28
An Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? (forthcoming from Temple
University Press, 1998).
[43] See Francione, Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement,
supra note 8, at 179-180; Animals, Property, and the Law, supra note 38, at 110-112.
[44] It is often argued that clothing made of nonanimal products, such as synthetics, may have
unintended, but nevertheless serious, consequences for humans and animals alike. That may very
well be, but there would be no difference in that circumstance from other situations in which
unintended harm occurs. Although our use of synthetics may have deleterious but completely
unintended consequences for the environment that adversely impact humans, this would not
support the view that there is no difference between pollution that indirectly kills five people,
and killing five people at random in order to use their skin to make clothing for other humans.
[45]Singer, Animal Liberation, supra note 15, at 15.
[46] Some scholars have accused Regan of the same problem based on his discussion of the
following hypothetical: five survivors--four normal adults and one normal dog--are on a lifeboat.
There is room in the boat only for four, and one of the occupants must be thrown overboard.
Regan maintains that his rights theory provides an answer to the problem. Although death is a
harm for the dog, Regan argues, death would be a qualitatively greater loss, and, accordingly, a
greater harm, for any of the humans: "To throw any one of the humans overboard, to face certain
death, would be to make that individual worse-off (i.e., would cause that individual a greater
harm) than the harm that would be done to the dog if the animal was thrown overboard." Regan,
The Case for Animal Rights, supra note 26, at 324 (emphasis in original). It would, on Regan's
view, be morally obligatory to kill the dog. Further, Regan claims even if the choice is between a
million dogs and one person, it would still be obligatory under rights theory to throw the dogs
overboard. For a criticism of this view, see S. F. Sapontzis, Morals, Reason, and Animals
(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1987), 219. Ironically, one of Regan's most vocal
critics on this point is Singer, who claims that a "theory that tells us that all subjects-of-a-life
(including dogs) have equal inherent value [cannot] be reconciled with the intuition that it is the
dog that must be sacrificed." Peter Singer, "Ten Years of Animal Liberation," The New York
Review of Books, January 17, 1985, at 49.
To the extent that Regan allows for the resolution of this hypothetical problem by appealing to
certain characteristics of the dog that Regan disallowed when he argued that all subjects-of-a-life
have equal inherent value, then his resolution is inconsistent with his general theory. But Regan's
discussion of the lifeboat example is irrelevant to his general theory that animals ought not to be
regarded exclusively as means to human ends, and, even if Regan is incorrect, the error does not
affect his general theory. The lifeboat example explicitly assumes the absence of any
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