Varying Degrees of Subjecthood?

Regan discusses the inherent value of beings which are the “subject-of-a-life”. However, it seems that humans and animals are the subjects of lives to varying degrees, and therefore have drastically different experiences of what Mary Anne Warren calls “subjecthood”. I believe this creates problems for Regan’s theory.

While a Utilitarian theory of sentience accounts for the differences between species, acknowledging that we have different capacities to feel pleasure and pain, Regan’s account seems lacking in that it does not adequately account for the fact that we are the subjects of lives to varying degrees. Consider, as Kant pointed out, the fact that animals are not self-conscious and therefore do not have an “I”. Being incapable of such self-reflection makes impossible the mental anguish and suffering that humans experience (which was acknowledged by Peter Singer). Considering this, some of Regan’s language becomes misleading, for example, his argument that humans and animals “want and prefer things; believe and feel things; recall and expect things” (Regan 88). Surely, depending on what species is in question, the experiences of “believing” and “expecting” will vary tremendously from one case to another. They may in fact vary so greatly that we will consider them to be “subjects” in significantly different ways.

This becomes especially problematic in light of Mary Anne Warren’s commentary on Regan. She recounts his theory, that things must have either “the same inherent value and the same basic moral rights that we do”, or that they have “no inherent value and presumably no moral rights” (Warren 92). If a things being the subject-of-a-life is the basis for its having inherent value, it is indeed problematic that we cannot tell where the line differentiating these classes of things is. It is alarming to think that we could mistakenly treat some subject of a life which has the same inherent value as a human as having no value at all, but this seems to be all but unavoidable on Regan’s theory. It seems correct that subjecthood is more likely to come in degrees than to be all or nothing.