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!
I am not talking about norms. My approach to ethical universalism is not to treat everyone and everything the same. Rather, it is to have the same sets of generalized rules, with different practical applications depending on what the god damn circumstance is. Ethical universalism does not mean every god damn problem has the same solution. Suffering is suffering, but the cause and form suffering takes can be different. They way emotions are processed is different. The various competing interests that must be balanced against eachother can be different.
We do not arrest bonobos for child molestation because being masturbated 20 minutes after birth is not traumatizing for bonobos, or indicative of fucked-up-ness on the part of the adults. It is normal behavior for them. If an adult bonobo chimp molests a six year old human, you dont lock it in prison like you would an adult human. You teach it that sexual activity with a human child is not appropriate behavior.
We can do this, because we have the capacity to meaningfully communicate with a bonobo chimp. The bonobo does it in the first place because it has no way of knowing that it will traumatize a human child. It thinks that it is bonding in a socially appropriate way.
The same thing with an Orca eating a humpback calf. It CANT know that what it is doing is wrong. It sees a source of food. Not only that, but we cannot communicate complex ideas to it, we can train it in a captive context but not in the wild. We have to balance the right to live for two different organisms involved in a millions of years old predator prey relationship, both of which have a completely alien mindset to our own. The alieness does not obviate what is and is not right. What it does do is modify the appropriate response. That response is necessarily long-term. We must obtain the ability to communicate with Orca. We must communicate the idea to them--in whatever terms that work--that eating another intelligent species is a thing they ought not do. We must offer them an alternative food source so they do not starve.
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?
Are you really that dense?
Orca eating whale do not have an alternative food source. We have no way of communicating the existence of another food source to them. Orca pods in the same area specialize on different food sources to avoid competition, so there may not be one that is locally available that they can switch over to.
Humans living in 9th century Norway did The Grind for the same reasons. They had no way of knowing what they were doing was morally questionable. They had to do it, because if they did not they might starve over winter. But it is no longer the 9th century. We know better now, or can at least reasonably infer better now. There are alternatives as well. We can store grain, import fruit, farm enough cattle etc.
If baleen whales ARE sapient, the First Nation peoples have alternative food sources. They can be convinced that what they are doing is wrong, and they can live with that. Hell, their culture can even evolve to not require the killing of whales while still preserving many elements of it. The orca's can as well, but it wont happen on its own. It is incumbent on us, as the more culturally and intellectually advanced species, to give them the necessary push in a way they can understand. Otherwise, all that is going to happen is the Wrath of the Bipeds descending on Orca who have no idea why, followed by the needless and painful deaths of entire Orca populations. We would be committing the equivalent of Orca Genocide if we did that.
Would you find this acceptable if we were talking about things being done by a newly encountered extraterrestrial at an approximately Baroque tech level? Say some distinct genotype and culture needs some chemical extracted from a gland in the brain of another sapient species on their planet in order to treat some lethal genetic illness affecting them. Assume for the sake of this discussion that the harvested species is so different in anatomy and has a communication system so different that there is no way for the harvesting species to know of their sapience, because they lack the capacity to detect said form of communication and believe--like we did--that all the other species on their planet are highly complex automatons. Lets say that the harvested species communicates via some sort of telepathy, while the harvesting species communicates way way of pulses of radio waves. Assume the harvesting is low-level and not population damaging. Assume also that we know both are sapient, we know both are sapient and can detect both languages but cannot translate them yet.
You have a ship in orbit. What the fuck do you do? Do you interfere with the harvesting, dooming an entire ethnic/cultural group to a slow and painful death and thus effectively commit genocide? Do you start killing them so at least it is a quick genocide? Or, do you weigh the consequences and decide--as I have in the case of Orca--that the best option for everyone involved is to work on breaking the language and culture barrier, tell them what they are doing and what its moral implications are, and offer an alternative to the harvesting like synthesizing an identical chemical in vitro or from tissue culture?
From my point of view, the obvious answer is that last one.
...
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
Alright. Let us assume we cannot strictly apply universalist ethics. What are the rules? How do we determine what is and is not acceptable? I ask this because cultural and individual moral relativism can be used to justify or excuse
anything. Would you like me to take you down the road that leads to? I can do that if you want.
Do they not have a claim on our protection from natural hazards? We wouldn't abandon human beings to be eaten by sharks or orcas; why would we abandon whales to the same fate?
Because the Orca have a similar right to not starve to death. The Orca are also innocent by way of not being culpable.
Under rule utilitarianism, I have upheld a rule with good utilitarian consequences: thou shalt not kill intelligent life.
Rule Utilitarianism is extensionally equivalent to Act Utilitarianism, because the rule that maximizes utility is "always perform the act that maximizes utility"
followed by "why the FUCK didn't you do something about those damn cannibal orcas?"
"Because, like we used to, they did not know what they were doing was wrong, we had no way of communicating this with them at the time, and no way of stopping them that did not involve the deaths of the Orca. We solved the problem. They stopped eating you, and have now taken to eating *whateverthefuck*. They are sorry, and we are sorry we did not figure out how to solve the matter sooner"
