Any activity done in the sea causes whales deaths. When we industrially extract fish from the sea, we disrupt their ecosystem and make it harder for them to find food. When we transport oil, the oil eventually gets poured into the ocean. Etc.
Is a whaler boat ramming a Shepherd boat a bad thing? The issue at hand is that the shepherds are operating in illegal ways. In the shepherd's logic, if someone else is doing a bad thing, it entitles them to disrupt the wrong doer and take justice to hands. From the whalers' perspective, they are just making a living and the shepherds are sabotaging their jobs. From the whalers' perspective, the shepherds are doing a bad thing. And from the shepherds' own logic, if you do a bad thing, that entitles me to take action. Shepherds kill by the sword and thus must admit that they can die by the sword.
It is shepherds that broke the social contract. So they are not entitled to the benefits of the contract.
Is what the whalers do a morally ok thing? In my opinion, Whales are too intelligent and thus eating whale is akin to eating dogs. Which I would not like to happen. The answer though is to reduce the demand for whale meat and oil. Because pirating whaler boats is probably more effective as a media stunt and a risky one at that.
Tensu wrote:
What happens if the day comes when we encounter extraterrestrials as intelligent as we are? Are we going to kill and eat them too?
Of course not.
It is far more likely that if we do encounter extraterrestrial, intelligent life in the short to mid term , they are going to be the ones that kill, eat and/or slave us.
There is most likely not intelligent life in the solar system. Outside of the solar system, the places that could harbor intelligent life are far , far away. If we ever do manage to get space travel to work and be able to reach such long distances, it will not be soon. I think we shall wait at least 100 years before anything of this happens.
The alternative would be that the extraterrestrials are the ones who find us instead. (And that's assuming long distance space travel is possible at all). Since they will have such advanced technological level, they will most likely be the "conquerors" and "pioneers" of the tale. And we will be the "new world". Our planet will be for them just a bunch of goods that could be marketable. And work force that could be exploited.
Eating us? That's unlikely, it is really unlikely our chemical structure will be compatible at all as food for them. Though who knows? Maybe they will have some form of device that converts any organic component into stuff that is metabolizable by their bodies.
And unlucky us, but it is unlikely we could have sex with each other. (It is even unlikely they will have the same kind of reproduction methods as ours). This makes them far more likely to just exterminate us instead of slaving us.
Oh I'm well aware that at our current level of technology the whole "to serve man" scenario is a more likely candidate in the near future, but if I may be so hopeful as to make the generous assumption that our species is going to manage not to destroy itself within the next two or three centuries then the day may come when we are in such a position.
I feel it's better we use cetaceans and great apes as "practice species" to learn empathy for other species than repeat the same cycle of discovery-colonization-genocide-guilt that has tainted human history on some other planet, not that you seem to disagree.
The sea shepherds claim that the whaler's actions violate the laws of the whale sanctuary as the "research" is clearly just exploitation of a loophole. Taking the battle to the courthouse may do more god in the end, but if it wasn't for the sea shepherds how many people would even know it was going on?
14 Dec 2012, 6:09 pm
