ers strong animal rights position and thinks there is a reasonable way of dealing with rights of animals of different kinds to vary in strength. She reasons that some creatures have very little self-awareness and probably no capacity to anticipate the future while some have more awareness. Which creatures have enough mental sophistication to count as subjects of life? How much is enough? She feels it is difficult to determine which creatures feel pain or have memories, desires or self-awareness. In dealing with such problems, Regan suggests using the the benefit of the doubt principle. Warren disagrees, and feels this would create such a huge area of concern where we would be incapable of drawing a line anywhere. She concludes a weak animal rights theory is more reasonable. Simply stated, Warren says animals may, in fact, not have rights but we are obliged to treat them in such a way that they do not suffer needlessly. She assumes a more practical and rational view of the problem of rights of animals.Animals have no rights and need no liberation, so states Tibor Machan. He believes it is a mistake to treat animals as if they were human beings. Rights are concepts applicable to human beings because they have a moral life. However, Machan is, like Kant, careful to point out that callousness or cruelty to animals shows disregard to life and is a character flaw. Machan believes there is a scale in nature and that humans are the most important. He reasons that if the scale in nature makes sense, that gives credence to the idea we may make use of animals for our purposes. Even animal activists admit that moral goodness and responsibility originate with human beings. Only humans consider the rights of animalsanimals do not, because they are not self-conscious.He concludes that we ought to treat animals with care, as sentient beings, when we use them for legitimate purposes. Machan probably wrote this in answer to the str...
