March 13, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
If you read the post from last week, you’ll remember that Stubb orders a sermon from the ship’s cook. Poor Fleece unwillingly obliges. But the whole scene smacks of injustice and indecency. Fleece seems to be the most blameless of all the characters — he’s just an aged and broken body being ordered around. And yet, his sermon strikes home. When Stubb demands a sermon for the sharks, Fleece delivers a sermon to the shark of the moment: Stubb. The unwitting Stubb licks his lips on freshly cut whale meat. Melville is setting the stage, but has not arrived at the main point just yet.
The full horrible truth of life’s complexity arrives in Chapter 66: “The Shark Massacre.” In only 625 words, in only five sparse paragraphs, Melville depicts mass carnage. Even though whale chases are bloody and brutal, the language coarse and tribal, Melville distinguishes between the purposeful capture of whales in which the entire whale is used, and this brutal, wasteful slaughter. With sharks surrounding the whale like insects – like maggots in one huge chunk of cheese – they represent an annoyance which becomes harmful to the Pequod’s profits. To fight off hungry sharks, the whalers spear and cut with whaling-spades. Water turns to blood and shark bodies writhe uncontrollably while others continue to feast. Flesh and entrails fill the sea of mutilated mouths and bodies.
Melville writes, “A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin, one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg’s hand off, when he tried to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw.” The terms “generic” and “Pantheistic” might make the reader question whether or not Melville places the sharks within a divine world which doesn’t really matter when you realize that whatever god you believe in created a system which requires such fierce, brutal struggle. Ishmael reinforces this lament a few chapters later when he cries: “Oh, horrible, vulturism of earth! from which not the mightiest whale is free.”
Yet sharks can eat only enough to fill their stomachs, but humans often stockpile goods – oil in the case of Moby Dick – in order to make a profit. There’s no true limit to the concept of profit. Profit carries positive connotations in human society because it signals progress and security. Yet Melville shows time and again that profit is a meaningless concept in nature.
Sharks are wasted in the whalers’ desperation to keep the whale. The public scorns the whaler’s job of undressing, cutting, and dismantling a whale. Whalers are viewed as dirty and lowly, unkempt and smelly. But the public demands the product while reviling the means. Melville wants the reader to see and feel the hypocrisy of human nature, to see and feel the unnatural tendencies of indiscriminate killing and hoarding.
However, I don’t believe that Moby Dick’s over 200,000 words are intended to leave us hopeless. Rather, I think they act as a cipher to help us analyze human behavior. While dissecting and harpooning whales and sharks, we might have learned more about ourselves. Even the chapter’s title “Shark Massacre” indicates a question. How might we define massacre? Or put another way, what is enough? Melville’s provocative language in the “Shark Massacre” asks us to question how we justify killing. Is killing a necessary part of civilization?
Sharks circle the carcass in seemingly endless numbers but even Ishmael understands that their numbers have limits. Through accumulated scenes in which humans attempt to control nature, Melville paves the way for an ethics of enough.
In Justice for Animals, Martha Nussbaum explains “the pervasiveness of human power makes human responsibility spread into domains we previously thought of as just ‘wild’ or ‘Nature’.” Echoing Melville, Nussbaum writes, “This book is about a large human injustice, but it would be of no use if it simply inspired readers to study human injustice, frowning at ourselves in a mirror. In the end, ethical thought has to become practical, or it is idle.” The first five chapters of her book describe the history of justice for the voiceless.
Although Nussbaum admires aspects from other theorists, she believes that none of them have gone far enough towards a comprehensive and practical plan. For example, Steven Wise created a “So Like Us” approach which claims that intelligent species are worthy of protections. However, defining intelligence has been a perennial problem as demonstrated by debates about AI. An earlier philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, noticed that humans don’t necessarily like or admit to animalistic tendencies, often imagining themselves as one step above nature. His necessary work inspired the Utilitarians find evidence for inclusion. The Utilitarians, particularly J. S. Mill, enhanced some of Bentham’s ideas to show that individuals have many different ways of flourishing. Finally, Nussbaum pulls in Kant’s Categorical Imperative as a basis for her ethical stance: she too believes that we have an unconditional moral duty to ourselves and therefore to the natural world on which we depend. Nussbaum believes that since humans are part of, in fact the biggest influencers of, the natural world, ethics and laws should guide all human activities which affect the natural world.
Having run through these historical inspirations, Nussbaum spends the rest of the book describing her Capabilities Approach. Her approach is distinct because it does not rely on pain assessment, does not look at intellect, but rather focuses on the actual abilities of a species. Each species is valued for its own sake, even if humans do not understand it. She asks whether or not the animal has a purpose. Does it demonstrate desire and intention? Does it follow through on plans? While she does rule out plants and simpler life forms, Nussbaum believes the Capabilities Approach can guide human interaction in the natural world.
Sharks offer an excellent example for Nussbaum’s approach. First, they have been evolving for nearly 450 million years, in comparison to humans roughly 200,000 years. Next, sharks live in the ocean, which is a difficult environment for humans to enter and an even more difficult environment to research. The ocean can be intimidating on many levels: no oxygen, high pressure, darkness, and temperature are all factors in a human approach. To a very superficial human eye sharks appear entirely instinctual. Humans can only scratch the surface of their actual existence though because much of their world lies in deep, remote, secluded places.
Nussbaum’s human-centric, rational breakdown of civilization, however, leaves room for improvement, especially in light of the nature of predation. Can there be ethical, moral, and just predation? Check back next Friday for the final installment of What Lurks Below Melville’s Whale: the Shark Chapters.
Photo credit: Shutterstock/ Wirestock Creators
