Title
“Save the whales” for their natural goodness
Author(s)
Campagna, Claudio; Guevara, Daniel
Published
2022
Abstract
Could the songs of the humpback whale be a reason for judging commercial whaling morally wrong? Something similar to that, we argue, was in fact judged in the 1970–80s, during the heyday of the Save the Whales movement. Some whale experts of the new era of field naturalists advocated for anti-whaling by reasoning like this: “because humpback whales ‘sing’ they cannot be slaughtered.” The natural history of whales and the judging of whaling as ethically wrong were connected by the logic of the language used to express both. We will discuss a possible philosophical ground for this connection, in the theory of Natural Goodness (NG), advanced by philosopher Philippa Foot, and based on philosopher Michael Thompson’s work on the logic and language of the “forms of life.” Natural goodness is the good of a creature satisfying the necessities of its life form. This is the primary value of life and it consists in the relation between life form and a particular bearer of the form (or “representative” of the form, as we will sometimes say). Thus, slaughtering whales is wrong primarily because it violates that relation. We explain the rationale and ethical power of this apparently simplistic statement by revisiting a movement whose effectiveness lay in its ethical commitment to forms of life other than human. The theory of NG provides a general, naturalistic standard for normative judgments about any and all living things. Our contribution to the theory is to show how NG serves as the primary standard for evaluating our treatment of other life forms such as marine mammals, and as an ethical grounding for conservation practice.
Keywords
save the whales; natural goodness; conservation ethics; Disney Holt; Roger Payne; Paul Watson; Philippa Foot; Michael Thompson
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PUB35613