Environmental Ethics

Volume 36, Issue 4, Winter 2014

Whale Killers and Whale Rights: The Future of the International Regulation of Whaling

The normative claims underlying international human rights have international law implica­tions in the context of cetaceans (whales, porpoises and dolphins). Legal, ethical, philosophical, and scientific elements can be brought together into a synthetic argument to determine appropriate criteria for affording “cetacean rights.” The ethical underpinning of human rights is a neo-Kantian conception of human dignity. Such dignity is ascribed to humans on account of their rationality, attributed according to certain sufficient criteria. The evidence appears sufficient to make it ethically and legally appropriate to consider a novel international instrument or an adaptation of the existing framework to afford cetaceans “whale rights.”