Tom Regan's Argumentative Analysis

816 Words2 Pages

When we were talking about vegetarianism the time right before Thanksgiving break many arguments were put forth for the idea. The one that stuck to me the most was the arguments made by Tom Regan. For the other arguments I thought about them but they did not have me think about what I eat. With Regan’s essay it was the first time I actually took the time and thought about what I eat and if it is immoral.
His argument is based on right that is not given by any document or government. It is given to us basic to who we are. This is the right to live. Every human being that is alive has a right to be. People have this right based on some prerequisites put forth in the essay: all humans can have reason, all humans have the capacity to have free choice, all humans have a sense a self, and all humans have a combination of the previous three points. Regan says that we all generally believe that this is what gives a human the right to life. But as you can imagine there are exceptions to these qualifications. We have people with mental disabilities who can’t rationalize because of their messed up structure of their nervous system. We have have another exception with babies. They are too young to …show more content…

He also mentions how someone would say that since animals don’t share all of the qualities to the right to live that it is okay to kill and eat them. Regan comes back by saying if that is the case why don’t we eat the mentally disabled and babies since they don’t share all of the qualifications as well. This argument is very sound, it’s very hard to counter this argument. Because it we believe that everyone has the right to live based on certain things and we ourselves don’t even follow them then why do we not we give the same courtesy to animals. We also only give this courtesy to certain animals. For example it is taboo to eat a dog, but when it is a chicken or a cow it is totally

Open Document