By S.L. Davis, Department of Animal Sciences, Oregon State
University, Corvallis, OR 97331. Published in the Proceedings of
the Third Congress of the European Society for Agricultural and
Food Ethics, 2001, pp 440-450. Although the debate over the
moral status of animals has been going on for thousands of years
(Shapiro, 2000), there has been a resurgence of interest in this
issue in the last quarter of the 20th century. One of the
landmark philosophical works of this period was the book by
Regan (1983) called “A Case for Animal Rights.” In that book,
Regan concludes that animals do have moral standing, that they
are subjects-of-a-life with interests that deserve equal
consideration to the same interests in humans, and therefore
have the right to live their lives without human interference.
As a consequence, he concludes that humans have a moral
obligation to consume a vegan (use no animal products) diet and
eliminate animal agriculture. However, production of an all
vegan diet also comes at the cost of the l