Putting Humans First: Why We Are Nature's Favorite

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!

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.

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. Ou

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!