I got this book because I somehow stumbled onto the Wikipedia article about its author, William F. Baxter, which said this:

In 1974, Baxter published a widely read and influential book on the law and economics of pollution control entitled People or Penguins: The Case for Optimal Pollution. This book, though aimed at a law audience, contains a philosophically sophisticated stance on the topic of animal rights.

Baxter is a speciesist. He maintains that non-human animals have no moral consideration on their own. Any moral consideration of animals is in relation to humans. Moral consideration is a uniquely human affair. This differs from the view that there is no essential difference between the pain of non-human animals and that of human beings (see Peter Singer), and also differs from the view that the pain of animals is a morally relevant consideration, but is not morally decisive (See Bonnie Steinbock).

It is important to note that Baxter is not antipathetic toward non-human animals; in fact, he points out that many things that are in the interests of animals (and the larger environment for that matter) are in fact also in the best interests of humans as well. In this sense we have obligations to how we treat non-human animals, but the grounds is only because of the respective impact on human beings.

Baxter states that the way to measure these humans interests are in terms of a cost benefit analysis, where cost doesn’t necessarily mean uniquely monetary costs.

Coherent arguments against animal rights are rare and still rarer are philosophically sophisticated ones. I had to read this book, especially once I found out it was out of print. This could be the most brilliant defense of speciesism yet written and it was languishing in obscurity!

The book was $50 from Amazon. “Well, it might be worth it if it really is the most brilliant defense of speciesism yet written,” I thought. Luckily my next thought was, “But maybe it’s cheaper somewhere else.”

With shipping, it was $6.00 from Barnes & Noble. That worked out to $1.50 per page that has anything to do with animal rights. From Amazon, it would have been $12.50 per page having anything to do with animal rights. In other words, I could easily post everything that PEOPLE OR PENGUINS has to say about penguins or any other animal right here.

According to the late William F. Baxter:

Recently scientists have informed us that the use of DDT in food production is causing damage to the penguin population. For the present purposes let us accept that assertion as an indisputable scientific fact. The scientific fact is often asserted as if the correct implication—that we must stop the agricultural use of DDT—followed from the mere statement of penguin damage. But plainly it does not follow if my criteria are employed.

My criteria are oriented to people, not penguins. Damage to penguins, or sugar pines, or geological marvels is, without more, simply irrelevant. One must go further, by my criteria, and say: Penguins are important because people enjoy seeing them walk about on rocks; and furthermore, the well-being of people would be less impaired by halting the use of DDT than by giving up penguins. In short, my observations about environmental problems will be people-oriented, as are my criteria. I have no interest in preserving penguins for their own sake.

It may be said by way of objection to this position, that it is very selfish of people to act as if each person represented one unit of importance and nothing else was of any importance. It is undeniably selfish. Nevertheless I think it is the only tenable starting place for several reasons. First, no other position corresponds to the way most people really think and act—i.e., corresponds to reality.

Second, this attitude does not portend any massive destruction of nonhuman flora and fauna, for people depend on them in many obvious ways, and they will be preserved because and to the degree that humans do depend on them.

Third, what is good for humans is, in many regards, good for penguins and pine trees—clean air for example. So that humans are, in these respects, surrogates for plant and animal life.

Fourth, I do not know how we could administer any other system. Our decisions are either private or collective. Insofar as Mr. Jones is free to act privately, he may give such preferences as he wishes to other forms of life: he may feed birds in winter and do with less himself, and he may even decline to resist an advancing polar bear on the ground that the bear’s appetite is more important than those portions of himself that the bear may choose to eat. In short my basic premise does not rule out private altruism to competing life-forms. It does rule out, however, Mr. Jones’ inclination to feed Mr. Smith to the bear, however hungry the bear, however despicable Mr. Smith.

Insofar as we act collectively on the other hand, only humans can be afforded an opportunity to participate in the collective decisions. Penguins cannot vote now and are unlikely subjects for the franchise—pine trees more unlikely still. Again each individual is free to cast his vote so as to benefit sugar pines if that is his inclination. But many of the more extreme assertions that one hears from some conservationists amount to tacit assertions that they are specially appointed representatives of sugar pines, and hence that their preferences should be weighted more heavily than the preferences of other humans who do not enjoy equal rapport with “nature.” The simplistic assertion that agricultural use of DDT must stop at once because it is harmful to penguins is of that type.

Fifth, if polar bears or pine trees or penguins, like men, are to be regarded as ends rather than means, if they are to count in our calculus of social organization, someone must tell me how much each one counts, and someone must tell me how these life-forms are to be permitted to express their preferences, for I do not know either answer. If the answer is that certain people are to hold their proxies, then I want to know how those proxy-holders are to be selected: self-appointment does not seem workable to me.

Sixth, and by way of summary of all the foregoing, let me point out that the set of environmental issues under discussion—although they raise very complex technical questions of how to achieve any objective—ultimately raise a normative question: what ought we to do. Questions of ought are unique to the human mind and world—they are meaningless as applied to a nonhuman situation.

I reject the proposition that we ought to respect the “balance of nature” or to “preserve the environment” unless the reason for doing so, express or implied, is the benefit of man.

I reject the idea that there is a “right” or “morally correct” state of nature to which we should return. The word “nature” has no normative connotation. Was it “right” or “wrong” for the earth’s crust to heave in contortion and create mountains and seas? Was it “right” for the first amphibian to crawl up out of the primordial ooze? Was it “wrong” for plants to reproduce themselves and alter the atmospheric composition in favor of oxygen? For animals to alter the atmosphere in favor of carbon dioxide both by breathing oxygen and eating plants? No answers can be given to these questions because they are meaningless questions.

All this may seem obvious to the point of tedious, but much of the present controversy over environment and pollution rests on tacit normative assumptions about just such nonnormative phenomena: that it is “wrong” to impair penguins with DDT, but not to slaughter cattle for prime rib roasts. That it is wrong to kill stands of sugar pines with industrial fumes, but not to cut sugar pines and build housing for the poor. Every man is entitled to his own preferred definition of Walden Pond, but there is no definition that has any moral superiority over another, except by reference to the selfish needs of the human race.

That’s it for animal rights talk in People of Penguins: The Case for Optimal Pollution. I guess I got my $6 worth (at least as far as satisfying my curiosity), but those few pages can’t have put up much of a fight against Animal Liberation when that came out a year later.

Baxter’s take on how we should treat animals is less an argument and more a description of the speciesist attitude. With speciesism, you are allowed to be selective in your treatment of animals. “Why love one and eat the other?” has an easy answer — because one is fun to love and one is fun to eat. Speciesists get more value out of a living dog than a dead one, and more value out of a dead pig than a living one.

A speciesist could slaughter their dog and eat it in order to be more consistent, or they could stop eating animals all together for the same reason, but consistency doesn’t provide them with enough enjoyment. They like watching their dog chase its tail and they like eating meat, so they pamper their dogs and eat anonymous animals. The fate of a given animal is all about what that animal is doing for them.

A speciesist may enjoy knowing that whales are in the ocean singing songs and being gigantic, so they might want to ban whale hunting. But if they prefer the taste of filet mignon over the knowledge that a cow is alive and mooing, that cow’s days are numbered. The speciesist loves one and eats the other because that’s what gives them the most satisfaction. Unfortunately for our bovine friends, an unmilked cow that roams free and dies of natural causes fails most people’s cost/benefit analysis.

It helps that there are plenty of animals to choose from. If it was just whales and humans on this planet, speciesist humans might put less value on whale songs and more on the taste of blubber.

Now… if we had religious reasons not to kill the cow, that would change the equation — the good feeling that comes from sparing cows would outweigh our desire to eat them. Same goes for ethical reasons. To a vegan, a cow provides more value alive than dead because it allows vegans to feel like humane people who care more about lives than taste. The biggest difference between speciesists and anti-speciesists, then, are their cost/benefit analysis charts.

William F. Baxter did a good job of laying out the speciesist mindset, but nothing he wrote would make someone switch from vegan anti-speciesist to meat-eating speciesist. He merely states that he values humans more than non-human animals, without explaining why. Reading PEOPLE OR PENGUINS did help me realize, however, that the key to burying veganism is to come up with an airtight defense of speciesism.

I’ve got a few ideas for where such a defense would begin, but this book review is probably already longer than the reviewed book, so I better stop here.