Early this year, the International Court of Justice handed down a ruling that brought at least a temporary halt to Japan's whaling program. Normally, an international court case isn't science news. In this case, however, the whaling was justified under a clause of the International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling that allowed whales to be killed “for the purposes of scientific research." And, as detailed in a perspective in this week's edition of Science, the court decision came down to whether Japan was actually doing any science.

Australia, which brought the case, argued that science is an international activity, and subject to some properties that hold no matter where it's done:

(i) defined and achievable objectives; (ii) use of appropriate methods, including use of lethal methods only where objectives cannot be answered through alternate methods; and (iii) proper assessment and response through the community of scientists.

Japan, in contrast, argued that if some research resulted from its whaling, the whole effort should be considered "for the purposes of scientific research."

The court didn't buy either of these arguments. Instead, it looked at the details of how Japan designed and implemented its whaling program, and whether they could satisfy the scientific objectives it claimed were being addressed, such as monitoring the Antarctic ecosystem and examining competition for food among whale species.

The perspective looks in details at the issue of how many individuals Japan allowed whalers to take. A brief glance makes them appear arbitrary: 50 each of humpback and fin, but over 935 minke whales. But the court also found that Japanese whalers rarely ever reached these numbers, but that this failure never resulted in any adjustments to the research program. And there appeared to be no consideration of whether the same research goals could be reached through non-lethal sampling.

As such, the court decided that the program was clearly based on purposes other than scientific research, and that any claims of the sort needed to rely on something more than Japan's word.

The perspective notes that this decision is rather damning for the International Whaling Commission, which had approved the research. All of the inconsistencies in the Japanese program were pointed out during a review in which it was initially proposed. Japan simply dismissed these criticisms as "political"—something that you hear about a wide variety of scientific topics—and the IWC approved the program.

Although the decision doesn't get in to the actual definition of what makes something scientific (something that's come up in other court cases), it does provide a useful guide to how to identify a scientific research program: does it have clear goals that can be achieved using the approach laid out? That won't be enough to avoid the clashes where science runs up against social values. But it might help identify some cases where it's clear that the primary issue is on the social values side of the equation.

Science, 2014. DOI: 10.1126/science.1254616 (About DOIs).

Listing image by Tony Hisgett (via Flickr)