Customer Reviews

Putting Humans First: Why We Are Nature's Favorite (Studies in Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

It is unfortunate that writers too often believe they get paid by the word. As a result, we end up with not only overly long books, but bad overly long books. Excessive verbiage often confuses rather than clarifies.

Of course, those of you who have read my book reviews might accuse me of the same failing. Admittedly, my approach is to overwhelm my readers with an amount of information that will cause them to buy the book I review or dissuade them from buying it. At the very least, I aim to impart much of the message of the book, in case readers ignore my advice.

Imparting the total message of Putting Humans First is extremely difficult: Its density of thoughtful content defies its brief narrative.

Putting Humans First is the only book I have encountered that views today's environmental movement from a historical and philosophical perspective and convincingly argues why we have been on the wrong track. Machan then lays out a simple blueprint for man's future interaction with the planet and animal kingdom.

Putting Humans First should become the gold standard for warm and friendly human beings endeavoring to understand and explain why, though we may love animals and nature, they are intrinsically inferior to humans. They warrant "rights" only as we humans define them.


A Logical Argument

Author Dr. Tibor Machan, who is emeritus professor of philosophy at Auburn University, presents an irrefutable argument that will arm with unbeatable ammunition anyone inclined to debate this topic.

Machan develops his argument in a logical manner. He describes most warm, fuzzy members of the animal kingdom as being driven by uncontrollable instinct that is often brutal to their own young, not to mention competing animal families. The phrase "dog eat dog" may no longer be accurate with respect to domestic pets, but it most assuredly applies in the wild with other mammals. Machan vividly describes unambiguous situations where an animal's life must be sacrificed to save a human. Then he points out that "animal activists" and many "eco-activists" are not persuaded by this argument because they truly hate people.

He explains how public policy has already subjugated human rights to animal rights through the Endangered Species Act and wetlands legislation, which stifle human progress and property rights.

He then offers a lengthy philosophical argument, of which Plato and Aristotle would be proud, to explain why humans warrant extensive individual rights but animals only modest rights. He supports, as do I, the prevention of cruelty to animals, though neither of us defines as "cruelty" the humane ending of an animal's life for medical and nutritional purposes.

Machan defines the flaws of environmental activism with skill equal to his assault on animal rights activists. Any student of recent history knows collectivist political economies have failed everywhere in the world they have been attempted--China, USSR, Cuba, and East Germany to name but a few modern examples. Machan traces strong warning against collectivist societies from Aristotle and Plato thousands of years ago to Ludwig von Mises early in the twentieth century and Garrett Hardin more recently still.

For those of you who may make the mistake of not investing the time and money to spend a few hours with this book, let me share with you what Aristotle said in the 4th Century B.C. and what Garrett Hardin said in 1968.


Aristotle

"That all persons call the same thing mine in the sense in which each does so may be a fine thing, but it is impracticable; or if the words are taken in the other sense, such a unity in no way conduces to harmony. And there is another objection to the proposal. For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other consideration, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill; as in families, many attendants are often less useful than a few." (Politics 1262a30 37)


Hardin

"Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning--that is the day when the long desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all." (Science December 13, 1968)


Addressing the Tragedy

The main thing we need to solve the tragedy of the commons, Machan says, "is a theory of justice fully informed by Aristotle and Hardin's recognition of the problem." He says libertarianism is the only such theory currently afoot, but he worries over its inability to become mainstream.

Machan points out that each succeeding generation spawns an intellectual elite convinced "they can make collectivism work," regardless of past failures. He brilliantly portrays today's radical environmentalism as a variant of socialism, in turn a variant of collectivism--the theory that the individual counts for nothing when compared to some greater collective whole, whether the state or mother nature. "Yesterday it was socialism, today it is environmentalism," Machan writes.

Though a philosopher by trade, Machan proves to a be a strong proponent of free markets, private property, and the rule of law. While we know this to be capitalism by definition, he proves its effectiveness as a mathematician might prove an equation in differential calculus. He writes,

"Governments use force to accomplish their goals. But force, unless used in self-defense--as the military is supposed to use it--wreaks havoc in its path, even when the ostensible results seem to be grand. And nowhere is this more evident than in environmental matters. When the laws and public policy favor the system of eminent domain and the use of publicly owned lands and waters for whatever happens to be in quasi-democratic demand, the usual result is akin to a zero-sum game: the favored policy wins, the disfavored one loses. By contrast, in the free market, there are many disparate demands that get satisfied to a greater or lesser extent. This has vital implication for environmental policy."

Machan concludes there is evidence for the environmental benefits of free markets all around us but, perhaps most clearly, in the contrast between what Soviet-style socialist central planning has done to the environment in eastern Europe and the comparatively less-harmful results arising from the far more capitalist, free market, private property-based system of the West.

There are gems of wisdom on nearly every page of this wonderfully short book. I will conclude with this one.

"Environmentalists need to be more optimistic about the prospects of managing environmental problems in a legal framework of individual liberty. What many in the environmental movement fail to realize (or perhaps admit to) is that the environmental problems that can be clearly identified rather than merely speculated about are generated by the tragedy of the commons. They are not generated by the privatization of resources or by the implementation of the principles that prohibit dumping and other kinds of trespassing, principles derived from an individual conception of justice and public policy."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jay Lehr [...] is science director for The Heartland Institute.

In this book, Dr. Tibor Machan makes the case against rights for animals and makes a convincing argument that environmentalists should favor individual rights rather than an emphasizing the needs of nature over humanity.

This is the first of Dr. Machan's books that I have read and it is a short, well-written treatise that should provoke people, especially environmentalists, to think about the cause(s) they support or the positions they take.

To Machan, the notion that animals should be granted the same rights as humans is nonsense and demonstrates why it is. He contends (and I completely agree) that only beings who have the capacity to think and reason should have natural, individual rights.

Because only humans have the capacity to think, unlike animals, it is they who will and have the capacity to act morally and ethically.

Therefore, only humans should have rights.

A right designates someone's natural sphere of influence so they can remain free from force or the involuntary influence of others.

Government, in turn, is established to protect individual human beings from force and fraud and should not be preverted, like the environmentalist and animal rights groups want, into granting special privileges to certain groups. In this case animals.

The concept of rights took many centuries of struggle and thought on the part of humans to achieve and was nearly obliterated with the adoption of the collectivistic philosophies of fascism, naziism and communism.

Now, mankind is faced with other popular collectivist philosophies (the most prominent of them is environmentalism) in which a cause that is a natural outgrowth from that movement is animal rights.

Aside from the fact that animals had no part in the achievement and restoration of rights for human beings, its clear that rights were achieved for the betterment of human beings and are exclusively for them.

On animal cruelty, Tibor is not clear on this point. Yet there are property laws in place that can protect an owner's domesticated animals from acts of violence committed against them by another. This I agree with since one of government's proper functions is to protect private property.

Any attempt to pervert rights by extending them to non-humans or even potential ones (such as developing fetuses) is an attack on human life itself, is immoral and should be rejected outright.

"Putting Humans First" is not a medium to attack people who wish to give rights to animals and other forms of nature. It is a open letter to the average reader who may or may not have considered arguments to the contrary of what they believe or what leaders or activists of groups, like PETA or Greenpeace, may have told them.

This is the first and only book that I have found to openly challenge the concept of animal rights and bring arguments against them to the general public.

Accolades to Tibor Machan for doing so!

Revisiting the Animal Rights/Liberation Debate

I say "revisiting" because I have addressed the topic in several places quite a few times and want merely to respond to a rather dismissive footnote reference to my treatment of it by Nathan Nobis. I am not going to address Nobis' discussion in full. (He and I have gone round and round about all this via email.)

In a footnote Nobis says "Tibor Machan claims...that humans' use of animals is permissible because doing so makes `the best use of nature of our success in living our lives'." He then adds "[Machan] also notes that we also might benefit from using (marginal) humans, but does not explain why that would be wrong. He merely states that `as far as infants or the significantly impaired among human beings are concerned, they cannot be the basis for a general account of human morality, of what rights human beings have. Borderline cases matter in making difficult decisions but not in forging a general theory.' That might be true, but these remarks provide no reason to think that marginal humans have rights and animals don't, so Machan's views remain incomplete and undefended" (p. 59).

If you only read one paper by someone concerning a topic on which the author has written several more basic papers, no wonder you will conclude that the author's views "remain incomplete." However, I have written a now widely reprinted paper, "Do Animals Have Rights?" (available on the Internet via Google) which lays the foundation for just the point I make in the later paper Nobis references. And since I have written at least two full length books on natural rights theory, the probability of my having given the matter a reasonably complete treatment is considerable. However, for those unfamiliar with the work who wish, nonetheless, to comment on my views, there will be a problem since much of what I discuss about animal rights/liberation rests on these prior works.

More recently, I have also produced this little book, mainly for the general reader, in which I explain why nonhuman animals are not the sort of beings to which the sort of rights human beings have and Regan and others wish to defend can reasonably be ascribed. Basically, the idea is that Lockean rights that, as it were, carve out what Robert Nozick called our "moral space," concern the kind of beings that are moral agents. Moral patients-that is, beings vis-à-vis one may do something wrong-need not be rights possessors. Consider a Rembrandt painting that would be ordinarily morally vicious to destroy. Yet, despite being a sort of moral patient, the painting has no rights. Only beings that are capable of making fundamental, free choices that may be morally evaluated as right or wrong, can be rights possessors of the sort at issue in the discussion.

"Rights" are a political concept based on the moral nature of human beings who possess them and require a sphere of personal authority, sovereignty, to make morally significant choices. Our moral nature consists of our capacity-qua human beings, rational and volitional animals-to make free, morally significant choices.

There are cases, of course, of impaired human beings, infants and so forth whose rights need to be explained in light of their special situation. As I indicated in the passage Nobis quotes from my last paper on the topic--and as I discuss at length in my book, which Nobis seems not really to have read in full--such exceptional instances do not defeat the general case for human rights anymore than the existence of broken chairs would defeat the general case of chairs being the sort of objects suitable for sitting on them. The existence of malfunctioning-or infant-instances of any kind of thing do not defeat the general principles characterizing their actions and the conditions of their behavior. So, yes, children have rights, as do people in a coma, at least up to the point that they remain properly classified as human beings (which could change).

Putting the matter more simply, nonhuman animals aren't subject to moral considerations-guilt, regret, forgiveness, punishment, obligation, and so forth, just as they aren't subject to legal considerations-subjects of lawsuits, owed due process, etc. Sure, one can stretch normal normative language-as is done so effectively in Disney and other animated movies-but that is poetic license, not accurate discourse about morality and politics.

None of this addresses the topic of how animals should be treated by human beings except that whatever will be the right answer to that will not rest on considerations of their rights, which do not exist. But let me just make a final point which I discuss at length in my recent book, namely, that it is quite OK for people to hurt animals as they use them for their own good, if that is the best way to achieve that good. This is so with human beings hurting themselves-when they go to the dentist, have a painful operation, undertake painful exercise or go about seeking various worthy goals that can only be achieved at the expense of some, often terrible, pain. Wanton self-infliction of pain-masochism, in short-is morally wrong, and so would be-as all parents seem to tell their children without benefit of animal rights advocates-wanton cruelty to nonhuman animals. The justification for this, however, is not the topic here.

Writings criticizing our treatment of non-human animals - in agribusiness, the fashion industry and in research labs - are being published at an astounding rate. Since defenses of the status quo regarding animal use have not been as forthcoming, Machan's book is a welcome, but disappointing, contribution to the debates.

Machan argues that the idea of animal rights is "a fiction" and "a trick." This is because a being has rights - it is wrong to harm it for pleasure or even serious benefits - only if it has a "moral nature," i.e., a "capacity" to see the difference between right and wrong and choose accordingly (pp. xv, 10). Machan says humans are of that "kind" and animals are not and so concludes that humans have rights and animals have none.

But these arguments are imprecise: true, only humans have this capacity, but only some humans, not all. Thus, his theory of rights seems to provide no protection for vulnerable humans who are not moral agents and so lack the moral nature he describes.

Machan disagrees: he argues that, contrary to appearances, human babies and severely mentally challenged individuals do not "lack moral agency altogether" (p. 16) and thus they have rights on his theory. To see this, however, he says that we must consider them as they would exist "normally, not abnormally" and focus on the "healthy cases, not the special or exceptional ones" (p. 16; cf. pp. 38, 40). Apparently, Machan thinks that since "normal" human beings are moral agents, abnormal humans are moral agents as well. But this inference is clearly illegitimate: while exceptional humans' characteristics include some properties they share with normal humans (e.g., being biologically human), it is not true that, in general, all features of normal beings are shared by abnormal beings: e.g., quadriplegics and cancer patients are in their unfortunate conditions even though normal, healthy humans - whom they share much with - are not.

So, in the absence of arguments to the contrary, the fact that normal humans are moral agents does not make abnormal humans moral agents. Thus, they do not meet Machan's necessary condition for rights; his defense of the rights of vulnerable humans fails and thereby so does his argument that animals have no moral rights. His criticism of one implausible theory of rights - that if someone merely has an interest in something, then he or she has a right to that thing - does little to defend his position either.

Machan's other main argument against animal rights is surprising. He claims that if animals have the right to not be harmed at the hands of moral agents, then they also have that right against "politically incorrect" animals who, as he repeatedly observes throughout the book, are not moral agents (p. 12). He argues that since they don't have that latter right (i.e., animals don't have rights against other animals), they don't have the former right (i.e., they have no rights against us). Basically he suggests that - when it suits our pleasure - it is morally permissible for us to act like some animals and kill other animals. Thankfully Machan does not endorse our imitating some animals by our eating our offspring (or our excrement), but since chickens, pigs, cows, rats, mice, and most primates are primarily vegetarian, they would surely welcome our imitation in that regard.

One important, surprising and encouraging remark might help resolve this ambivalence: Machan suggests that one might be "morally remiss" for not breaking the law to "invade" a neighbor's private property to rescue a cat who was being tortured by the neighbor, the cat's owner (p. 22). If this is Machan's true view, then he clearly does not believe that humans should always come first and the Animal and Earth Liberation Fronts, as well as more moderate animal and environmental advocates, have found an ally in a most surprising place.

There are many smart approaches to defending human rights as superior to animal "rights" and Tibor Machan is on the right track with this book. Read it for yourself - don't listen to the fools writing here who dismiss him as "not a serious philosopher" - that's just a cowardly and intellectually wimpy way to attack someone's work. The other negative reviews are even more intellectually vacant. Hey, you know what? Tibor Machan is smarter than James Rachels! The tests are in and in every metric, Machan surpasses Rachels. It's really quite refreshing.

This short but nifty book is a concise defense of human life, with a critique of the muddle of "animal rights" theory and a sharp examination of anti-human environmentalism. Machan successfully demonstrates that the tragedy of the commons plagues nearly all mainstream, let alone extreme, environmentalist policy recommendations. But the most telling point he makes is that animal rights or liberation champions contradict themselves when they implore us to treat animals as if they were just like us and had the rights we all have, while also treating animals as lacking all moral responsibilities. Well, then we are very, very different from other animals, are we not, which accounts for our having rights and their lacking them!

I recently had the displeasure of reading this book, which ranks as one of the most smug, self-serving, pseudointellectual diatribes I've ever come across. Come on, the author gives HIMSELF a five-star review? And no, I'm not some animal rights greenie weenie; I used to work for a big game guide and am an active hunter who's lived 24 of my 27 years in Alaska in remote Native villages, surrounded by wildlife. I've learned the hard way that all life is equal on this little rock, and I wish that I could give back the thoughtless excesses of my past, when I, too, believed animals were here for our pleasure and whim. I could write forever on all that's wrong with this book, but it'd be a waste of time, because the author is so sure of his conclusions, and obviously has spent so little face time with the "inferior" creatures he dismisses with such facility. And oh, did you notice the writing this book was subsidized by a special interest group, and wasn't published by a legitimate for-profit house? That explains a lot. Anyhow, I wonder how the superior Mr. Machan would fare if he, like a caribou calf, came into this world soaking wet onto a patch of soggy tundra, owning nothing, in one of the harshest environments on earth. Who's smart around here? Get out of your plasticized-ivory tower and out into the woods, Mr. Machan, and spend a few years learning what our hunter-gatherer ancestors always knew: we're nothing special, and all life is sacred.

This is a hideous display of human idiocy - there is no way that any thinking, reasoning adult could actually hold these views. This simply must have been written as some kind of sick joke - not funny at all.