Review (with David Graham)
of Putting
Humans First: Why We Are Nature's Favorite by Tibor Machan, (The Journal of
Ayn Rand Studies, Fall 2006, Vol. 8, No. 1, 85-104).
Please see the PDF of final version
– which differs some from what’s below.
Also see our reply to John
Altick’s Review of Putting Humans First by Tibor Machan, The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (with
David Graham, forthcoming, Spring 2007)
Abstract: In
Putting Humans First: Why We Are Nature’s Favorite, Tibor Machan argues
against moral perspectives that require taking animals’ interests seriously. He
attempts to defend the status quo regarding routine, harmful uses of animals
for food, fashion and experimentation. Graham and Nobis show that his arguments
fail: they arguments provide no good reason to resist pro-animal moral
conclusions that are supported by a wide range of contemporary ethical
arguments.
David
Graham is an independent scholar living in
Nathan
Nobis, Ph.D., Philosophy Department,
1. Introduction
Philosophers
and other theorists from a surprisingly wide range of ethical perspectives have
advanced arguments for the conclusion that harming animals in agribusiness, in
the fashion industry, in research labs, and in other arenas – that is, causing
animals to experience pain, suffering, and death for these purposes – is
seriously morally wrong and that we individually and collectively ought not to
support these practices. The range of ethical perspectives includes
utilitarianism and other consequentialisms, rights-based deontologies, ideal
contractarianisms, virtue ethics, common-sense moralities, religious
moralities, feminist ethics, and more, indeed almost every major theoretical
perspective in ethics.[1]
While
there is a river of moral thinking in defense of animals, defenses of common
beliefs and attitudes regarding animal use are but a trickle. Therefore, Tibor Machan’s Putting
Humans First: Why We Are Nature’s Favorite, an attempt to justify the
status quo regarding animal use and show why its critics are mistaken, is a welcome
contribution to the discussion. Machan deserves
credit for addressing these issues and going where too few philosophers and
other intellectuals have gone before, but we argue that his book is a serious
philosophical disappointment. Regrettably, it will not become “the” case
against moral perspectives that take animals seriously.
We offer
our criticisms, however, in a friendly, constructive spirit. This is because,
based on some of what Machan writes, it seems that he
should be regarded him as a philosophical friend of animals. While he does not
seem to intend this, his position seems to morally condemn over 99% of the
practices that cause animals to experience pain, suffering, and death. We say
“seems” because we argue that a careful reader cannot tell exactly what Machan thinks are acceptable and unacceptable uses of
animals. Nevertheless, it seems that any informed and consistent advocates of Machan’s views should think that, in nearly all cases,
animals should not be raise and killed to be eaten, worn, and even experimented
on: they should agree with animal rights advocates on nearly all points of
practice about how animals ought to be treated. They might disagree about some
points of “theory,” but those disagreements might be merely academic in the
most trivial sense.
2. Staying on Target: Why “Rights” Can Be a
Distraction
We trust that readers are familiar
with the methods of husbandry, use and killing routinely employed in
agribusiness, the fur industry and animal experimentation. Machan unfortunately
does not provide readers with such information, so we encourage readers to seek
out this information so they might make more fully informed judgments and
choices about these matters.[2] Understanding these factual conditions gives
rise to concrete and practical ethical questions, such as these: Is it morally
permissible to treat animals these ways or not? If so, why? If not, what ways
of treating animals would be morally permissible? Should we support those who
treat animals these ways or not?
Answering these questions can take
us into moral theory to think about the basic nature of the difference between
right and wrong and what general moral principles are true. In thinking about
theory, however, we must remember that for any conclusions about theory we come
to, we always need to ask what implications they have for practice, in terms of
the answers they suggest to the concrete questions asked immediately above.
Just as
Machan avoids the empirical conditions of how animals are raised and killed,
much of his discussion of moral theory avoids direct
contact with these concrete questions about the rightness or wrongness of
actions that result in harms for animals. Machan’s focus on “theory” might
explain why much of his discussion is irrelevant to the concrete question of
whether such treatment of animals is right or wrong.
As an
example of this avoidance, in his introduction and first chapter (and
throughout the book), he focuses on arguing that
animals do not have moral “rights.” Below we argue that his arguments for this
claim are unsuccessful, but what’s important to remember is that even if they
were sound and so showed that no animals have any moral rights, this would not yield an answer to our concrete, practical
questions about how animals ought to be treated. This is because, even if
animals don’t have moral rights, there might be other, non-rights-based reasons
that would make it obligatory that we not eat, wear or experiment on them. As
Machan himself admits, “the issue of rights does not exhaust the field of
morality” (p. 21).
Because
not all moral obligations depend on moral rights, showing that animals have no
moral rights has no immediate implications for the concrete questions of whether
they should be raised and killed to be eaten, worn and experimented on. Talk of
moral rights, then, can be a huge red herring, a distraction from the concrete
questions of whether an action or policy is morally permissible or not. Of
course, keeping our focus on the evaluations of actions in terms of whether
they are morally permissible or not, morally obligatory or not, does not
preclude our careful evaluation of Machan’s
moral-theoretical discussion, and to this we now turn.
3. Beating Straw Men? Avoiding Serious
Philosophy
Machan’s
first chapter, “A Case for Animal Rights?”, begins by asking us to consider the
story of a boy whose arm was bitten off by a seven-foot, two-hundred-pound
shark. After the shark was wrestled ashore and shot dead, a lifeguard retrieved
the boy’s arm from the gullet of the shark, and doctors reattached it.
Machan reports that although any
sane person would agree that it was right to kill the shark to retrieve
Jessie’s arm, “there are thousands of animal rights advocates around the world,
including sundry Hollywood celebrities and high-profile academics with easy
access to the media,” who disagree because they believe “that human beings are
no more important than non-human beings” (p. 3). And he wonders why, after the
shark was killed, “not one rabid radical environmentalist galloped to the
nearest media outlet to bray about how wrong it is to slay a fish merely to
smooth the life path of a hegemonic human.”
This passage is an attack on a
straw man. Few animal advocates, philosophers, or activists that we know of
deny that a human is morally entitled to use deadly force against an animal to
fend off an attack or to retrieve a limb that the animal has bitten off. (It’s
telling that Machan does not name any philosophers whose views entail that it
would be wrong to engage in self-defense in such a bizarre circumstance.) This
is because this issue is, plausibly, one of self-defense, not whether “human
beings are no more important than non-human beings.“ Defenders of animal
rights, like defenders of human rights, believe in the right to self-defense
and rights to bodily protection (and even restoration, as in this case),
whether the aggressor is an animal or a human.
But to
keep our discussion directed towards the relevant issues we must ask: if Machan
thinks that if it’s morally permissible to defend ourselves from sharks in this
way, does this entail that standard practices in farms, slaughterhouses, and
labs are also morally permissible? This would be a remarkable inference; if it
was intended, it surely needs defense. Thus, it seems that Machan introduces
the issues to readers with an example that is not ideally relevant to the
relevant questions.
The simplistic view that Machan is
interested in attacking – that animals are simply “more important” than humans
and so their interests should always be placed above those of humans, even in a
violent conflict between a shark and a boy – is one that no serious philosopher
holds. On the contrary, as we will see below, most philosophers arguing for
animal rights are merely calling for the recognition of a negative right: the
right to be left alone and not harmed. Animal advocates who do not rest their
case on “rights” defend similar claims.[3]
4. Taking On Cases In Defense of Animals
In a variety of places in his book, Machan
gives reasons to think that no animals have “moral rights.” To understand the
exact claim he is arguing for, we must understand what he means by moral
rights, since this term can be used in a variety of ways. What are these moral
rights that Machan argues that no animals have? We
need to understand what moral rights are before we might understand why no
animals have them.
Machan’s explanations of what moral
rights are is not entirely clear. He claims that, “To have a
right means to be justified in preventing those who have the choice from
intruding on one within a given sphere of jurisdiction” (p. 5), and that “A
right specifies a sphere of liberty wherein the agent has full authority to
act” (p. 10). On this view about rights, what might it mean to say that animals
have no moral rights? Apparently, this is to say that nobody is justified in
preventing someone from intruding on any animals’ “sphere of jurisdiction.”
This is rather cryptic and not what people typically seem to be saying when
they claim that animals have no moral rights, and we will later see that
Machan, surprisingly, affirms that animals have rights in this sense.
Since Machan does not adequately explain what moral rights are (or
even note the wide variety of possible more specific moral rights, e.g., a
moral right to not be tortured, a right to respectful treatment, a right not to
suffer for trivial reasons, or a right not be killed for no good reason, etc.)
we need to help him. We can pretend and suppose that rights are the only thing
that would make routine harms to animals wrong; on this (false) view, to say
that animals have no rights is just to say that these routine harms are
justified, not wrong. This suggestion at least helps us make Machan’s
discussion relevant to the concrete issues, since we are taken directly to
reasons that might justify harmful uses of animals.
So, on this view, why is the claim that some animals possess moral
rights, as Machan puts it, “a fiction” and “a trick”? Why are people who think
it’s wrong to harm animals for food and fashion, among other uses, mistaken?
This is because, on his view, a being has moral rights, the properties that
presumably would make it wrong to harm it for pleasure or even serious
benefits, only if that being has a “moral nature,” that is, a “capacity” to see
the difference between right and wrong and choose accordingly (pp. xv, 10).
Machan claims, “It is this moral capacity that establishes a basis for rights,
not the fact that animals, like us, have interests or can feel pain.” Machan says humans are of the “kind” of being that have
such a moral nature and animals are not and so concludes that humans have
rights and animals have none.
So, according to Machan, why is harmful treatments of animals
permissible, e.g., why is it ok to cause them pain and suffering for the
pleasures of eating them? Because animals have no “moral nature.” Why would it
be wrong to treat any humans in such a way? Because they have such a “moral nature,” i.e., the
capacity to make moral decisions.
Those who have suffered greatly at the hands of others, or can
vividly imagine such an experience, might deny Machan’s hypothesis. On his
view, why would it be wrong to torture and kill you, the reader, for no good
reason? Not because of anything like this: it would hurt, your serious
interests would be set back greatly, doing so would be disrespectful to you,
and so on: it would be wrong because you are able to make moral decisions.
Those who have been victimized might easily think that Machan is simply wrong
about why what their tormenters were doing was wrong. If so, they would think that
Machan’s argument for why humans have
rights has a false premise: we don’t have rights because we are moral agents;
if that’s so, then so does his argument against animal rights, as this premise
is shared.
Setting this aside, we must note that the premises of Machan’s
argument against animal rights and for human rights are imprecise: true, we
might agree that only humans have this capacity for discerning right and
wrong, but only some humans, not all: it’s not the case that all humans
who, intuitively, should not be treated as animals are treated have this “moral
nature” that Machan describes: they don’t make moral decisions and so are not
moral agents. Thus, Machan’s theory of rights seems to provide no protection
for vulnerable humans – human babies, severely
mentally challenged individuals, and others
(regrettably these humans are often called “marginal cases” or “marginal
humans”) – who are not moral agents and so lack the moral nature he describes.
So, if such humans have rights, this shows that Machan’s argument against
animal rights is unsound because he has a mistaken view of what is necessary
for having any moral rights.[4]
Predictably, Machan disagrees with this evaluation of his argument. He claims 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. But how can this be? Machan explains that it’s not “the
particular level of intelligence or mental capacity of individual human agents
but rather on their particular type of consciousness, namely, what Ayn Rand has
called ‘volitional consciousness’ that makes humans moral agents” (p. 16). For
this reason, only a human “completely stripped of conscious faculty – for
example, an irremediably brain-dead accident victim – might be said to lack
moral agency altogether.”
So, on Machan’s view, even though these beings do not make any
moral decisions (since, perhaps, they don’t make any decisions) they are still
moral agents and so have rights. This is simply because they are humans, all
human consciousness is “volitional,” having volitional consciousness is
sufficient (and necessary?) for having rights, and therefore all humans who
have any degree of
consciousness – that is, those who are not “vegetables” lacking any
consciousness – have rights. So, for example, even though a newborn baby makes
no moral decisions, Machan thinks this being is a moral agent now; not a
potential moral agent, or a being who will become a moral agent, but an actual
moral agent.
This response is arbitrary. Machan defines any level of consciousness found in a
human being as “volitional” but defines any
level of consciousness found in animals as not volitional. But if “volitional” has any meaning at all, it
means having free will or having the ability to make moral decisions. As Machan
himself says, any human who has the tiniest degree of consciousness does not
lack moral agency altogether; this proves that for Machan and other
Objectivists, the crucial aspect of “volitional consciousness” – assuming it’s
not just a mere synonym for
moral agency – is that it includes some quality of moral agency.
But clearly we can point to flesh-and-blood individuals who,
despite being conscious, can’t engage in moral reasoning – individuals who’ve
had lobotomies, severe brain damage, severe retardation, and so on. To insist
that, despite this fact, these humans actually do have “volitional consciousness” simply because no matter what
their apparent incapacities are, they are human and therefore all of their consciousness is always
“volitional,” is to drain the word “volitional” of any weight or meaning. It
becomes an empty term whose only role is to beg the question in favor of human
consciousness and to smuggle in the notion that merely being a human with even
the slightest degree of consciousness is sufficient to be a moral agent. “Moral
agency,” or “volitional consciousness,” then becomes a capacity that depends,
not on a being’s provable possession of specific mental capacities, but merely
on the empirical test of whether you have human DNA and the slightest degree of
sentience. Thus, Machan’s response to this objection fails.
In addition to Machan’s claim that having any degree of human
consciousness is enough to give you volitional consciousness or moral agency,
Machan thinks that it is illegitimate to draw any ethical conclusions about
animals by examining our ethical beliefs about sentient human who are not moral
agents, and even lack the potential to be moral agents. This is because he
insists that we must consider these kinds of humans 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, since these humans would
“normally” be moral agents, this is why they have moral rights, even though
they are not moral agents.
This response fails also. First, infants and children, at least,
are not “abnormal” cases: all human, adult moral agents were once infants and
children: it’s a normal stage in a normal life. Second, why must we, as Machan insists, judge individual cases, some of
which are abnormal, as if they were “normal” ones? Machan simply states this
guideline without offering a reason for it. At first glance, it seems that making
ethical judgments about individuals based not on their own traits but on the
traits of normal members of their species is faulty. After all, normal humans
are not serial killers; does that mean when deciding how to regard an
exceptional, abnormal human like Ted Bundy, we should consider only normal
humans? To do so would ignore this individual’s special, and morally relevant,
features. It seems that we have to judge people’s moral status by their
individual traits, not by what is normal for their species. Machan reports:
A Martian would learn little about human beings beyond the
strictly biological if he were instructed only about fetuses, infants, and the
mentally ill. Nor can earthlings discover much about how to live their lives by
contemplating such cases.
And:
We do need to deal with borderline cases. But we can do so only by
applying and adapting the knowledge we acquire from the normal case. We can’t
start with the exception and infer the rule (pp. 16–17).
These responses do not help Machan’s position. It’s true that a
Martian would learn little about babies, and the mentally challenged, and the
senile if he only examined healthy, normal adults. Likewise, if a doctor
studied only humans who had normal, healthy pancreases, she would learn little
about how to treat humans who have diabetes. And if she studied only humans who
have good vision, she would learn little about treating the causes of blindness
in humans.
It would seem, then, that whether we’re talking about medicine or
morality, to learn how to deal with normal cases, we have to look at individual
normal cases, and to learn how to deal with marginal cases, we have to look at
individual marginal cases. In other words, we have to look at individuals. We
treat beings according to their own characteristics, not the features of other
beings who are in some ways similar to them but in
other ways different, sometimes importantly so. Thus, in absence of reasons 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
explicitly stated logically 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.[5]
To further argue
that animals have no rights, Machan claims that, “If nonhuman animals had
rights derived from their mere interests, they would have obligations to other
(interest-bearing) beings” (p. 14). He suggests that since animals have no
obligations to anyone, they have no rights either. But this does not follow:
human babies presumably have the moral right not to be tortured, but they have
no duties or obligations to anyone. Machan fails to justify his assumption to
the contrary, even though it is part of the bedrock of his claim that no
animals can have any moral rights. Machan’s refutation of an implausible and,
as far as we know, undefended, theory of moral rights – that if someone merely
has an interest in something, then he or she has a moral right to that thing – does little to
defend his position either.
While philosophers like Tom Regan, Peter Singer, and many others,
have spent decades developing ethical positions on the treatment of animals,
Machan’s presentation of their positions is very brief, at most only a few
pages in a very short book with very large print. A careful reader would not
get an accurate sense for what their views are or what their arguments in favor
of them are. Machan wishes to criticize these views, but he only provides a
caricature.
It seems, then, that this chapter provides no good reason to think
that animals cannot have moral rights. It also seems to provide an either false
or inferior explanation for why any humans have rights. Machan offers more
remarks in later chapters to try to show why animals have no moral rights, and
we will address those below. We will argue that these further remarks are
equally unsuccessful in providing good reasons to think that routine harms to
animals are morally justified.
5. Humans are of “the Highest
Value in the Known Universe”?
In his next chapter, “The Case for Speciesism,” Machan attempts to
explain why, by gaining an “objective understanding of nature,” we can justify
the view that “human beings are more important or valuable than other aspects
of nature, including plants and animals” (p. 29). He explains that, “Something
is important or valuable when it makes a positive or advantageous difference to
something or someone – as when we say that the sun is important for the plant
or that his home is a value to John” (p. 30). By this standard, he thinks,
humans are “of the highest value in the known universe” (p. 30).
A problem for this theory of value
or importance is that since nearly everything, and everyone, makes some
positive “difference” to something or someone, everything is important or
valuable on this theory. Some might thus suspect this theory makes value too
cheap. While Machan provides no details about what determines what might be of
highest value, there is no a priori reason that any, and especially all, humans
would come out at the top of the scale. Machan
notices that the sun makes a big difference to plants (and everyone, for that
matter) but doesn’t conclude that it is of highest value, even though his theory
perhaps implies it is. So his theory of value seems to provide little support
for his sense that all humans are of highest value.
In this chapter Machan returns to his explanation for why humans
who are not moral agents nevertheless have rights, but in a slightly different
way. The following two passages are representative. First:
The fact of occasional borderline cases is simply irrelevant to
the normal case – what is crucial is the generalization that human beings are
basically different from other animals by virtue of a crucial threshold in a
continuum of degrees (p. 40).
And, second:
To be sure, some people – infants and certain invalids – cannot be
characterized as fully responsible moral agents. There are some who have become
so ill or incapacitated that we excuse their conduct even when they act in ways
we would normally consider reprehensible. But these are exceptions, explained
by reference to the special conditions of debilitation or disease (p. 38).
It is not clear why Machan states that these cases are “explained
by reference to the special conditions of debilitation or disease.” Yes, these
humans are different from normal humans, but the moral question is, why these
individuals have moral rights even though they lack the qualities Machan’s
theory of rights states are necessary to have rights.
One way to
interpret Machan’s answer to this question is this: he is asserting that even
though these human marginal cases lack moral agency and volitional
consciousness as individuals, these humans still have rights because they are
members of a species for whom moral
agency and volitional consciousness are the norm. In general, his principle
seems to be this: to determine whether an individual has rights, we look not at
the individual’s capacities, but at what capacities are normal for members of
the being’s species.
But, again, this is a false principle. For example, normal human
adults have the basic hand-eye coordination that is necessary to drive a car;
we might plausibly think that this kind of hand-eye coordination is a norm for
the species. However, a blind human adult lacks this hand-eye coordination. But
so what? As Machan insists, when deciding what rights an individual has, “The
fact of occasional borderline cases is simply irrelevant to the normal case…”
It follows then, on Machan’s reasoning, that blind people have a right to drive
a car (or just they should be allowed to do so) since the abilities necessary
for doing so are ones that normal humans have. But since they don’t have this
right, again we see that how individuals should be treated is determined by
what they are like as individuals, not by what groups they are part of, or what
is normal for others, or even what is normal for their species.
As Machan repeatedly reminds us, normal humans don’t just have
rights: they also have obligations to others. Another consequence of a
species-based norm principle seems to be this: if a woman afflicted with
paranoid schizophrenia kills an innocent man because she honestly believes that
he is trying to kill her with deadly telepathic thought-rays, we must hold her
responsible for murder because she failed in her obligations to not murder
others. Why? Because being a responsible agent is normal for her species: schizophrenia is abnormal. However, Machan claims in several passages that animals
and humans who lack moral agency cannot be held responsible for these kinds of
actions. Unfortunately, before we can accept his theory of “individualist
anthropocentrism” and the rejection of animal rights on which it rests, we need
answers to these concerns about Machan’s repeated appeals to the moral
relevance of normalcy.
In a published reply to an earlier, shorter version of this review
posted on Nathan Nobis’s web site, Machan tries to answer the argument from
marginal cases by accusing it of falling prey to what he describes as the
nitpicking “geometrical” reasoning popular among logicians and analytic
philosophers. In this case, this amounts to observing that if one says that
something is a logically necessary condition for having some property (e.g.
having moral rights) then, if that claim is true, things that do not meet that
condition will lack that property. He says this error results from treating
humans like some Platonic entity T, such as a triangle, that always must have
certain traits A, B, and C, or else it can’t correctly be characterized as a T.
Machan says we must accept that in the real world of biological entities that:
when something is properly defined, it will have the
characteristics that are included in the definition in typical cases, normally,
mainly. So, for example, if being a human beings [sic] means, in part, being a
moral agent, the bulk of human beings in the bulk of cases, typically, will be
moral agents. However, when they are asleep or in a coma or suffer from serious
mental impediments they will lack such moral agency…. Nonetheless, human beings
are moral agents, generally, as a matter of their nature, over the long haul,
normally.[6]
But, as have discussed above, the humans who lack Machan’s stated
logically necessary condition for having moral rights are not limited to those
who are deprived of moral agency only while asleep or in a coma. These humans
include those who have the potential to become moral agents, such as infants
and children, and even those who will never be moral agents because they lack
the biological potential, such as the severely brain-damaged, the congenitally
disabled, the senile, the permanently insane, and so on. So Machan’s appeal to
these examples is unhelpful. Surprisingly, Machan then goes on to unravel his
own response to such an objection:
The law treats us as [moral agents], for example, as do fellow
human beings as we go about our lives – we are evaluated for whether we act
morally or not, routinely, although in special circumstances such evaluations
would be misguided. So, for example, sometimes people accused of a crime are
excused because they had some mental impediment that rendered it impossible for
them to act as moral agents. The same is true when we judge others morally --
if we are informed that they suffered from certain malfunctions, such as severe
traumas, we withdraw our moral judgments.[7]
In other words, we are morally justified in treating human
marginal cases differently than normal humans because of special, individual
traits, when it comes to attributing duties to them. But in the case of
deciding whether these marginal humans have rights, Machan’s whole argument is
that we should treat marginal cases not differently but the same as normal
cases.
Thus, Machan
blows hot and cold: he wants to say that when deciding which humans should be
held morally responsible, we should happily embrace the “geometrical” reasoning
he rejects above. In these cases we should accept that marginal cases are
different from normal cases in ways that have crucial moral implications; that
is, we should treat them differently than normal cases. But when deciding which
humans have rights, we should reject “geometrical” reasoning and treat marginal
humans the same as normal cases.
He can’t have it
both ways. Either “geometrical” reasoning is faulty when handling marginal
cases or it’s not faulty when handling marginal cases. What’s more, this charge
of “geometrical” reasoning fails to defuse all the reductios mentioned above,
such as the blind person’s alleged “right” to drive based on the normal vision
of others, and so on. If we must reject “geometrical” reasoning as Machan
defines it, then a blind human has a right to drive a car, and the marginal
moral agents in our earlier thought experiments lack moral rights. This again
shows that Machan’s premises, when made precise, have false implications.
6. Environmentalism and
“Altruism”
In the third chapter, “A Sound Environmentalism,” Machan calls for the privatization of public lands. The
current state, he urges, unjustly restricts individual liberty and,
importantly, yields poor environmental management since individuals lack the
motivation to properly care for the land and its inhabitants. Machan details some of the positive environmental
consequences he thinks would follow from his humans- (and only humans) first
environmentalism. For example, he argues that individuals have a right to avoid
pollution, and so potential polluters have a legal duty to address the problem
or be held financially liable for damages. These suggestions might provide
points of agreement, and a basis for constructive dialogue, between the
individualist and the more traditional, non-humanistic environmentalist:
despite their philosophical differences, they might be able to agree on more
points of practice than either suspected.
In the final chapter, “Putting Humans First,” he compares some
radical environmentalists to central planners, determining what is best for
everyone from afar without considering differing individual needs and
preferences. To illustrate the problem, he relates being criticized for driving
an SUV, even though that vehicle works best for him, and tells other amusing
anecdotes about his personal life and upbringing. Most importantly, he objects
to those who argue that, in our relations with animals, humans often should not
be put first. Rather, on their view, animals’ interests in avoiding harms like
pain, suffering and death should come before our interests in eating, wearing
and experimenting on them. Machan responds that,
“Humans are more important, even better, than animals, and we deserve the
benefits that exploiting animals can provide” (p. 116).
He calls views that deny this principle “altruistic” and calls
this kind of altruism “insidious and perverse” (p. 118). We need to take a
close look at Machan’s suggestion that not exploiting animals amounts to
“altruism” because self-sacrifice, or “altruism,” carries negative
philosophical baggage for his Objectivist readers. Reacting to an essay by
Peter Singer in the New York Review
of Books, Machan writes:
Singer [and other animal
advocates] could not promise that ‘we will become healthier, or enjoy life
more, if we cease exploiting animals. Animal Liberation will require greater
altruism on the part of mankind than any other liberation movement, since
animals are incapable of demanding it for themselves, or of protesting against
their exploitation by votes, demonstrations, or bombs’….Singer goes on to ask,
rhetorically one may assume, whether ‘man is capable of such genuine altruism?
Who knows? If this book does have a significant effect, however, it will be a
vindication of all those who have believed that man has within himself the
potential for more than cruelty and selfishness’ (p. 115).
But then Machan adds, “So what is
called for, if we believe Singer, is not merely humane treatment of members of
the nonhuman animal world but, literally, human self-sacrifice. . For Singer,
altruism requires that we take other animals as our priority as we conduct
ourselves in our lives. We’re supposed to sacrifice our well-being for the sake
of the guppies and lizards” (p. 116).
We need to keep two things in mind
here. First, even Singer does not claim that animals come first. He has stated
in many places that by his utilitarian calculus, humans will often count for
more than animals. This is because, on his view, many humans can experience
pleasure and pain at a more rich and complex level than animals. As Mill
famously said, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig
satisfied.” So, by suggesting that Singer is putting animals’ interests above
those of humans, Machan is either attacking another straw man or revealing his
misunderstanding of what Singer’s views actually are. Furthermore, Singer is
probably using the term in such a way that any relinquishment of “selfish”
interest-seeking amounts to “altruism.”
If this
is the case, Objectivist readers must be careful not to assume that Singer is
calling for “altruism” in the technical, Randian sense. The fact is, if it’s
morally wrong to treat animals in certain ways, as a wide range of ethicists
have argued (successfully, in our view), then to refrain from treating animals
in those ways is not genuinely “altruistic” in any meaningful sense of the word, even if refraining results in
some (real or perceived) loss to the people who used to exploit them. If
slave-owners in the late nineteenth century lost some (real or perceived)
economic value because they stopped using slave labor, it doesn’t follow that
refraining from exploiting slaves amounts to “altruism” or self-sacrifice in
the sense that Ayn Rand and other Objectivists define that term. No matter what
Singer or Machan says, simply observing our moral duties or the rights of
others is not genuine self-sacrifice in the Randian sense. Refraining from
exploiting animals is altruism only if it is morally permissible to harm
animals in ways they so often are harmed, but that’s the very point at issue.
So, to object to animal rights by saying it’s “altruistic” is to beg the
question by merely assuming that routine harms to animals, such as those
mentioned above, are morally permissible.
7. Conclusion: A Friend of
Animals in Disguise?
What implications does Machan’s book have for our treatment of
animals? A common concession from critics of animal rights, especially those in
the libertarian and Objectivist camp, is to say, “Sure, exploiting animals
might be immoral, but that’s not the same thing as saying animals have rights.
Likewise, it may be immoral to cheat on your boyfriend or girlfriend, but it
doesn’t follow that you have a right not to be cheated on.” Then they suggest
that the distinguishing feature between violating a right and merely committing
an immoral act is that you can use force to protect a right but not to prevent
an immoral act. Therefore, whether to exploit animals is an important personal
choice, but no person or group, such as government, can force anyone else to
refrain from exploiting animals as if they had a right not to be exploited.
Machan appears to be going down this road when he says, “Is it
wrong to use animals for certain nonvital purposes? Quite likely, ethically,
but this is not the same conclusion as holding that animals have rights” (p.
21). But on the next page he takes a most surprising turn:
Should there, nevertheless, be laws against certain kinds of
cruelty to animals? This is not something I am willing to address fully here.
Suffice it to say that, for my part, I would not necessarily take exception if
someone were to rescue an animal being treated with cruelty, even if this
amounted to invading someone’s private property. If one spotted a neighbor
torturing his cat, albeit on his own private property, one could well be
morally remiss in failing to invade the place and rescue the animal (p. 22).
This is a remarkable statement in a book that claims to “put
humans first” and argues that no animals have rights. For if humans have a duty
not to treat cats in a “cruel” way (whatever behavior that includes), and if a
moral agent is not only permitted, but obligated, to override the property
rights of a person who treats a cat in this way to forcibly prevent the abuse,
what does this cat have if not a right not to be treated cruelly?
Furthermore, this
admission surprisingly entails that some animals have rights, on Machan’s
conception of rights. Recall his statement above that “To have a right means to
be justified in preventing those who have the choice from intruding on one
within a given sphere of jurisdiction” (p. 5). The cat case seems to be one
where Machan admits that such intrusion would be justified; that, on his view,
entails that the cat has some moral rights, perhaps the right to not be harmed
needlessly. And if such a cat has rights, then surely chickens, cows, pigs, and
the other animals who humans routinely exploit have such rights too. That would
seem to justify the view that, at least, much (if not all) animal agribusiness
and the fur industry is morally wrong and ought to be eliminated because they
violate these animals’ rights. Indeed, it should be even easier to
establish that using animals for food and clothing is “needless” than to
establish that torturing the cat is needless: we can easily find clothing and
food (including some very realistic meat analogues) in today’s free market.
Machan concedes that most uses of animals are not for necessity
but merely for convenience and sport, that is, for entertainment, presumably
including culinary entertainment (p. 19). And he says, even though he thinks
animals don’t have strictly speaking moral rights, it is still quite likely
wrong to use them for certain “nonvital” purposes (p. 21). Again these insights
seem to justify the conclusion that the vast majority of uses of animals in the
food and fashion industries, as “nonvital,” are quite likely wrong, especially
in light of the direct harms for human health and indirect harms through
environmental contamination. On the other hand, Machan
claims that developing some human potentials may justify inflicting suffering
on animals, as might other “rational” purposes (pp. 20, 118). What sort of
purposes and potentials might justify such harms? Unfortunately, we aren’t
given any guidance.
One thing is clear: whichever ethical terms we use to describe it,
Machan’s statement about the cruelly treated cat, if correct, entails that as
moral agents, we have a duty to forcibly prevent the vast majority of factory
farming, dubious animal experiments, fur production, and dozens of other practices
that can only be described as cruel and nonvital, to use Machan’s own terms.
Thus, it would seem that Machan 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.[8]
[1] For an overview of the recent literature on ethics and animals issues, see Angus Taylor’s Ethics & Animals: An Overview of the Philosophical Debate (Broadview, 2003). For arguments from utilitarianism, see, among other sources, Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics, 2nd Edition (Cambridge UP, 1993) and his Animal Liberation, 3rd Edition (Harper, 2001) although the former is, strictly speaking, not an argument from utilitarianism. From rights-based deontology, see, among other sources, Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights, 2nd Edition (U California Press, 2004), as well as his more accessible Empty Cages: Facing the Challenge of Animal Rights (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); for Rawlsian-style ideal contractarianism, see among other sources, Mark Rowlands’ Animals Like Us (Verso, 2002); from virtue ethics, see among other sources, Rosalind Hursthouse’s Ethics, Humans and Other Animals (Routledge, 2000), from common-sense morality, see, among other sources, Mark Bernstein’s Without a Tear: Our Tragic Relationship With Animals (U Illinois Press, 2004) and David DeGrazia’s Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2002); for religious moralities, see, among other sources, Matthew Scully’s Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy (St. Martin’s, 2003); from feminism, see Carol Adams and Josephine Donavan (eds.) Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals (Continuum, 1996).
[2] For sources of this, and additional information, see Regan’s Empty Cages, Bernstein’s Without a Tear, Singer’s Animal Liberation, as well as the documentary films suggested below. Also see, e.g., the investigative films produced by Compassionate Consumers (WegmansCruelty.com), Compassion Over Killing (COK.net), Farm Sanctuary (FarmSanctuary.org), and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETATV.com), Tribe of Heart (TribeofHeart.org) among other sources. Animal use industries generally do not produce films showing the details of their practices: for an interesting exceptions, however, see “Veal Farm Tour” at http://www.vealfarm.com/veal-farm-tour/ and the Fur Commission’s “Excellence Through Humane Care,” “What Can I Say?” and “Chow Time” at http://www.furcommission.com/video . For a list of animal-use industry webpages, see the references in Regan’s Empty Cages.
[3] For further discussion of the notion of “negative rights” and why Machan’s (earlier) arguments failed to show that no animals have them, see David Graham’s “A Libertarian Replies to Tibor Machan's ‘Why Animal Rights Don’t Exist’” available at http://www.strike-the-root.com/4/graham/graham1.html
[4] For further elaboration on these objections below, see John Hadley’s “Using and Abusing Others: A Reply to Machan,” Journal of Value Inquiry, 2004, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 411-414.
[5] For further discussion of moral mistakes in appealing to what’s “normal,” see Nathan Nobis’s "Carl Cohen's 'Kind' Argument For Animal Rights and Against Human Rights" Journal of Applied Philosophy, March 2004, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 43-59 (available at NathanNobis.com). In endnote 32, p. 59, Nobis writes that, “Tibor Machan claims, for Cohen-esque reasons, that humans’ use of animals is permissible because doing so makes ‘the best use of nature for our success in living our lives.’ Machan, T. (2002) ‘Why Human Beings May Use Animals’, Journal of Value Inquiry, 36, 1, pp. 9-14, p. 11. He 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.”
[6] Tibor Machan, “Rebuttal: Putting Humans First, The Free Radical, August-September 2004.
[7] Ibid.
[8] For very helpful comments, we are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this journal, John Hadley, and Andy Lamey.