Another year, another whale war. Victory for Sea shepherd

[Alyrium Denryle]

And the First Nations that hunt whales off the coast of British Columbia as part of their treaty rights, they OK with you?

It is not. However, I am willing to live with it, so long as they use traditional methods and their species selection and catch quotas are strictly regulated.

My views on whaling in general are two fold.

The position I take with the most certainty is that their populations cannot sustain industrial harvesting very well. But in this case, it is the difference between long-line industrial fishing for tuna, and sport fishing for tuna. One harms populations, the other does not.

The other, which I take with less confidence, is that all cetaceans are self aware and thus should be considered people for all intents and purposes. However, I know this view is contentious and for many species not as well supported by empirical evidence as I would like. So I am willing to compromise on it for First Nation People's. If and when there is more evidence that large baleen whales are self aware, that willingness to compromise will change.

There comes a point when two wrongs do not make a right. If we had a treaty obligation that permitted natives of some area to kill chimpanzees or occassionally cull a group of human hunter-gatherers I would oppose it. However, we dont KNOW if that is the case with Baleen whales yet and until we do, a certain level of permissiveness is warranted.

I also see things like the grind in the same light

I dont, because the Grind is done with Pilot whales, which are dolphins and we KNOW most if not all of them are self-aware and thus should be considered people for all intents and purposes.

There comes a point when the arrogant white people are simply correct, and no amount of ethnic or cultural guilt will change that. If it comes down to it, no amount of sovereignty is an excuse for outright murder. You argued earlier that a treaty arrangement could be made with the whales? Unless we have some means of communicating written language to them, that wont exactly work. At the end of the day, once we know to a reasonable degree of certainty that Bowhead whales are self-aware, the killing of said Bowheads must end, because to permit it to continue is murder. At that point, it is no longer up to the tribal ethicists.

[Flagg]

No red herrings or strawmen, please. The Makah were not using modern powerboats.

Ok, then the news report I saw when it happened was full of shit. I remember they also said they used machineguns.

Edit: OK, looked it up on google images, and they use both canoes and motorboats, but most of the action takes place from the canoes, so mea culpa on that front.

[Simon_Jester]

It really could just be a belief that hunting possible sentients is wrong, you know.

I know. It's the "we're right and you're wrong" part of the simple summary I gave above. "We're right and you're wrong, so we'll stop you."

The natives don't get any significant personal vote in what 'we' think is right and wrong. And have basically no say in the world's discourse about what is right and wrong for everyone, because our ancestors killed theirs and took their land. Maybe those whaling tribes would have evolved into as obnoxious a bunch of factory whalers as Japan. Maybe they'd be as concerned with preserving marine ecology as the best of us today. We do not and cannot know.

Jumping up and down on the remnants of what 'they' thought the world was supposed to be... it's distasteful, it makes me depressed. Maybe it's true in a universal sense that we're right and they're wrong. But I'm reluctant to press this issue. I'd rather err on the side of not finishing off what my ancestors wrongfully destroyed, even if that means occasionally letting someone else commit a relatively minor sin.

I fully support restoring indigenous control over tribal lands, including the above, with some reservations - the Gosiutes here in Utah seriously considered storing nuclear waste on their land a few years back, which could have led to potential environmental issues with the rest of us in the state.

I don't see a problem with it. Given all the crap we've put them through (including screwing over natives' health digging the uranium out of the ground in the first place), letting the natives decide to stick the waste in a cave under their land for money seems fair to me.

1) They weren't allowed to whale for decades and their culture survived as much as any smashed culture could, so I don't even see a need for it beyond "tradition" which is always a very poor argument.
2) I hold them to the same standard I hold everyone to, which isn't very high. "Don't kill sapient or endangered animals for stupid religious or traditional practices" applies equally to everyone in my book. Same goes for Christian Scientists allowing their kids to die.

Exactly. "Fuck them, we're right and they're wrong." Nothing else matters, it seems.

[Flagg]

1) They weren't allowed to whale for decades and their culture survived as much as any smashed culture could, so I don't even see a need for it beyond "tradition" which is always a very poor argument.
2) I hold them to the same standard I hold everyone to, which isn't very high. "Don't kill sapient or endangered animals for stupid religious or traditional practices" applies equally to everyone in my book. Same goes for Christian Scientists allowing their kids to die.

Exactly. "Fuck them, we're right and they're wrong." Nothing else matters, it seems.

So you going to keep ignoring my arguments and responding with horseshit? Because if so you can fuck off now and we won't have to go through page after page of me calling you a retard.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

A group of very angry young men killed a whale with a rifle from a powerboat in 2007 as a very badly thought out protest to the renewed moratorium which by that point had lasted 7 years from their last legal taking in 2000. They were detained and condemned by the tribe and handed over to federal authorities who sentenced them to prison for it. The sanctioned whale hunt involved a traditional wooden canoe, traditional paddles, traditional harpoons (they salvaged steel from Japanese shipwrecks that drifted to the Pacific Northwest and cold forged it into harpoon tips, so steel harpoon tips are traditional for them), and a mix of traditional basket floats and modern rubber floats to keep the whale afloat after it was killed. The floats are attached to a traditionally woven cedar bark line, which was secured to the harpoon which was driven into the whale. Then another member of the crew fired a quick finishing shot with a .577 Tyrannosaur rifle to finish the whale to avoid prolonged suffering, per the decision of the tribal elders that this was more important than keeping the traditional tiring method. The whale was only successfully taken because the harpoon was successfully driven deep enough that it would remain afixed to the lines and floats keeping the whale up.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Edit: OK, looked it up on google images, and they use both canoes and motorboats, but most of the action takes place from the canoes, so mea culpa on that front.

In fact, the motorboats were just there primarily to rescue anyone if the whales smacked the canoes to pieces, which often happened in the old days. They made the canoes and paddles by hand, the old fashioned way, too, out of western Red Cedar whole logs the tribe cut themselves on their own land.

[Alyrium Denryle]

The natives don't get any significant personal vote in what 'we' think is right and wrong. And have basically no say in the world's discourse about what is right and wrong for everyone, because our ancestors killed theirs and took their land. Maybe those whaling tribes would have evolved into as obnoxious a bunch of factory whalers as Japan. Maybe they'd be as concerned with preserving marine ecology as the best of us today. We do not and cannot know.

If their tradition was to go out and kill hunter-gatherers for reasons of ritual cannibalism, would you be hand-wringing about it?

We are not currently sure, which is why I am willing to give some latitude. However, in the event that we do know for certain, what justification is there other than vapid moral relativism to permit it? Objective facts are not up to a vote. A position justified on the basis of anthropocentrism where only HUMAN sapients matter is objectively equivalent to racism where only WHITE people matter.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The sticky problem, and we both know it, Aly, is where to draw the line on the gradient between what is a sapient and what is an animal. A translatable language of comparable complexity to our own is the absolutely certain cutoff. Without that, it is a very complex issue of "how sapient makes you sapient" because it's not a very clear-cut thing, there's no solid dividing line. Elephant death rituals have personally tipped them into a no-kill ever status for me as an overriding moral imperative, because the only other mammals known to possess them are Neanderthals and us. I have not personally seen enough evidence to make that judgement with marine mammals or even primates (though the functionalist reasons not to kill them are overwhelming so it's irrelevant). I am generally more comfortable with the killing of Baleen whales than toothed whales, so I admit that though I'm prepared to defend it, the grind does make me a bit uncomfortable.

[Alyrium Denryle]

The sticky problem, and we both know it, Aly, is where to draw the line on the gradient between what is a sapient and what is an animal. A translatable language of comparable complexity to our own is the absolutely certain cutoff. Without that, it is a very complex issue of "how sapient makes you sapient" because it's not a very clear-cut thing, there's no solid dividing line. Elephant death rituals have personally tipped them into a no-kill ever status for me as an overriding moral imperative, because the only other mammals known to possess them are Neanderthals and us. I have not personally seen enough evidence to make that judgement with marine mammals or even primates (though the functionalist reasons not to kill them are overwhelming so it's irrelevant). I am generally more comfortable with the killing of Baleen whales than toothed whales, so I admit that though I'm prepared to defend it, the grind does make me a bit uncomfortable.

Is it metacognitive? Is it aware of its own primary consciousness? That is my cutoff. A being can be alien and still a person for all intents and purposes. It does not have to grieve like us, or have a language like ours. There is of course the technical difficulties of determining if the really complex modes of communications cetaceans use are language. However it has dialects, grammar, and is used to coordinate very complex behaviors. When Orca teach their young how to hunt for seals floating on ice rafts, by forming a line and washing the seal off the ice with their "bow wake", while rattling off complicated whistles and clicks that are not part of their contact calls or echolocation, what exactly do you make of it? The same goes for teaching them (ironically enough) how to take out gray whales or properly approach and attack a great white shark. We have documented evidence that Orca innovate hunting methods and then the individual who figures it out teaches their entire pod. We can infer language from behavior, even if their language is VERY different from ours. Linguistic criteria for language was derived from human languages. We may not be able to mathematically determine if the language of an alien species with space travel has language using our linguistic models.

Toothed whales, particularly Orca DO have rather complex ways of dealing with deaths. When calves die, the other pod members will move off while the mother grieves (which involves pushing the dead calf around for hours). Males stay with their mother (pods are matriarchal), and when mom dies, her sons will go into periods of seclusion.

Other species (Sperm whales as I recall), have been documented sacrificing themselves to help unrelated individuals in distress, a behavior exploited by whalers historically.

So you tell me. Is killing these animals a thing to be comfortable with? Dont even get me into The Grind, which wipes out entire pods of pilot whales in a fashion that can only be called barbaric. That shit is a fucking abomination equivalent to hacking children to pieces with machetes.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Dogs will stand by their masters after death also. The point about elephants is that they behave around the bones of long-deceased, unrelated elephants like we would around a random corpse, and can recognize the places where other elephants died even years later. Immediate corpse-nurturing responses are not definable as death ritual that indicates some cognizance around the issue.

Anyway, your examples bring up a serious problem of its own as we go back to Baleen whales, the primary issue here. If they're sapient, how are we going to stop the Orcas from hunting them? Isn't that then murder? So shouldn't we have NOAA cops shooting Orca's that try to eat grey whales? Why do the Orcas you presume are sapient get away with this shit while we get condemned for it?

[Simon_Jester]

So you going to keep ignoring my arguments and responding with horseshit? Because if so you can fuck off now and we won't have to go through page after page of me calling you a retard.

Flagg, I understand your argument about how we're right to totally ban killing of whales because it's [cruel/ecologically harmful, pick any of the above]. You don't need to keep explaining it to me until I 'get it.'

The problem is that I see an issue here about culture and autonomy and trying to assimilate minorities into a global discourse they never got a chance to have a say in. To you, this argument summarizes as "horseshit." If that's all you have to say about it, then we are at an impasse.


The debate Alyrium and Duchess are now having about whether the whales are intelligent- that has enough power to be decisive, to my way of thinking. It's also hard to settle, and I respect Alyrium for presenting actual evidence by referring to real studies of whale behavior, instead of just saying "fuck them they can't kill whales" and calling it a day.

Frankly, on the strength of his evidence, if anyone wants to go orca hunting... fuck them they can't kill orcas. * Works for me. But if we're talking primates, I wouldn't let someone go human hunting, or Neanderthal hunting- but I would be less concerned about a gorilla hunt, and unconcerned about a monkey hunt. Not all primates are equal, and neither are all cetaceans.

*It is somehow ironic that the orcas themselves seem to go after equally-arguably-intelligent cetaceans. But that's their moral crisis, not mine. I'll stay out of Duchess's counterpoint on that one.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Basically I think that this ethical position essentially leads us to the absurdity where we will at some point in the future see an episode of COPS: NOAA PAC NORWEST BEAT going roughly --
"Spool up the HH60 and load rockets, we're rolling hot! We've got an attempted murder IN PROGRESS at 48.393°N 124.735°W off Tatoosh island inside of the US territorial jurisdiction. The J pod crew is going to town on another migrator grey!"

Because if they're both sapient and both equally deserving of the same human rights we extend to humans, how is the Orca hunting grey whales anything other than murder and cannibalism? We're internationally obligated to enforce our laws within the 12-mile limit, and that includes Premeditated Murder. Furthermore legal precedence is completely explicit in that ignorance of the law is not an excuse in breaking it. So I am not just being absurd. This is then a serious problem. We can't communicate with them but we have to enforce the law to adhere to this position of universalism of ethics toward sapients. That means we rocket salvo Orca pods attacking grey whales until they learn not to murder other sapients to break up attempted murders in progress.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Dogs will stand by their masters after death also. The point about elephants is that they behave around the bones of long-deceased, unrelated elephants like we would around a random corpse, and can recognize the places where other elephants died even years later. Immediate corpse-nurturing responses are not definable as death ritual that indicates some cognizance around the issue.

What of the periods of seclusion that can last for days or weeks? Or did you conveniently ignore that part? Of course you did. And of course, you require that a thing be directly analogous to a human behavior even though the two lineages are separated by millions of years. Whales CANT perform death rituals, standing over a pile of old bones and touching them ritualistically. They dont have a suitable appendage and eventually the corpse sinks to be eaten by hagfish. They cannot make grave markers, nor do their bodies remain stationary upon death. You have defined them out of ever being able to meet your standard, no matter how intelligent they are.

Anyway, your examples bring up a serious problem of its own as we go back to Baleen whales, the primary issue here. If they're sapient, how are we going to stop the Orcas from hunting them? Isn't that then murder? So shouldn't we have NOAA cops shooting Orca's that try to eat grey whales? Why do the Orcas you presume are sapient get away with this shit while we get condemned for it?

Mostly, because they live in a state of nature (literally) and may lack a moral context to frame the matter. Only recently have we as humans come around to the idea that killing members of our own species is wrong, and that is after millenia of civilization.

But lets get into particulars

1) We cannot hold them responsible, because the matter under consideration may be an outside context issue for them. It is just not something that has occurred to them. In much the same way that it may not have occurred to H. sapiens that they should not kill off H. neanderthalis when they did. We can acknowledge this as a bad thing without holding them culpable. Hell, even of they have the capacity to think of the question, they cannot possibly be aware that baleen whales are sapient (if they are). Millions of years of divergence will do that. They have no way of communicating with their prey, they lack the instrumentation and scientific ability to test the matter. Think of how recently we figured out how smart our fellow ape species are. We can look back on it and say to ourselves "this thing we did to them is regrettable and sad" but cannot retroactively apply moral culpability. We cannot say "they should have known", because there is no way they could have.

2) We have no way of communicating this with them. Yet. So for the time being, we cannot offer them an alternative to a major food source. To say someone ought do something implies that they CAN do that thing. Mammal specialist pods do not have an alternative, nor do they have the technological means to come up with their own. Humans do.

Furthermore legal precedence is completely explicit in that ignorance of the law is not an excuse in breaking it. So I am not just being absurd.

No. You are still being absurd. A human CAN be aware of a law. At the very least, a Reasonable Person standard applies. In this case, there is no way an Orca can be aware of the law, and it is very likely they are unaware of the moral question.

Bonobo chimps are sapient. That does not mean we arrest them for child molestation when they masturbate one of their babies 20 minutes after birth.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I just can't help but see this as sophism that carves out a permissible sphere for committing a wrong by one group, Aly, at a very fundamental level. It's a very nice construct, but it breaks down in the face of the universalism that makes the original postulate acceptable to me. This is surely merely a matter of a commitment to varying schools of philosophy, though, and I could debate it, but it seems very, very different from the original topic at hand by this point.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I just can't help but see this as sophism that carves out a permissible sphere for committing a wrong by one group, Aly, at a very fundamental level. It's a very nice construct, but it breaks down in the face of the universalism that makes the original postulate acceptable to me. This is surely merely a matter of a commitment to varying schools of philosophy, though, and I could debate it, but it seems very, very different from the original topic at hand by this point.

Well, lets put it this way. Actions are right or wrong based on their consequences. However, moral culpability is a different matter. Moral culpability depends on your intentions, or your capacity to understand or predict said consequences. If a 4 year old gets pissed off and beats another 4 year old to death with a hammer, the action is still wrong. It rightly fills us with horror. That does not mean we lock the guilty party away for their rest of their life. They are too young to know any better. Their Theory of Mind is not developed enough yet to understand that the other 4 year old is equivalent to themselves, they dont know the finality of death etc etc etc.

It is a similar thing with Orca and their hunting. Yes, it is wrong for them to kill Humpback Whales. However, we should not hold them morally culpable because they are incapable of knowing. Not just "is ignorant of a particular rule our society has, which is no excuse" but "not actually capable of being aware that what they are doing is wrong".

There is a REALLY big difference between those two statements. If we want to alter that situation, it is incumbent upon us to learn how to speak Orca--because we might be able to do that someday--and have a talk with our fellow intelligent species, and offer them an alternative that does not amount to death by starvation.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I'm not saying we should retroactively punish Orcas. We agree they're not culpable. But what about actively intervening to save one sapient from another trying to kill it? That was my example, not punishing people for murder, but rather actively stopping murder. Why should we let sapient Orca whales murder sapient grey whales?

[Alyrium Denryle]

I'm not saying we should retroactively punish Orcas. We agree they're not culpable. But what about actively intervening to save one sapient from another trying to kill it? That was my example, not punishing people for murder, but rather actively stopping murder. Why should we let sapient Orca whales murder sapient grey whales?

Because without an alternative, we only condemn the orca to death by starvation.

Orca pods are specialists on particular prey, with a seasonal component. Some pods are specialist fish eaters. Some specialize on other marine mammals. There is one pod off California that specializes on eating the great white sharks that are locally abundant. In some pods the prey shifts seasonally within a specialty (so when seals are breeding it is seals, but they switch over to dolphins at another time of year).

If we intervene, we need to fully realize the consequences of doing so. In other words, we need to figure out some way of getting them to switch diets to something less morally hazardous. We cant just switch them over to eating fish by denying them whale. Whale specialist pods literally dont know how to fish, they pass hunting strategies down culturally, they are not hard-wired. They may figure out how, but that is a bit of a throw of the dice. An unacceptable risk.

We could intervene, and probably should do so. However it wont be a matter of going out in a speed boat to stop Orca from killing baleen whale calves. We need to, in a word, teach them to fish so they dont simply starve for lack of prey over the course of three months during the spring and autumn migration seasons.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

If you can voluntarily convince Orca pods to switch food sources then I'll consider them completely sapient and equal to humans, I'll tell you that right now, and you can hold me to it if you or someone else can make it happen.

[Simon_Jester]

Dogs will stand by their masters after death also. The point about elephants is that they behave around the bones of long-deceased, unrelated elephants like we would around a random corpse, and can recognize the places where other elephants died even years later. Immediate corpse-nurturing responses are not definable as death ritual that indicates some cognizance around the issue.

What of the periods of seclusion that can last for days or weeks? Or did you conveniently ignore that part? Of course you did. And of course, you require that a thing be directly analogous to a human behavior even though the two lineages are separated by millions of years. Whales CANT perform death rituals, standing over a pile of old bones and touching them ritualistically. They dont have a suitable appendage and eventually the corpse sinks to be eaten by hagfish. They cannot make grave markers, nor do their bodies remain stationary upon death. You have defined them out of ever being able to meet your standard, no matter how intelligent they are.

I think her point is that it's hard to tell.

There is absence of evidence of how whales behave around the bodies of dead whales over the long run. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (of intelligence), but it isn't evidence of presence either.

Then again, I think you've got a strong case based on the purely social behavior of whales which we can measure anyway.

1) We cannot hold them responsible, because the matter under consideration may be an outside context issue for them. It is just not something that has occurred to them. In much the same way that it may not have occurred to H. sapiens that they should not kill off H. neanderthalis when they did. We can acknowledge this as a bad thing without holding them culpable. Hell, even of they have the capacity to think of the question, they cannot possibly be aware that baleen whales are sapient (if they are). Millions of years of divergence will do that. They have no way of communicating with their prey, they lack the instrumentation and scientific ability to test the matter. Think of how recently we figured out how smart our fellow ape species are. We can look back on it and say to ourselves "this thing we did to them is regrettable and sad" but cannot retroactively apply moral culpability. We cannot say "they should have known", because there is no way they could have.

If the baleen whales communicate with language, and so do the orcas, I would think... put this way, if our tribal ancestors encountered orcs or dwarves or some other fantastic near-humanoid species, I would think that we would be able to deduce their intelligence from knowing that they can talk to each other, if nothing else.

We can argue that the orcas are not responsible for deaths of intelligent life- but in that case, we are still responsible for protecting one intelligent creature from another, aren't we? Just because Fred does not KNOW that by firing guns into bushes he can kill people, does not mean Fred should be allowed to do so. Fred would be stopped, by main force if necessary.

Well, lets put it this way. Actions are right or wrong based on their consequences. However, moral culpability is a different matter. Moral culpability depends on your intentions, or your capacity to understand or predict said consequences. If a 4 year old gets pissed off and beats another 4 year old to death with a hammer, the action is still wrong. It rightly fills us with horror. That does not mean we lock the guilty party away for their rest of their life. They are too young to know any better. Their Theory of Mind is not developed enough yet to understand that the other 4 year old is equivalent to themselves, they dont know the finality of death etc etc etc.

But if a four year old child kills, and keeps killing, eventually we would start getting very drastic about how we intervened. We might try to 'fix' the child, but we wouldn't just stop thinking about the problem or shrug it off.

If killing intelligent whales is murder when we do it, it can't simply become irrelevant when other intelligent beings do it. If nothing else, a creature that attacks intelligent humans (like a maneating tiger) will be hunted down to eliminate the threat to other intelligent beings. If the tiger were sentient we might not kill it so casually, but we'd still have to do something.

I'm not saying we should retroactively punish Orcas. We agree they're not culpable. But what about actively intervening to save one sapient from another trying to kill it? That was my example, not punishing people for murder, but rather actively stopping murder. Why should we let sapient Orca whales murder sapient grey whales?

Because without an alternative, we only condemn the orca to death by starvation.

I would normally default to stopping a cannibal to save their victim, even if the alternative is starvation for the cannibal.

[Alyrium Denryle]

There is absence of evidence of how whales behave around the bodies of dead whales over the long run. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (of intelligence), but it isn't evidence of presence either.

Which is why you use different lines of evidence. Is grieving behavior ambiguous? Sure. It is indicative, but also very alien. Put it in the plus column. Complex communication? Put it in the plus column. Evidence of advance planning? Put it in the plus column. Eventually you build a very strong case for erring on the side of sapience. It is done for dolphins orca etc. The case is very strong. For baleen whales, less so. On the other hand, their brains are the size of a couch.

Brain-Size relative to body mass is often used as a proxy measure for relative intelligence. However, that only works within certain ranges because the power of a brain is not a thing that scales like that. Being HUGE does not mean you need more neurons to control that mass. It is a function of structure--which we should not expect to follow the particular path ours did--and the number of neuron connections. This is why bird and octopus intelligence is freakish despite relatively small brains and less neocortex. Higher neuron density and a completely divergent evolution of brain structure.

But with a brain the size of a sofa? That goes in the plus column. We dont have the capacity to bring a bowhead whale into an aquarium though, so the case is just not as strong.

If the baleen whales communicate with language, and so do the orcas, I would think... put this way, if our tribal ancestors encountered orcs or dwarves or some other fantastic near-humanoid species, I would think that we would be able to deduce their intelligence from knowing that they can talk to each other, if nothing else.

When they are that close? Maybe. But not all languages are translatable. Orca and baleen whale communicate in vastly different fashions even though they both use sound. Different frequency ranges etc. Between humans and orcs, say, there is mutual tool use, maybe written language etc. You can watch them and they are similar enough to us that we can draw the analogy.

A human and an orc can look at eachother and think "Ok, they look like me, they write, they forge iron tools. I dont know what they are saying, but they are saying something."

Now, think about this as if you were an Orca. It is somewhat different. There is this HUGE thing there. It makes sounds, but you have no way of knowing if it is language. You have no way of knowing what it means. You cannot get these things in a controlled environment etc.

We can put a dolphin in a tank, teach them to associate pictographic symbols with actions, and then string together imperative sentences to one individual and watch it somehow communicate that command to another dolphin that could not see the initial command, and watch them do the thing requested. We can tell them make something up, they will hang out under the surface and we can listen in on the sounds they make, and then they will perform some unique acrobatics routine that is synchronized.

It took centuries of intellectual development before it ever occurred to us to do this. We took it for granted that we were the only sapient beings on this planet for thousands of years after we had writing.

As far as an Orca is concerned, that whale is just a thing that makes noise--just like everything else in the ocean. Just like, for us, chickens that we are pretty sure are not sapient at this point. How on earth is an Orca to know? If the language is sufficiently different, there is no way at all to distinguish it from noise. If chickens were sapient and used all their calls and clucks as language, we would not be able to tell they were even sapient until we brought them into a lab and ran some tests. Those tests have mercifully all come back negative.

I would normally default to stopping a cannibal to save their victim, even if the alternative is starvation for the cannibal.

Then you are trading one death for another. Net 0 in the utility column. Congratulations! You have accomplished nothing.

The difference is that you can offer the human cannibal a god damn sandwich and make it clear to the cannibal that it is edible and teach him how to make more if necessary. You might even be able to provide the needed materials *gasp and shock*. Unless there is something fucked in their head, they will typically be happy you did so.

The solution is figuring out a way to offer the Orca an alternative so they get to live too. Maximizing utility is often a long term thing. It is not always possible in the short term.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Ghetto Edit:

I initially thought this was adequately addressed by inference, but I would like to make it more explicit.

But if a four year old child kills, and keeps killing, eventually we would start getting very drastic about how we intervened. We might try to 'fix' the child, but we wouldn't just stop thinking about the problem or shrug it off.

A kid who keeps killing is fucked in the head. An orca is engaging in normal behavior. Bit of a false analogy there. That does not mean you ignore it, but it is, for lack of a better term, a structural problem you cant solve in the same way you might deal with an insane child.

If killing intelligent whales is murder when we do it, it can't simply become irrelevant when other intelligent beings do it. If nothing else, a creature that attacks intelligent humans (like a maneating tiger) will be hunted down to eliminate the threat to other intelligent beings. If the tiger were sentient we might not kill it so casually, but we'd still have to do something.

Yeah, you would. That something is to find an alternative to human flesh for the tiger. With non sapient tigers, killing is a thing used as a last resort. There are options. Relocation, sanctuaries etc. However, you cant use those with a whole pod of Orca. You have to get at and solve the root problem in the case or Orca or the hypothetical sapient tiger.

[Grumman]

I would normally default to stopping a cannibal to save their victim, even if the alternative is starvation for the cannibal.

Then you are trading one death for another. Net 0 in the utility column. Congratulations! You have accomplished nothing.

I don't think many people would consider killing a serial killer to save their victim a "net zero in the utility column". Even if you do not consider the life of an innocent worth more than the life of their aggressor, you might weigh the life of the cannibal against the lives of all their future victims and not just the one they're planning on eating right now.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I would normally default to stopping a cannibal to save their victim, even if the alternative is starvation for the cannibal.

Then you are trading one death for another. Net 0 in the utility column. Congratulations! You have accomplished nothing.

I don't think many people would consider killing a serial killer to save their victim a "net zero in the utility column". Even if you do not consider the life of an innocent worth more than the life of their aggressor, you might weigh the life of the cannibal against the lives of all their future victims and not just the one they're planning on eating right now.

True, but Orca are not serial killers. Additionally, we are not dealing with an individual orca. Rather an entire pod feeds on one whale for some time and without those whales, the pod which can number dozens of individuals will die.

Human concepts of justice and punishment etc are just not analogous in this case. You are failing to make the distinction between "morally wrong and in need of changing" and "criminal, evil, and possibly insane".

You are effectively dealing with an alien species here. They live on this planet, but they are Alien. The matter must be approached differently.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

No, it should not. Either there is a universal standard applicable to sapients, or else the Makah have as much right to have different norms as an Orca pod does! That is the point I am trying to make, that as far as I am concerned, if you want a universal standard, it has to be universal across sapience, not just universal across humanity. I am prepared to accept a nonuniversal standard... But then you can't apply it racially, either. Cultural differences must be considered just as much as differences across species. You cannot bias genetic evolution against memetic evolution in how you judge and apply the law. Either all sapients are treated equally, or a culture that has evolved separately for aeons must be given the same consideration as the culture of the whale pod that did the same. You yourself just admitted that Orca whales learn to hunt different kinds of prey, how is that different than some groups of humans whaling and some groups of humans not whaling?

You can defend universalism, but you cannot make universalism non-universal to get the result you desire out of the world. If both Orca whales and Grey whales are sapient, then we've got to intervene to protect the innocent non-violent Grey whales against the cannibal Orcas, until the Orcas either learn to stop trying to murder, or all the ones who developed a culture based on murder are dead.

Or maybe we should step back and consider whether universalism is really appropriate in this context at all, with the amount of information that we have right now. I would say it isn't

[Simon_Jester]

It took centuries of intellectual development before it ever occurred to us to do this. We took it for granted that we were the only sapient beings on this planet for thousands of years after we had writing.

For thousands of years before that, we took it for granted that fairies and goblins existed. I don't think you can generalize that smoothly.

I would normally default to stopping a cannibal to save their victim, even if the alternative is starvation for the cannibal.

Then you are trading one death for another. Net 0 in the utility column. Congratulations! You have accomplished nothing.

Under simple utilitarianism, I have accomplished nothing.

Under rule utilitarianism, I have upheld a rule with good utilitarian consequences: thou shalt not kill intelligent life.

Non-rule utilitarianism is so hard to make reliable decisions under that I can't imagine trying to base a law code on it. So we're back to trying to protect intelligent whales from intelligent whales.

On the other hand, I am almost tempted by the image of future-us having this conversation with a gray whale participating. If it's intelligent, I bet its first question is "why the FUCK did you do that to our ocean," followed by "why the FUCK didn't you do something about those damn cannibal orcas?"