First, human beings are freed to do as they wish, so long as our choices do not interfere with the freedoms of others. Baxter highlights four general goals within the human community, which contribute to the way we form individual and particular judgments.

He illustrates his anthropocentric view by applying it to pollution, claiming “agreement on how and whether to pursue a particular objective, such as pollution control, is not possible unless some more general objective has been identified and states with reasonable precision”. On that same day, he dismissed as 'without merit' a seemingly endless, thirteen-year-old suit against IBM, which had employed more than 300 lawyers and generated 2,500 depositions and 66 million pages of documents.In his essay “People or Penguins”, William Baxter presents his criteria for environmental policies. As Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice, Baxter commanded wide public attention when in 1982 he settled a seven-year-old case against AT&T with by far the largest breakup in the history of the Sherman Antitrust Act, splitting AT&T up into seven regional phone companies. 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. 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. 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. This differs from the view that there is no essential difference between the pain of non-human animals and that of human beings, and also differs from the view that the pain of animals is a morally relevant consideration, but is not morally decisive. Moral consideration is a uniquely human affair.

Any moral consideration of animals is in relation to humans.

Baxter maintains that non-human animals have no moral consideration on their own. This book, though aimed at a law audience, contains a philosophically sophisticated stance on the topic of animal rights. In 1974, Baxter published this widely read and influential book on the law and economics of pollution control entitled 'People or The Case for Optimal Pollution'.

People or penguins by william f baxter