This is a paper on animal rights, specifically from the viewpoint of philosopher Tom Regan.

Animal rights have been a heated issue for decades, argued by such philosophers as Tom Regan. Regan believes that any practice in which an "experiencing subject of a life" is used as a resource is unethical, not because of emotion, but because of reason. In this paper, I will provide a short reconstruction and evaluation of Regan's argument for animal rights.

Tom Regan is a firm believer and strong supporter of animal rights. This includes the elimination of research experiments using animals, factory farming, and hunting or trapping. He is not just an animal rights' advocate some of time - rather, he believes that using any animal as a resource is wrong all the time. This means that giving an animal more space to live and better food will not help the problem; he thinks that will only make it worse, because we will feel better about ourselves for helping the animal, and concentrate less on the real issue at hand. The only way Regan sees in eliminating the problem is to change the way we view animals, and change the way we teach our children to think of them.

First of all, to understand Regan's argument, you must assume that some things are true. The first and most important thing you must understand is that "[p]ain is pain, wherever it occurs (Regan 401)." This means that each and every animal on this earth feels pain and suffering just as much as any other animal. It is just as wrong to inflict pain or suffering on a moral agent, someone with moral standing who can deliberate morally, as it is to a moral patient, something that has moral standing, but cannot deliberate morally. Every moral patient's interests are weighed equally to those of moral agent's. Therefore, we must not discriminate...