Regan on Animal Rights
This has been bothering me for years. Tom Regan's "Case for Animal Rights," as far as I can tell, comes to the following:
If animals do not have rights, then harming them is not doing a wrong to them. But harming animals is doing a wrong to them. Therefore, animals do have rights.
Can anybody tell me which logical fallacy Regan is committing?
Roman,
ReplyDeleteI think I'm missing something -- that looks like a straightforward application of modus tollens. Where's the problem you're seeing?
Tom
It's definitely deductively valid, yes. But so is "If the soul is not immortal, then it can perish. The soul can't perish, therefore it is immortal." And yet that's a pretty awful argument for the immortality of the soul.
ReplyDeleteTrue. But awful doesn't mean fallacious. I'm assuming that you think the argument you've given is question-begging or trivial. Do you think that Regan's argument is question-begging in the same way? Or do you just think that the first premise is false?
ReplyDeleteYou're right, I have a tendency to think it is question-begging, but it might not be. The problem, from my perspective, is that if you want to argue that X has rights, you need to give a reason to think that X has rights. I think that if X has rights, it is pretty easy to see that violating those rights wrongs X. If the first premise is true (if animals do not have rights, then harming them is not doing a wrong to them), then it's going to look increasingly like the claim is that X has rights iff harming X does a wrong to X. And if that's true, then showing that harming X does a wrong to X just is the same as showing that X has rights, and thus requires the same burden of proof as the latter. So if I show that harming X does a wrong to X, I've shown that X has rights. But I can't intuit that harming X does a wrong to X and use that as evidence that X has rights!
ReplyDelete"If animals do not have rights, then harming them is not doing a wrong to them. But harming animals is doing a wrong to them. Therefore, animals do have rights."
ReplyDeletei find the statement ok but its somehow wrong when reading it very well. in the first statement it says, if there no governing laws that animals do not have rights then doing anything to them like harming is ok.
in the other statement, if there are governing laws that refers harming them is bad then most definitely is is wrong.
maybe you are just confused with "harming them is not doing a wrong to them." and "harming animals is doing a wrong to them."
Smith | salon uniforms
harming <-- define this and maybe we'll find the fallacy
ReplyDelete