl Cohen, who argues against them—make their respective case before the public at large. The very terms of the debate will never be the same.
