Magel was born June 3, 1920, and grew up in Burlington, Iowa, where he lived on a 150-acre farm with eight siblings. He studied electrical engineering at Iowa State College, going on to study at Northwestern University for three years. He worked as a night clerk at a hotel after graduation and served for five years in the US Naval Reserve during the Second World War. In 1950, inspired by Albert Schweitzer's autobiography Out of My Life and Thought, Magel enrolled in graduate school at the University of Minnesota to study philosophy. He submitted his dissertation, An Analysis of Kierkegaard's Philosophic Categories in 1960. In 1962, he initiated a philosophy program at Moorhead State University. After reading Peter Singer'sAnimal Liberation and Tom Regan's "The Moral Basis of Vegetarianism" in 1975, Magel became a vegetarian and introduced an animal rights course onto the philosophy curriculum; making it one of the first university courses completely focused on the topic. In 1981, Magel published A Bibliography on Animal Rights and Related Matters lists over 3,200 works. He retired from teaching in 1985. In 1989, Magel authored Keyguide to Information Sources in Animal Rights a bibliography of works dealing with animal rights. It was positively reviewed as an "outstanding resource that many academic libraries will want to acquire." Another review described it as a "carefully crafted and scholarly overview to the literature and philosophy of the animal rights movement." In 1992, a new edition of J. Howard Moore's The Universal Kinship was published, edited by Magel and including a biographical essay of the author. In 1997, Magel published an edited edition of Lewis Gompertz's Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes. Magel died on March 22, 2014, he left Moorhead State University $800,000 to establish the Charles R. Magel Endowment Fund.
Activism
Magel was an outspoken advocate against animal testing; he once stated:
Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: "Because the animals are like us." Ask the experimenters why it is morally okay to experiment on animals, and the answer is: "Because the animals are not like us." Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction.
