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5.0 out of 5 stars
Human Rights, Not Animal Rights, October 16, 2009
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!
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20 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Response to Nobis' Review by author, August 29, 2004
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.
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22 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
a serious disappointment from a not very serious philosopher, July 16, 2004
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.
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