by adam heckler

I recently came across a show on Animal Planet called "Whale Wars". The program follows the crew of the MV Steve Irwin as they attempt to impede Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. The Japanese, however, say that their activities are legal because they only kill whales for scientific research, which is allowed by the IWC.

I'm not an expert in international law, so I don't know whether the Japanese whalers are acting legally or not. That being said, I think the second question has a much clearer answer, mostly because the methods used by the crew of the MV Steve Irwin (e.g., throwing nauseating chemicals onto the decks of the whaling vessels) strike me as far too dangerous and aggressive.

So can we take pop culture, give it a healthy dose of moral philosophy, and come out the other side with some insight? You bet.

Rawls to the Rescue

The American philosopher John Rawls once created a thought-experiment that may be useful here: the "original position". It goes like this:

Imagine a group of people who are attempting to write the laws of a new society. While creating their laws, however, they remain ignorant of their ultimate position in the society; that is, nobody knows what race, sex, and so forth that they'll eventually become. Because everyone is presumably rational and wouldn't want to condemn themselves to any disadvantages, they will eventually agree on a just set of laws.

Now let's apply Rawls' scenario to "Whale Wars" and see if we can figure out if the actions of the MV Steve Irwin are just or not. So imagine you and I, not knowing who will turn out to be the environmentalist and who will turn out to be the whaler, are trying to decide what to do.

Obviously, neither one of us would want stinky chemicals thrown onto the deck of our ship, nor would we want to be injured if our ships collide, so we can rule out those types of aggressive actions as unjust. We can also rule out unregulated whaling (even in the name of science), as neither one of us wants to kill all the whales either.

Since we both have an equal chance of becoming the whaler versus becoming the environmentalist, we would probably agree on a compromise. Such a deal would most likely allow for the killing of a certain number of whales, but we'd also want such whaling to be done in a sustainable manner.

Although these non-violent conclusions seem obvious when attained through Rawls' methods, for some reason they seem to escape the environmentalists of the MV Steve Irwin. As for the Japanese, I won't quite fault them yet, as I cannot say for sure whether they are killing more whales than is sustainable.

Kant Rocks the Boat

Another ethical philosophy that could be instructive here is Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative. Put simply, his ethical framework says this:

"Act in such a way that you treat humanity [...] as an end and never only as a means to an end." That is, don't use others just to get what you want.

For example, suppose I tell my friend Brett that I will give him $20 to wash my car, but I secretly decide to not pay up. Kant would say that this is wrong because I used Brett as a way to get what I wanted (a clean car) instead of treating him like a person with intrinsic value.

In the case of the MV Steve Irwin, the crew's end is to save whales from the Japanese ships. However, the way they go about this endangers both their own lives and the lives of the Japanese whalers. Thus, the crew is effectively using the whalers to get at their own ends, and are not treating the whalers as ends in themselves (or else they would not be endangering them).

So What?

Both Kant's categorical imperative and Rawls' original position find the crew at fault for their dangerously aggressive tactics, but that isn't to say that the Japanese whalers are completely without blame. Clearly, there is a legal and ethical conflict here that requires further examination.

The most important thing we've discovered here is that the morality of the show isn't as black and white as Animal Planet wants it's viewers to think. Although the MV Steve Irwin's goal is as noble as could be, the means used the achieve it are much less so. Trying to stop violence against animals by using violence against people isn't a solution, it's part of the problem.

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