In Defense of Dolphins: The New Moral Frontier

by Thomas White

Have humans been sharing the planet with other intelligent life for millions of years without realizing it? In Defense of Dolphins combines accessible science and philosophy, surveying the latest research on dolphin intelligence and social behavior, to advocate for their ethical treatment.

Encourages a reassessment of the human-dolphin relationship, arguing for an end to the inhuman treatment of dolphins Written by an expert philosopher with almost twenty-years of experience studying dolphins Combines up-to-date research supporting the sophisticated cognitive and emotional capacities of dolphins with entertaining first-hand accounts Looks at the serious questions of intelligent life, ethical treatment, and moral obligation Engaging and thought-provoking

Genres: Science, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Animals, Nature, Wildlife

256 pages, Paperback

First published July 23, 2007

About the author

Thomas I. White is the Inaugural Conrad N. Hilton Professor of Business Ethics and Director of the Center for Ethics and Business at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He is Founder and Director of IBECC: The International Business Ethics Case Competition. A resident of Amherst, MA, He also teaches at Mount Holyoke College.

His books can be considered 'applied ethics.' SOCRATES COMES TO WALL STREET challenges the presuppositions about business that led to the 2008 meltdown and that continue to produce ongoing corporate scandals. IN DEFENSE OF DOLPHINS and a number of articles argue against the captivity of cetaceans by the entertainment industry. In connection with his work on dolphins, He is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics.

His next book (coming soon) is CONVERSATION ABOUT AMERICA: THE FAUX-G.O.P. ASSAULT ON THE VALUES THAT DEFINE US.

For more detailed information about his writings see: indefenseofdolphins.com, socratescomestowallstreet.com and conversationaboutamerica.com

Reviews

[Silvio Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reviews the evidence for what bottlenosed dolphins' minds are like and its ethical implications, from the supposedly commonsense perspective that harm to more sophisticated minds is very bad but harm to unsophisticated minds is no big deal. I think that perspective is absurd, along with the conclusions drawn from it, like advocating dolphin-safe but tuna-deadly tuna fishing. Still, it's a good demonstration that no matter how tightly you restrict your criteria for who to care about, you can't include humans and exclude dolphins. Probably the most important idea is the suggestion that dolphins' sense of self might be more communal and less individual than humans', so that holding them captive might be bad for them less because of the loss of freedom and more because of the social deprivation than we would guess.

[Wendelle]

short book that contains base information about dolphin cognition in order to argue for their right to be considered and treated as 'nonhuman persons'. The author sometimes lacks dispassionate scientific conservatism in declaring his points, but reading this book can cause curiosity over the open-ended questions of dolphin abilities, and the ethics of penning them in concrete tanks for our own purposes.

[Kirsten · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book! In the post-Blackfish era, I see a lot of uninformed ranting about captivity that does the dolphins no favors. This book lays out the arguments perfectly in a well-reasoned manner. This is what a debate should look like, and this is what both sides of the issue should respect.

[UChicagoLaw]

"For a book in progress on animal law, I have been reading a lot of the wonderful scholarship animal scientists have been producing about animal cognition and emotions. I will recommend a group of books, not just one. Momma's Last Hug, the most recent book by the great primatologist Frans De Waal, is a moving study of animal emotions; another older book on that topic, covering many more species, is Mark Bekoff's The Emotional Lives of Animals. Two books by philosophers who are also experts in a particular species are Thomas White's In Defense of Dolphins and Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Finally, an amazing combination of cutting-edge research and argument is Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. This is a large literature, and there is a lot more, but these books will start anyone who cares about wild animals on a fascinating journey."

—Martha C. Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm trying to find the full (unabridged) copy of this book rn, and oh is it a struggle.
The argument here is so unwavering; this is the first piece of literature I've encountered that doesn't falter on the argument that dolphins are non-human persons. What a game-changing notion! I've seen my fair share of references to the Declaration of Cetaceans Rights (see the Oxford Animal Ethics page here), but to see an expanded document that fundamentally outlines WHY cetaceans qualify as persons with convincing and very scientific supporting evidence is an entirely different experience. There is no justification for the continued exploitation of marine rights. To dismiss cetacean consciousness as less than our own is to step back in history; to acknowledge cetacean rights and dismantle "educational" marine park displays of cetaceans in captivity is to move forward toward a more empathetic and scientific world. If you haven't already, go check out The Dolphin Project

[Shel · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Defense of Dolphins contains some fun facts about dolphins who are aquatic, auditory, emotional, interconnected, highly-social, intelligent nonhuman beings. Dolphins have spherical brains and have been around in their modern form for more than 10 million years (compared with 5 million years for humans and just 100,000 for homo sapiens). They can share auditory information with each other in a way that would be akin to humans being able to "... see what something looked like through someone's else's eyes." and this may give them a shared and interconnected sense of self, explaining why they opt to remain in a group rather than escape as individuals — if this is made possible — when trapped in tuna nets.

It also offers some interesting speculations: What would humans be like if we had evolved in the water without tools and hands? What if human intelligence were assessed by dolphin standards (with an emphasis on social, emotional, auditory interactions)? How would we stack up?

"We might say that, in the ocean, nature may select for specialists in relationships not tools — for emotional sophistication perhaps more than for cognitive sophistication."

The key idea here is that dolphins are intelligent in a way that is different from humans, best described as "alien" intelligence (per marine scientist Diana Reiss), and therefore, dolphins are ethically entitled to treatment as individuals. White provides some science and research to support a perspective expressed in Douglas Adams' novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979).

"It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — while all that dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons."

To anyone predisposed to imagine that dolphins may be intelligent in ways that are different from humans, there isn't much surprising here. Rather than delving into an understanding of dolphin intelligence, this book skims the surface. In large part, this is because White (while often using terms familiar to the animal rights movement: sentient-ism, speciesism, and anthropocentric bias) makes a strategic decision to address this book to skeptics rather than people who might already be familiar with the concept of respecting nonhuman intelligences (readers of works by philosophers and ethicists Jeremy Bentham and Peter Singer, for example.) White's premise is that the case for dolphin intelligence is so strong as to convince even someone resistant to the idea that nonhumans can think, and once so convinced, anyone will naturally understand the necessity of treating dolphins with the same moral code — do no harm — accorded any human individual.

Pairs well with: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — re watch the opening song to the movie, "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish."

[Judith · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a scholarly examination of the personhood of alien beings (i.e., dolphins), White provides moral and philosophical reasons for us to really think about how we treat creatures other than humans. Considering that we don't do a very good job of treating humans particularly well, I found this to be a stimulating, thought-provoking book. Because dolphins live in an entirely different medium than do humans, many of our comparisons have been anthropocentric, and thus somewhat limiting. I'm ready to join others to see that we treat all sentient beings much more carefully.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book on the need to rethink our relationship to whales and dolphins.don't know if it will change any minds, and he seems to chose the arguments that bolster his point of view, but since I agree with his conclusion -- whales and dolphins warrant treatment as "persons" in their own right, I'm fine with that.

[Barbara]

Excelente!