Yeah, I’m still pissed about how we hunted all the trilobytes to extinction. Why, if it wasn’t for that act of irresponsibility, I could be heading out to Red Lobster tomorrow night for some steamed Trilobyte Tail. Lemons optional.
Because of course no species ever became extinct but for man’s involvement.
That’s not a sound argument from one of our legal champions. The fact that species go extinct without man’s involvement doesn’t make it okay for humans to make them extinct. If God jumped off a cliff and made trilobites extinct, you’d want to do it too?
People die of natural causes all the time. Does that make murder okay? Does that make genocide okay?
Because what we’re doing to some species is quite literally genocide.
Nitpick: humans are animals.
More to the point, your distinction (humans cannot be freely killed) is a fairly modern one. Until very recently in human history, it was okay to kill humans too, as long as they belong to some outgroup. Strangers outside the tribe were fair game to kill, rob, or enslave.
Gradually our definition of “who is protected, who is ‘like me,’ morally” has expanded to cover others outside our family, village, tribe, nation-state, and so on. But there have been times when people you and I now consider human were legally classed as sub-human, as animals.
Nowadays all humans are in the protected class (except for ragheads and nonwhite terrorists, of course) and the definition shows signs of potentially expanding further…to chimps, gorillas, apes? Dolphins? Whales? Dogs already have some legal protections. The newspaper this week has featured the following two stories:
All mentally-disabled children deserve respect and rights. Eunice Kennedy Shriver is a heroine for her work pushing the status quo into realizing this.
Dogs are about as smart as a 2.5-year-old-human child – and not a mentally-disabled one, either.
Okay, so: dogs are popular, they’re part of our families, they’re smarter than some animals we do grant rights and respect to, they work for (earn) what we give them, they’re a partially protected class – do they have rights?
No, dogs have fewer rights and lower legal status than a black man had in the United States 150 years ago.
But look who’s president today.
Things change. Historically there has been a trend – a fitful and often-reversed trend, a ragged and slow trend, true; but there has been a trend toward expanding the circle of who we consider our kin and to whom we will grant legal recognition.
Has that trend ended here, with the latest arbitrary* definition of who is human and who is not?
Don’t bet on it.
*We share 99-point-something-percent of our genes with chimpanzees; it has been argued with some merit that we are, in fact, one of three species of chimpanzee on this planet. Yet the other chimps are still on the outside of that mysterious kinship line. That’s because they are uglier, dumber, more primitive, less well-spoken, better suited to labor than we are, not human, need our protection because they can’t fend for themselves, wouldn’t vote intelligently, like being subordinate to us, are inferior, are not God’s children, have no souls, are property, or whatever. Use any of the these excuses recycled from the African slave trade that appeal to you. Just be aware that they don’t seem to work permanently.
What has that got to do with the price of eggs?
It is incontrovertible that the collapse of whale populations in the 20th century was due to unrestricted hunting by humans.
Is your argument that we should hunt whales to extinction, because hey, species have gone extinct before so no big whoop?
It’s a particularly puzzling argument because if you postulate that whales have no value except in their use to humans, well, when they’re extinct they will be of no value to humans, forever.
As for the contention that no one cares when foxes hunt rodents to extinction, well I guess no one has ever heard of a continent called Australia where there are regular and extensive efforts to control non-native species (such as…foxes) that are killing off native species.
Only by strict zoological definitions. By most standard definitions they are not.
There is nothing whatsoever arbitrary about it. It is based on solid, objective, hard-science genetic evaluations with >99.999% accuracy. That’s about as non-arbitrary as any definition in existence.
No they won’t.
If a whale is worth a buck-oh-five to me rendered into whale oil, and it is of no value whatsoever except in its use to humans, then it is only of value dead. If the species becomes extinct in future as a result of this killing the whale remains worth $1.05 right now.
IOW it is only by not killing them that they will never be of value to humans. And it is only by killing them that we make them of value, albeit for a short term.
Their value comes to us in different forms, not just as dinner :rolleyes:
Yours is the fallacy of the excluded middle. My argument doesn’t say, “Extinction always good!” It says, “Extinction isn’t always bad.” By pointing out that 98% of the species once living on the planet are now extinct, I’m saying it’s not axiomatic that an extinction is bad. You don’t win the argument merely by saying, “Extinction bad!”
Or is it your contention that despite the millions of years of species disappearing, the current instant of time is the perfect one, and so now, at this moment, no more species should ever die off? It was good that the trilobytes and the eohippus are gone, but every species existing now should stay?
If not, then you need to point out why it’s bad to see a species hunted to extinction beyond the mere fact that it will be extinct… because the entire freaking history of the planet has been species becoming extinct.
Human-caused extinction is stupid and unnecessary. At any point in time.
Why? Why is it substantially different than any other kind of extinction? Just curious.
-XT
Well, except that hard science also told us that Negroes are not human, that Chinamen are not human, that poor people are not (really) human, that undesirables should be weeded out of the gene pool (eugenics hysteria), and all sorts of things that we now recognize as arbitrary.
Hard science tells us we’re one of three groups of chimpanzees. Observation tells us their social relationships are much like ours. One day we may admit them to the fold of “like us” just as surely as we did those “inferior subhumans” the Victorian scientists confidently excluded from the ranks of the elect – but that’ll be a social decision, not a scientific reclassification.
If done on purpose? yeah, sure. As a side effect of some human activity, well…
The thing is people do things. Whatever gets in the way is either crushed over or worked around. In the case of whaling, it is hard to work around the fact that you need to kill whales to eat them. Should they stop eating whales? I think they should, but that’s just me. They think otherwise and there is no objection you can raise that will force them to stop. You have to make them stop of their own accord.
Whatever flimsy excuse for a law there is, they comply with. Whatever moral reason there is to stop, has a counter argument. Whaling is, sadly, one of those gray areas where it all boils down to opinions and theirs is that they can do it and there is nothing you can do to force them to stop.
I am sure some people think I am a loathsome criminal for eating chicken, stepping on cockroaches and killing bacteria by the bunch with soaps and antibiotics. I am not stopping for them.
I think killing whales is wrong in many different levels, but I don’t expect them to stop for me.
ETA: Imagine if when Grog invented agriculture, Drog and Vrog had objected to the killing of wild grasses as murder and genocide. Progress comes at a cost. We are terribly bad at gauging this cost in advance but there we go.
Really? I mean, that’s pretty much news to me. Humans are not animals? What definitions are you using?
What kind of an argument is that?
It’s a fact that millions of species have gone extinct. And it’s also a fact that millions more will go extinct in the future.
That doesn’t mean it’s fine to help the process along. Millions of people throughout history have died. You are eventually going to die, that doesn’t make it morally neutral for me to kill you, just because lots of other people have died. Just because the Mona Lisa will eventually crumble to dust doesn’t make it OK for me to toss the painting into the fireplace.
The reason nonextinction is better than extinction is because extinction is irreversible. And it’s no comfort to me that in 20 million years the biosphere will recover its diversity, because I’ll be dead by then. I want a decent living planet to be around for my lifetime, and the lifetime of my children, and my children’s children.
It’s not that human-caused extinction is somehow metaphysically different than other kinds of extinction, is that human-caused extinctions are PREVENTABLE, whereas the extinctions of trilobites and ammonites are not preventable, because they happened in the distant past.
So if we can prevent the extinction of whale by the simple expedient of not tracking down and killing every last one, then that’s a good thing. If a tree falls in the forest and kills the last egg of some obscure insect, well, that’s too bad, but it wasn’t preventable. Except in the sense of not cutting down the entire forest such that there’s only one tree left, and when that one tree falls over the last member of the species goes with it.
Human caused extinction isn’t as simple as overhunting, because the biggest threat to endangered species is typically habitat destruction, rather than an organized plan to kill every last one. But the thing is, we’re already living on an ecologically depopulated planet, and have been since the end of the ice age. And things are getting worse, not better. So how about we take our foot off the accelerator? Now, putting our foot on the brakes is just crazy talk, no need to do anything rash like that, but how about we try taking our foot off the gas? And stop, you know, deliberately making species go extinct?
Again…why? If humans, by being humans (and being animals just like other animals) cause a species to become extinct, how is it substantially different than bacteria, being bacteria, wipe out 90+% of all species due to the production of oxygen many moons ago? Or a big rock falling out of the sky and wiping out a large percentage of all species? Or the antics of the sun doing the same thing?
But you see, no one is setting out to DELIBERATELY make species go extinct. That’s where your hyperbole rockets off the top of the topic. Fishermen are trying to make a living. Habitat is destroyed not just for the fun of it, but because of human activities that have nothing to do with a desire to deliberately wipe out a species. That a species may or may not be wiped out is not a consideration…sort of like your tree analogy falling on the egg of the last of some species. The tree was just being a tree…humans are just being human.
BTW, I’m opposed to whale hunting. That said, I’ve seen the show in the OP, and those guys on SS are complete idiots and aren’t helping things at all. Harassing the whalers is like yelling at the clerk at WalMart that their prices suck or that they are driving local businesses out of business. It’s stupid and meaningless, and in the case of SS is endangering people for no good purpose. If they REALLY want to stop whaling then they should be attacking (verbally and with propaganda) the people who support the industry…the governments and consumers of the products. The lobby groups who support it. The corporations who support it. Attacking the actual whalers is flashy for TV I guess, but in the end it won’t do anything to halt whaling as long as there are markets for those products.
-XT
Xtisme, well, what’s the difference between your house burning down because it was struck by lightning, and your house burning down because your neighbor poured gasoline all over it and tossed on a match?
Your house is burned up either way, so what does it matter?
This argument, that species have gone extinct in the past, therefore we shouldn’t care whether they go extinct in the present, is mind-bogglingly nonsensical. Everybody dies. Every work of man is temporary. All we are is dust in the wind, dude.
That doesn’t make it a good idea to go around killing people and reducing cities to rubble.
All moral arguments are arguments from a human perspective, and don’t matter a hill of beans from a universal perspective. It doesn’t matter to the universe whether we humans have happy productive lives, or die in agonizing pain by the millions. It doesn’t matter to the universe whether life continues to exist on this rock. But it matters to me, because I’m a human being. I don’t want to die and I don’t want my children to die, and I want my children to live on a beautiful exciting world rather than a stinking scrapheap. I want my children to live in a better world, except you guys are cheering as we destroy the ecology, because hey, after all, nothing matters in the long run. So kill and destroy, and who cares about the future, because all that matters is today, and even that doesn’t matter because nothing matters.
Gee, let me think…um, one was done by a natural event and one was done to deliberately burn my house down? Do I get a prize? If so, tell me how this is relevant to the discussion, ehe?
From a practical perspective it doesn’t really matter…either way I don’t have a house. Again…relevance?
Well, that’s not the argument I AM making. You seem to be unclear on some things. I never said we shouldn’t care. I asked why it’s different. As for mind-bogglingly nonsensical…well, have you read your last post that I’m quoting here?
That’s true. But I wasn’t speaking of morals either. I’ll leave the rest of your post be…it really doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m talking about either.
-XT
The whalers are not out there to eliminate whales from the planet. They are there to catch whales for market. A market where people buy the stuff and eat it as they have done since long before they were endangered.
The extinction of whales is an unfortunate and undesirable (albeit avoidable) side effect. So it is more like your neighbor trying to make some s’mores in a bonfire and accidentally torching your home. An accident just as a lightning strike. Also a preventable accident for careful neighbors and all that, but an accident nonetheless.
The only difference is that there’s nothing we can do about previous extinctions, but there is something we can do about current human-caused extinctions. Of course humans are a part of the natural world too, and there’s no existential difference between a human catching and eating the last whale and a mongoose catching and killing the last member of an endemic bird species on Hawaii. The end result is the same.
The only thing we have to ask ourselves is, is this the outcome we want? And are there actions we can take to prevent this outcome? And what are the costs of those actions?
Do we want to live in a future world without whales? If the answer is that we don’t, then what do we have to do to accomplish that goal?
The point is that preservation of the biosphere isn’t a universal good, it’s a human good. We do it because that’s the kind of planet we’d prefer to live on.
Why is whale extinction bad? Maybe the world would be better off without them
The problem is that, as with many complex things, there are a lot of factors that are in play. Certainly human hunting pressure is one large factor. But there are others that may or may not contribute to, say, a certain whale species extinction. There are environmental changes happening world wide, for instance. Those may or may not be human caused as well, of course, but either way there is little we can do about it at this point.
If you want to remove the pressure from human hunting then you have to change the reasons that humans ARE hunting the things. You don’t do this by silly stunts or ramming the ships of the folks who are trying to make a living (i.e. being human), you do it by changing the perceptions, expectations and needs of the people who are wanting to buy the products of these whales. If there is no market, then there will be no further serious hunting.
I think the thread has wandered off of it’s original course since the central question has already been asked and answered. The legalities? WHAT legalities? International Law is whatever each individual nation wants it to be…especially if said nation is economically or militarily (or both) powerful. It’s a fiction that powerful nations trot out when it suits them, and dismiss when it doesn’t.
-XT