Almost Like Waging War. Tom Regan and the Conditions for Using Violence for the Sake of Animals

Abstract

This paper investigates Tom Regan’s attitude towards violence as a litmus test to understand the justifiability of the use of violence in animal rights activists (ARAs). Although Regan’s take seems uncontroversially against a recourse to violence, there is an ambiguity in his position. By comparing Regan’s conditions for the legitimate use of violence for the sake of animal liberation with the standard conditions for jus ad bellum, I show that Regan construed the conditions for the former in a specular manner as the conditions for the latter. However, since he was not an absolute pacifist, there is some contradiction, and he should have been more willing to justify some recourse to violence than he in fact does. I conclude by gesturing towards some possible changes that his thought should undergo in order to adjust this incoherence.