NYT Points Moral Finger at Japanese

I was so excited when I read the first two sentences of an editorial with a most unpromising title ("Japan’s Whaling Obsession") in today’s New York Times. "Humans should be careful when criticizing other humans about the industrial slaughter of animal species. It is hard to find moral ground."

For a moment, I thought the editorial was going to address the irrational nature of our capricious decisions regarding which animals should live and die–and how they should live and die–in large numbers. But good titles in journalism tell you what the article is about, and I was soon jettisoned from my fantasy world where killing without justification is morally unjustifiable regardless of how tasty or useful the kill-ee is.

Alas, the next sentence, leading to the crux of the piece, is: "There was one small, bright spot of global consensus: whales." And the crux is: the Japanese the only holdouts. They still slaughter whales, if for no other reason than it’s part of their culture. Yes, The C-Word is back. Culture, the word used to justify something that is otherwise unjustifiable.

I’d like to turn the tables on The Times, which calls whales "wonderful, sociable mammals  . . . [who] should be granted a stay of extinction," and says  "[N]ationalism seems hard-wired into Japans’s insistence on maintaining the right to exploit any and all ocean resources." I’m no fan of Japan on this issue, but doesn’t the US do the same thing? Like them, we have decided that certain animals are outside the boundaries of hideous slaughter (maybe dogs, cats, horses, and of course, whales), but it’s open season on just about everyone else.

Why should whales get preferential treatment, and why does our preferential treatment give us the right to point the moral finger at the Japanese? If you’re going to ridicule someone for doing something, you should always make sure you aren’t doing something just like it. Look what we here in the US do to cows, chickens, deer, alligators, minks, and anyone else who we’ve deemed delectable, whose skin we’ve deemed fashionable, or whose existence we’ve deemed a nuisance.

Contrary to the second sentence of this editorial, finding moral ground is easy: there is no preferential treatment. If she’s a sentient being, whether mammal or fish or bird or reptile, there is no moral justification for killing without necessity. And culture doesn’t come close to necessity. But once you have a classification system for who gets to live and die that is based on something arbitrary (culture) or unnecessary (what we want to eat or wear), you’d best keep silent about morality.