Comparing Lives and Epistemic Limitations: A Critique of Regan's Lifeboat from An Unprivileged Position

In The Case for Animal Rights, Tom Regan argues that although all subjects-of-a-life have equal inherent value, there are often differences in the value of the lives of beings with inherent value. According to him, lives with the highest value are those lives with the opportunity for “impartial, moral satisfaction.” I argue that Regan's account of comparable value is problematic for two reasons. First, it embodies a masculine idea of what it means to have a morally significant life, while marginalizing the lives of those who use emotion and feeling in moral deliberation. Second, it leads to a hierarchical view of which lives matter, whereby the lives of the privileged will always turn out to have greater value than the lives of the oppressed since the oppressed do not always have equal opportunities for “higher satisfactions.” To avoid such counter-intuitive implications, I suggest that Regan should abandon the idea that we can make comparable judgments about the value of the lives of beings with inherent value.