Sharon Shaw has written a too complimentary response to my recent post regarding Alaskan wolves and has directed us all to the World Society for the Protection of Animals petition. Shaw also points out how little attention animal rights gets as an issue, noting that On the Issues doesn’t list it. I agree that there is a lot of work to do, as Shaw says, and think that work perhaps needs to proceed on more than one front.

FactCheck.org has recently done a piece on Palin and the Alaskan wolf hunt that seems to me to beg a number of questions. Under a rubric reading “A wildlife group’s ad attacks Palin for supporting the shooting of wolves from airplanes. She does, but there’s more to it than that,” the scholars at FactCheck.org, whom I normally respect, make an argument which ultimately reduces the moral claims of those who oppose aerial hunting to semantics and personal taste, ignoring the history of the practice and its effect on wildlife as well as Alaska’s role in the Bush administration’s assault on the Endangered Species Act — and ignoring some other important things as well.

I’m not going to try to reply to the FactCheck piece in detail on the merits. A reply from the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund (which in fairness I need to say that FactCheck references in a footnote) does that quite well. You can read it here. Rather, I want to make two observations. One goes to the FactCheck argument, itself; and the other goes to method.

First, those of us who oppose programs of “predator control” such as Alaska’s do so at least partly out of the conviction that we humans, the most vicious of all predators, have done irreparable damage to the planet which is our home. For some the ground of that conviction is religious; for others it is based in humanistic ethics or in science. but in no case is that conviction a matter of mere personal taste in convictions — the implication of FactCheck’s “That’s a personal judgment call.” I think it remarkable that FactCheck bends over backwards to honor the reasoning of those in Alaska who defend aerial hunting but doesn’t even mention the reasoning of those who oppose the practice. The effect of FactCheck’s foregrounding the case for aerial hunting and footnoting the arguments from the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund is to promote aerial hunting. I’m sure the scholars at FactCheck know this. They are journalists, rhetoricians, philosophers, political scientists, etc.

Which brings up my second observation. If there is anything we have learned from the arguments among scholars during the culture wars, it is that belief in the existence of a neutral territory for the critic is problematic. What is claimed to be neutral territory, upon inspection turns out to be governed by interest. The most honest scholars in the postmodern twenty-first century take positions and acknowledge them. The proposition that the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund’s ad, which is the subject of the FactCheck piece, can be stripped of its emotional characterization so as to reveal its real content is to make a naive fact/value distinction that at bottom is no more than a denial of the valuation that is the core of the ad in the first place.

Here’s my point about method. The idea of the critic as dispassionate, autonomous, and culturally neutral carries with it the idea of privileged access to objective knowledge. That’s an interest like any other. Not that it means we shouldn’t listen to scholars who analyse arguments — we should. But their enterprise is as perilous and prone to error as any other human enterprise. Don’t believe them when they pretend that it isn’t. I think the scholars at FactCheck have made an error here.

I think, perhaps without meaning to, they have preferred the worse cause over the better.