What could be the basis of our having more inherent value than animals? Their lack of reason, or autonomy, or intellect? Only if we are willing to make the same judgment in the case of humans who are similarly deficient.
Interpretation
The quote questions the basis of human superiority over animals based on traits like reason and intellect.
Tom Regan's quote challenges the notion that humans have inherent value over animals due to characteristics like reason, autonomy, or intellect. By questioning this assumption, he prompts us to consider the moral implications of how we value all beings, including those humans who may also lack these attributes, thus advocating for a more egalitarian perspective on life and its inherent worth.
In practice
During a debate on animal rights, this quote can highlight the inconsistency in how we evaluate beings.
The other animals humans eat, use in science, hunt, trap, and exploit in a variety of ways, have a life of their own that is of importance to them apart from their utility to us. They are not only in the world, they are aware of it. What happens to them matters to them. Each has a life that fares better or worse for the one whose life it is.
It is not larger, cleaner cages that justice demands...but empty cages; not traditional animal agriculture but a complete end to all commerce in the flesh of dead animals; not more humane hunting and trapping, but the total eradication of these barbarous practices.
It is not an act of kindness to treat animals respectfully. It is an act of justice.
I would encourage them never to forget that they were not always vegans. The self-righteousness of the recently converted hurts, it does not help, other animals.
Surely no mere mortal who has at all gone down into himself will ever pretend that his slightest thought or act solely originates in his own defined identity.
Except a man be born again, he will wish one day he had never been born at all.
The stories we are told shape the way we see the world, which shapes the way we experience the world.
But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
To suppress minority thinking and minority expression would tend to freeze society and prevent progress. Now more than ever we must keep in the forefront of our minds the fact that whenever we take away the liberties of those we hate, we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love.
Guilt, regret, resentment, sadness & all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past & not enough presence.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.