Angus Taylor’s Animals & Ethics: An Overview of the Philosophical Debate delivers on its title’s promise: it summarizes the philosophical debate over animals, often phrasing points more clearly than the philosophers did themselves. One of the key figures in this debate is Tom Regan, author of The Case for Animal Rights, and Taylor applauds him for his main contribution to the animal rights debate, “inherent value”:

The key concept in Regan’s philosophy is inherent value. Inherent value is a quality that Regan attributes to every creature that (to put it briefly for the moment) has a life that matters to it. To say that a being has inherent value is to say that it has a value that is independent of any use that it may have for others. Inherent value, then is to be contrasted with instrumental value. To have inherent value, in Regan’s view, is to have the fundamental right never to be treated merely as an instrument, or means, for others. …

The kind of autonomy that Regan says many animals possess is preference autonomy. To have preference autonomy, as he defines it, is to have preferences and the ability to initiate action with a view to satisfying them. In Regan’s view, preference autonomy is the key to having a life that matters to oneself, to being what he calls the subject-of-a-life. Those who are subjects-of-a-life are those who ‘have beliefs and desires; perception, memory, and a sense of the future, including their own future; an emotional life together with feelings of pleasure and pain; preference- and welfare-interests; the ability to initiate action in pursuit of their desires and goals; a psychophysical identity over time; and an individual welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares well or ill for them, logically independently of their being the object of anyone else’s interests (Regan 2004a, p.243). Regan believes that normal mammalian animals of at least a year in age meet this criterion and thus have inherent value and hence moral rights. Birds are probably subjects-of-a-life, and some other creatures may be too (Regan 2003). …

Now, asks Regan, what is it that accounts for our ascription of inherent value to someone, regardless of whether that individual is a genius or a moron, regardless of whether that individual is a morally responsible agent? What relevant similarity can we point to among individuals who have inherent value? Regan answers that what plausibly accounts for our ascription of inherent value to them is the fact that the individuals in question have lives that matter to them, that fare well or ill for them, independently of their usefulness for others…

Further, in Regan’s opinion, this inherent value that we ascribe to persons depends neither on the quality of their experiences nor on whether they are saints or sinners. All who have inherent value have it equally, he says, and it does not matter whether someone is Mother Teresa or an unscrupulous used-car salesperson. (67 – 70)

Taylor does a good job of summing it up, but I thought I’d better consult the original. At the beginning of Chapter 7 of The Case for Animal Rights, Regan unveils his core concept, using slightly more obscure terminology than Taylor:

The inherent value of individual moral agents is to be understood as being conceptually distinct from the intrinsic value that attaches to the experiences they have (e.g., their pleasures or preference satisfactions), as not being reducible to values of this latter kind, and as being incommensurate with these values. To say that inherent value is not reducible to the intrinsic values of an individual’s experiences means that we cannot determine the inherent value of individual moral agents by totaling the intrinsic values of their experiences. Those who have a more pleasant or happier life do not therefore have greater inherent value than those whose lives are less pleasant or happy. Nor do those who have more “cultivated” preferences (say, for arts and letters) therefore have greater inherent value.

To say that the inherent value of individual moral agents is incommensurate with the intrinsic value of their (or anyone else’s) experiences means that the two kinds of value are not comparable and cannot be exchanged one for the other. Like proverbial apples and oranges, the two kinds of value do not fall within the same scale of comparison. One cannot ask, How much intrinsic value is the inherent value of this individual worth—how much is it equal to? The inherent value of any given moral agent isn’t equal to any sum of intrinsic values, neither the intrinsic value of that individual’s experiences nor the total of the intrinsic value of the experiences of all other moral agents. To view moral agents as having inherent value is thus to view them as something different from, and something more than, mere receptacles of what has intrinsic value. They have value in their own right, a value that is distinct from, not reducible to, and incommensurate with the values of those experiences which, as receptacles, they have or undergo. …

Two options present themselves concerning the possession by moral agents of inherent value. First, moral agents might be viewed as having this value to varying degrees, so that some may have more of it than others. Second, moral agents might be viewed as having this value equally. The latter view is rationally preferable. If moral agents are viewed as having inherent value to varying degrees, then there would have to be some basis for determining how much inherent value any given moral agent has. Theoretically, the basis could be claimed to be anything—such as wealth or belonging to the “right” race or sex. … All moral agents are equal in inherent value, if moral agents have inherent value. (235 – 237)

Before I get to my own quibbles with Regan’s fantasy, I want to quote a comment that Joel Marks made on Tom Regan’s blog, since I think it deftly gets at the main problem with inherent value (that it doesn’t really exist):

Tom Regan’s argument has always been the rock on which a thoroughgoing animal liberation movement could be built. I certainly embraced it wholeheartedly … until a few years ago, when I suddenly realized that the notion of inherent value did not jibe with my otherwise materialist worldview. The so-called Argument to the Best Explanation of the world as we know it simply does not have room for any such “animal.” There are quarks and gluons and maybe even trees and rabbits and human beings and beliefs and desires, but it does not seem plausible to the scientific-minded to suppose that there are also inherent values (among many other mythological beasts).

What there are are subjective values, and also, let us grant, valuers — the “subjects” of those values. A distinction that is often lost on folks who discuss these things is between inherent value and intrinsic value. The latter is quite subjective and contingent; it is distinguished only from instrumental or “extrinsic” value. For example, you value your cat extrinsically if you like her for ridding your house of mice; but you value your cat intrinsically if you simply find her lovable and wonderful and wish only her good “for her own sake.”

Inherent value is quite different from either of these. And Regan certainly recognizes this in Chapter 7 of his book. But it leaves me wondering, now that I have taken a skeptical turn regarding objective value, just what basis Regan thinks inherent value has. It is a distinct concept, yes. But is it instantiated in reality? If so, how? …

Without some spelled-out basis for fitting inherent value into the universe we accept on nonmoral grounds, where is that rock for us to stand on when we affirm the truth of animal rights (in a non-derivative and merely utilitarian sense)?

I think Marks is correct that “inherent value” is a supernatural concept that Regan does not (nor could ever) properly defend. For something to have value, there must be someone valuing it. Otherwise, what the hell are we talking about? What is an inherent value that is independent of any valuator making a value judgment upon something?

The only way I can make sense of a concept such as “inherent value” is to interpret it as “self-valuation” – an individual’s assessment of their own worth – but Regan insists that this isn’t it. (“Those who have a more pleasant or happier life do not therefore have greater inherent value than those whose lives are less pleasant or happy.”) I don’t see how this can be logically supported.

Regan says it is subjects-of-a-life who have inherent value. And he also says that what distinguishes subjects-of-a-life from other living creatures is that we are aware of our lives and value them. The reason subjects-of-a-life have value even when no one else cares about us is that we care about ourselves. Self-valuing beings provide their own guaranteed worth. (In contrast, since non-sentient things cannot value themselves, there must be someone else valuing them if they are to be worth anything.) And if the reason we subjects-of-a-life have inherent value is that we are aware of our own lives and value them, how can Regan then say that this value that appears only in beings who value their own lives is independent of how we personally value our own lives (“Those who have a more pleasant or happier life do not therefore have greater inherent value than those whose lives are less pleasant or happy.”)? If inherent value only comes about through consciousness, how can the quality of that conscious experience not affect the quality of that inherent value?

I can see why Regan goes this route. Otherwise, suffering and suicidal people would have little to no inherent value, no matter how beloved they were (sorry Kurt), and deluded, conceited, self-important pricks would have the most inherent value, even if everyone hated them. Arrogant idiots and psychopaths would be due more respect than depressed, world-saving geniuses.

But just because that seems like a sad state of affairs doesn’t mean that Regan’s answer makes sense. If self-valuation is not germane to inherent value, a life characterized by near-constant pain from birth to death has the same inherent value as a life characterized primarily by pleasure and joy. The person enduring ceaseless, excruciating suffering who never wants to leave bed is no doubt less pleased with her own life than is her neighbor who experiences mostly happiness and races to the shower every morning, yet Regan says these self-assessments cannot contradict that their lives are equally inherently valuable.

So let’s imagine a pre-existence, as philosophers are wont to do. And let’s say the pre-born get some say in the lives they are going to assume on Earth, but there is fierce competition and the pre-born have to squabble over the lives that are most in demand. Wouldn’t they all be fighting to secure the more pleasurable future lives for themselves? And wouldn’t they all shy away from the lives of mostly agony, boredom, gloom and defeat? If there were money in the pre-existence, wouldn’t the richest pre-born buy the most desirable future lives? And if so, wouldn’t it seem that the lives of agony have less value, and the lives of ease and pleasantness have more value?

Since Regan says inherent value doesn’t have to do with self-valuation or the assessment of outsiders, this inevitably raises a question that Regan never answers: where does inherent value come from if it’s not dependent on a valuator? If I don’t value myself, and no one else values me, how do I have value?

By the power of Regan’s wishful thinking, it would seem:

To view certain individuals (e.g., moral agents) as having equal inherent value is a postulate—that is, a theoretical assumption. As befits any theoretical assumption, however, it is not one made without reason. On the contrary, it is an assumption that vies with alternative theories about the value of moral agents, in particular the views that they lack value in their own right and are only receptacles of experiences that are valuable in themselves (the utilitarian view) or that they have value in their own right but a kind of value that varies from individual to individual, depending upon the possession of favored virtues (the perfectionist view).

And there are reasons for accepting [the equal inherent value] postulate. To postulate that moral agents have equal inherent value provides a theoretical basis for avoiding the wildly inegalitarian implications of perfectionist theories, on the one hand, and, on the other, the counterintuitive implications of all forms of act utilitarianism (e.g., that secret killings that optimize the aggregate consequences for all affected by the outcome are justified). (247)

In other words, Regan doesn’t like what happens if we don’t accept inherent value, so let’s all believe in inherent value even though it doesn’t appear to have any basis in fact.

Many people are not opposed to believing a myth if it makes their lives better, so inherent value could be defensible if it worked in that regard, but Regan seems to have overlooked that accepting a sourceless valuation on our heads that is independent of even what we think of ourselves leads to some strange results.

For instance, even if your life were horrible and no one loved you and you wished for nothing more than to be dead, suicide would be wrong because it would violate your own inherent value, that mysterious value which is inextricable from yourself and out of your own control and everyone else’s. In fact, it would be just as bad to self-murder as it would be to murder someone who loved her life and was loved by many people, since you both have this same inextricable value. Inherent value traps us in a secular version of the religious view that suicide is immoral because even if we don’t value our lives, God does, and so killing ourselves is an affront to God and a harm to his creation. Except it makes even less sense here, because at least in the religious version we know where this value is coming from.

If Regan explicitly discusses suicide in the book, I missed that part, but he does talk about euthanasia in an earlier chapter; unfortunately, he appears to have written this section before the concept of inherent value occurred to him, because he comes out in favor of euthanasia in certain conditions, seemingly unaware of its obvious conflict with his ideal of equal inherent value no matter what anyone thinks of a sentient life, including the one living it. If inherent value exists whether or not anyone values a given life, there can never be a justification to intentionally end any life that could otherwise persist—not even your own miserable one.

It’s not just suicide that is on par with murder if we all have equal inherent value no matter what. Another unusual development is that killing someone in self-defense or hunting an animal for survival are both as bad as premeditated, cold-blooded murder. Like with suicide, Regan doesn’t come right out and say this — in fact, he says self-defense can be justified in certain instances — but the implication is hard to miss:

Though this is not the occasion to work out the full implications, it is worth noting in passing that the rights view could not sanction any form of punishment that failed to treat the convicted criminal with that respect to which he or she is due as one who possesses inherent value. For no one can gain or lose this value by anything that person does or fails to do. (290-291)

If you don’t lose your inherent value by being an aggressor with murderous intent, then no matter who dies in a fight to the death –- the one who started it or the one acting in self-defense -– either survivor is equally guilty of snuffing out someone with inherent value. And since animals don’t lose their inherent value just because you’re on the verge of starvation, eating one would be an instrumental use of animals (and thus wrong), even if you were about to die.

In an earlier version of this entry, I questioned the consistency of Regan’s “lifeboat scenario,” in which he argues that human lives have more value than other animal lives, but at the same time have equal inherent value. Equal inherent value, it turns out, has nothing to do with lives being equally worthy, but rather with equality of respect. We have to give due respect to beings for the sort of lives they have, and in the case of animals, this means sometimes treating their lives as less precious because they have simpler, less rich experiences.

I still don’t think that works for Regan because it leaves the value of animal lives and the respect due to them open to subjective interpretation; if you are willing to acknowledge a hierarchy in life value, there’s nothing — aside from the argument from marginal cases — to prevent us from saying that we can respect animals and yet also eat them. For instance, you could say that because animal lives are so basic, all it takes to respect them is to raise them humanely and attempt to kill them painlessly. Since their lives are not as valuable as ours, we are under no obligation to treat their lives as we do human lives.

But I took this section out because the lifeboat scenario has been attacked so often that it’s hard to say anything new about it, and it’s what everyone focuses on, even though there are plenty of other problems with inherent value. I do still want to quote the lifeboat scenario anyway, but for another reason. Here is Regan:

There are five survivors: four normal adults and a dog. The boat has room enough only for four. Someone must go or else all will perish. Who should it be? Our initial belief is: the dog. Can the rights view illuminate and justify this prereflective intuition? The preceding discussion of prevention cases shows how it can. All on board have equal inherent value and an equal prima facie right not to be harmed. Now, the harm that death is, is a function of the opportunities for satisfaction it forecloses, and no reasonable person would deny that the death of any of the four humans would be a greater prima facie loss, and thus a greater prima facie harm, than would be true in the case of the dog. Death for the dog, in short, though a harm, is not comparable to the harm that death would be 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 were thrown overboard.  (324)

All I want to say about this now is that since Regan claims that death is a harm because it forecloses all opportunities — and so we should not intentionally kill anyone except in an emergency — anything we do that forecloses even some opportunities should be considered an inexcusable harm, as it is a kind of partial death. Inherent value, then, would ban the spaying and neutering of companion animals, since that forecloses the opportunities these animals have for the satisfaction of sex. And euthanasia and suicide are on the cutting room floor again because even if a life is awful on the whole, it still has an opportunity for at least one or two satisfactions, and death would foreclose the opportunity to experience those meager joys.

An even greater problem comes from Regan’s implication that in a choice between something with inherent value and something with instrumental value, the one with merely instrumental value must always be sacrificed. Since plants are not subjects-of-a-life and have only instrumental value (we like to eat them), equality of respect means plants get none. Therefore, we should never sacrifice an animal for a plant. Accidental and “unintentional but foreseen” killing of animals for agriculture might not upset Regan too much, but intentionally killing rodents, birds or deer to protect crops could not be allowed if we accepted Regan’s views. Even though the crops we plant make our lives possible by giving us sustenance, they still only function instrumentally — unlike all the animals that we now have to let devour our cherished food supply.

And yet, to make this even more non-sensical and confusing, Regan doesn’t discount the possibility that non-sentient life may have inherent value!:

It may be that there are individuals, or possibly collections of individuals, that, though they are not subjects of a life in the sense explained, nevertheless have inherent value—have, that is, a kind of value that is conceptually distinct from, is not reducible to, and is incommensurate with such values as pleasure or preference satisfaction. The issues here are extremely complicated. As I have argued elsewhere, the very possibility of developing a genuine ethic of the environment, as distinct from an ethic for its use, turns on the possibility of making the case that natural objects, though they do not meet the subject-of-a-life criterion, can nonetheless have inherent value. Attempts to show that this is conceptually absurd are inconclusive at best, while attempts to show that postulating inherent value in natural objects or collections of such objects, though intelligible, is unnecessary, suffer from a similar fate. Nevertheless, it is extraordinarily difficult to give an intelligent account of inherent value in this connection. …

Those who would work out a genuine ethic of the environment in terms of the inherent value of natural objects (trees, rivers, rocks, etc.) or of collections of such objects are not logically debarred from undertaking the task by anything said or implied in these pages, since the subject-of-a-life criterion is set forth as a sufficient, not as a necessary, condition of making the attribution of inherent value intelligible and non-arbitrary. While no one is denied the possibility of working out such an ethic, however, those who aspire to do it certainly have their work cut out for them. (245 – 246)

I am amazed that Regan left this issue unresolved. Adherents of his philosophy don’t eat animals because they believe them to have inherent value by virtue of being born subjects-of-a-life, and here’s Regan saying that plants may have inherent value too, despite not being subjects-of-a-life. Dear lord, what are vegans supposed to eat?! True, Regan mentions “trees, rivers, rocks, etc.” and doesn’t say anything about soybeans and earns of corn possibly having inherent value, but if frickin’ rocks might deserve equal respect, who knows? It’s not like we get to choose what has inherent value, right Regan?

Regan is skeptical that anyone could reveal inherent value in non-SOALs, but all it would take is a minor tweak of his own theory. He says that all beings deserve equal respect if they care about their own lives. A more lax (but no less plausible) way to put this is that all beings deserve respect if they have a survival instinct, which is a sort of caring about one’s life, even if an unconscious one. Plants have a survival instinct (or Wille zum Leben), despite not being aware of their own lives, so they could have inherent value too.

What a mess it would be if inherent value actually existed! It’s kind of nice to know that it’s all just a figment of Regan’s imagination.