Insects Are Not Moderately Important
Crosspost from my blog that you should totally check out!
If I were an animal, I would be a bug. Statistically.
C.S. Lewis once said, “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.” In other words, the thing one cannot think is that Christianity is only a bit important—that following the way of Christ should be part of one’s life, but not a big part. You should not be the sort of person who goes to church once a month, occasionally feels contrite about their sins, but basically ignores Christianity most of the time.
This is how I feel about insect suffering.
I wrote an article recently about insects. In short, I argued that there are so many insects that their suffering is the biggest deal in the world. Most insects live only days or weeks and die painfully—as a result, reducing insect populations should be a top global priority. Inflicting brief, miserable, and hellish lives on countless quadrillions of beings is not compassionate. If the insects could scream in intensity proportional to their suffering, all other sounds in the world would be blotted out by the constant screaming of the insects.
Many people disagreed with my conclusion. They argued that insects mostly live fairly good lives, and as a result, we should try to increase insect populations rather than decrease them. They seemed to think that this was the moderate position—that actively trying to reduce insect populations is crazy and extreme.
This is wrong. You cannot be moderate about insects.
The human population has made literally quadrillions fewer insects exist. Every dollar going to charities that save human lives prevents around 14,000 years of insect life. Ordinary actions like driving to the store kill hundreds or thousands of insects, and energy use affects far more. Human civilization functions by paving over insects—the overwhelming majority of potentially conscious beings that are affected by our actions are bugs.
You can, of course, hold that insects don’t matter at all or that they matter infinitely less than other things so that we can, for all practical purposes, ignore their welfare. Certainly this would be very convenient. But the world does not owe us convenience and rarely provides us with it. If insects can suffer—and probably experience in a week more suffering than humans have for our entire history—this is certainly worth caring about. Plausibly insects can suffer rather intensely. When hundreds of billions of beings die a second, most experiencing quite intense pain before their deaths, that is quite morally serious, unless there’s some overwhelmingly powerful argument against taking their interests seriously. However, as I’ve explained at length, I do not think there is such an argument. Indeed, every justification for ignoring their interests has horrendously counterintuitive implications in rather mundane cases.
Pain is bad because it hurts. Headaches are not bad because their victims are intelligent, but because of how they feel. Utterly mindboggling quantities of suffering being experienced every second—quantities that dwarf that generated by the cruelest human atrocities—are thus quite significant problems. And the quantities of suffering are, indeed, beyond comprehension; if the most detailed report ever composed on the subject is to be believed, insects on average suffer a few percent as intensely as we do, potentially more. If we assume that being beaten with a cane is about 1% as painful as being killed, then insects experience about as much pain just in the moments before death as would be experienced globally if 300 billion people were being savagely beaten with canes every second.
But suppose one has the opposite judgment from my own and thinks that insects mostly have good lives. Thus killing and preventing the existence of insects is very bad. In this case, one’s conclusions are even more radical and counterintuitive.
As mentioned before, most of those affected by humans’ actions are insects. Those who think insects live good lives would thus disagree with me about whether insects are primarily affected positively or negatively. If one places any substantial weight on insects, they should thus think that human civilization has been quite a dreadful thing. They should think that saving lives is generally bad, that humans’ daily actions are like those of the people in Horton Hears A Who, who attempted to exterminate the tiny civilization. They should think one’s primary aim should be reversing the pace of environmental destruction, so as to increase by unfathomable amounts the number of happy insects. Perhaps such a person should even support climate change, for warmer climates have more insects.
This is, suffice it to say, not an intuitive position. At the very least, it implies that one cannot ignore insects most of the time in their ordinary lives. One cannot be like the Christian who occasionally goes to Church and reads the Bible, but mostly ignores their religious commitments in daily life. Insect welfare is either of no importance or unfathomable importance. It cannot be of moderate importance.
The view that says insects don’t matter at all is itself strange. It implies that microwaving millions of insects for trivial reasons would be fine. It implies that if it would be slightly more convenient to run a car by burning billions of live insects, doing so would be perfectly fine. It implies that one should ignore the majority of suffering on earth.
Could one sensibly think insect suffering to be only of moderate importance? Perhaps one values insects at suspiciously small levels, so that insect welfare is neither the most important thing in the world nor totally irrelevant. The problem is, of course, that this is totally arbitrary. It’s one thing to think that insect suffering doesn’t matter at all, but quite another to think that, purely by chance, the amount it matters is calibrated so that the unfathomable quantity of global insect suffering is important but not the biggest deal in the world. It would be like a Christian who applied a discount rate to years in heaven, so as to deliver the consequence that Christianity is of only moderate importance.
The reason one cannot be a moderate about Christianity is that the goods that Christians claim are at stake are infinite in number. When an infinite amount of something is at stake, either that is the most important thing or it doesn’t matter at all. The same thing applies to insects. When the number of insects so thoroughly swamps the number of people that almost all suffering is experienced by insects, either it is the most important thing or it doesn’t matter. If an insect dying painfully is only one six millionth as bad as a human having an experience as painful as death, the nearly 600 billion insect deaths per second still are the worst thing in the world—about as bad as 50,000 human experiences as painful as death experienced each second.
Modifying one’s concern about insects so as to enable one to reject the overwhelming importance of insect suffering would be obviously irrational. If you’re trying to figure out how bad it is for an insect to die in a cave, you don’t need to know how many other insects are dying outside of the cave. Reality does not owe us a guarantee that it will conform to our unreflective intuitions, formed before we learned any of the pertinent facts.
Now, in the face of this inconvenient fact—that either insects don’t matter or they are, for all practical purposes, the only things that matter—I anticipate many people holding that insects don’t matter. After all, the notion that insect suffering is the worst thing in the world is wildly counterintuitive. Just as we can confidently reject ethical arguments that tell us that extreme suffering isn’t bad, so too can we reject arguments that claim that insect suffering is the worst thing in the world.
But this would be a mistake.
The reason taking insect suffering seriously has surprising implications is that the world is surprising. It’s surprising that almost all suffering on Earth is experienced by insects. If the facts are very different from what you’d expect, so too should your ethical judgments be different from what you’d expect.
To give an example from
, suppose you learned that each time you scratched your butt, it caused quadrillions of people on distant planets to be violently tortured to death. This would have wildly revisionary ethical implications. It would imply that the primary determinant of how much good a person does is whether they increase or decrease butt-scratching. But if we learned the world was that way, we shouldn’t reject the obvious datum that torture was bad—just so that we can hold on to the intuitions we formed before learning how the world worked.
If the world is weird, the right ethical judgment will be weird! The reason taking insect suffering seriously has counterintuitive implications is not because it’s unintuitive that suffering is bad. In fact, that’s one of the most intuitive ethical judgments. It’s because the world is weird, so that most of the suffering is had by the small weird creatures that we can’t avoid constantly killing!
If insects looked like people, we’d find it ghastly that hundreds of billions of them were dying every second. It’s only because we focus on morally arbitrary characteristics—what they look like—that we find it permissible to wholly ignore their interests.
We’re also obviously biased against taking insects seriously. Insects are small and weird looking. We don’t naturally empathize with them. Taking seriously their interests is inconvenient. Scope neglect—the tendency to neglect the differences between big numbers—results in us neglecting how much more serious it is when a quadrillion insects suffer than when a trillion insects do.
If the world only had a few thousand insects, the idea they matter a bit wouldn’t seem so weird. It’s only because they are so numerous that taking them seriously has counterintuitive implications. But your judgments about how much insects matter shouldn’t depend on the number of insects there are. If we discovered tomorrow that we’d overestimated the number of insects by several orders of magnitude, that shouldn’t lead us to think that individual insects matter more.
There are only two options. You can think that the cause of most of the world’s suffering is not very important or you can think that insect suffering is the biggest issue. But you must pick one. Insect suffering cannot be only moderately important.
I think it’s reasonable to say “I put some credence on moral views that imply insect suffering is very important and some credence on moral views that imply it’s not important; all things considered, I think it’s moderately important.”
A couple other comments are gesturing at this, but this logic could be applied to all kinds of things: existential risk is probably “either” extremely important or not at all important if you plug different empirical and ethical views into a formula and trust the answer; likewise present-day global health, or political polarization, or developed-world mental health, etc. Eventually, you can either (1) go all in on a particular ethical and meta-ethical theory, (2) be inconsistent, or (3) combine all these considerations into a balanced whole, in which probably a lot of things that pencil as “extremely important” in some views wind up being a moderately high priority. I don’t think it’s obvious that (3) is right, but this post does not make an argument that (1) is right, and I think the burden of proof is on the side arguing explicitly against moderation and intuitive conclusions.
One reason to think (3) is right is to look at the track records. You say you “cannot be a moderate Christian.” I don’t think religious fundamentalists have morally outperformed religious moderates. There are lots of people who take religious values seriously but not fanatically; some of the leaders of the world’s greatest social movements used a lot of religious thinking and rhetoric without trying to follow every letter of the Bible.
If you use a standard expected-value-like method for determining preferences, you still get that insect suffering is very important. Say (for simplicity) you have a 50% credence that aggregate insect suffering is 10,000x more important than aggregate human suffering, and a 50% credence that it’s 0x as important. In expectation, it is 5,000x more important.
If you reject expected value reasoning, then it’s not clear how you can form consistent preferences. Perhaps under a “moral parliament” view, you could allocate 50% of your charitable resources to insects and 50% to humans. IIRC there are some issues with moral parliaments (I think Toby Ord had a paper on it) but there might be some way to make it work.
Note that a world where Insect suffering is 50% to be 10,000x as important as human suffering, and 50% to be 0.0001x as important as human suffering, is also a world where you can say exactly the same thing with humans and insects reversed.
That should make it clear that the ‘in expectation, [insects are] 5000x more important’ claim that follows is false, or more precisely requires additional assumptions.
This is the type of argument I was trying to eliminate when I wrote this:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/atdmkTAnoPMfmHJsX/multiplier-arguments-are-often-flawed
I don’t know the weeds of the moral parliament view, but my suspicion is that this argument relies on too low of a level of ethical views (that is, “not meta enough”). That’s still just a utilitarian frame with empirical uncertainty. The kind of “credences on different moral views” I have in mind is more like:
I don’t know what my actual numbers are, and I’m not sure each of these views is really what the respective philosophy would say about insect welfare; I’m just saying, it’s easy in this kind of framework to wind up having lots of moderate priorities that each seem extremely important on certain ethical views.
Hey there I love the C.S Lewis quote and the sentiment—but I think there is a small world where I can belive that insect suffering is moderately important.
My personal “P-Sentience” (Thanks AI doomers) for most insects might be somewhere between 1 in 1,000 and 1 in 100,000,000 (The moral weights project is great but not the gospel). In addition if they are sentient, then I would estimate their experience of pain might be between 0x and 1,000x less important than that of an individual human.
If this was in the ballpark, then insect suffering could be a “moderately important” issue. Still imporant—but in the realm of the importance of human suffering, not a lot more nor a lot less. OF course it being much more or much less important is far more likely.
I agree that most people would have a “P sentience” for insects far higher or far lower than mine, in which case it would be very imoprtant or utterly unimportant.
So I think you’re mostly right, but there is a small-ish possibility of it being moderately important too.
This is the reason why I agree that there’s a non-negligible chance that insect suffering is “only” moderately important, though I think the chance is higher than “small-ish” (despite the fact that I think insects are 100% conscious/sentient). I come at it from a non-materialist physicalist stance on consciousness, assuming that suffering is (super roughly) proportional to the energy of the electromagnetic field in each nervous system times the degree of dissonance/asymmetry in the field (quantified using some metric tbd). Given the size of many insects, the EM field they generate is very weak, so maybe the worst suffering an insect endures is just not too bad (maybe comparable to stubbing one’s toe lightly). But I’m not sure (especially about how suffering scales with size), so I still think there’s some chance the suffering is quite bad.
(Thanks for posting this, @Bentham’s Bulldog! I enjoyed reading it. 🙂)
How did you come to these numbers for the P-sentience ? Why not between 1 in 10 and 1 in 100,000,000,000,000 ?
My personal feeling, while reading these kind of numbers, is that they seem conveniently in the ballpark of ‘wide enough that I recognize I am not really sure about what is causing sentience, but low enough that I don’t have anything to do about it’. Maybe this is not how you came up with them, but this is what I would come up with I had to justify not working on the topic.
I understand that it’s possible that insects may have a lower ability to feel suffering, but I don’t see how we can be confident enough to find it unlikely that they are morally relevant.
Thanks @CB🔸 I’d rather not get into this here in detail (its not what the post is about), but these numbers come from something like starting from the moral weights project numbers then discounting pretty heavily due to skepticism about the methodology being biased towards animals at most junctures. My starting point of 1 in a thousand isn’t far off RPs numbers. Your between 1 in 10 and one in 100 billion is also entirely reasonable.
I’m not at all confident they are morally irrelevant, my point was only that there’s a chance their suffering is relevant on the ballpark of human suffering—not necessarily all or nothing.
Hi, I really enjoyed this post. Your writing style is engaging, and the argument is well-constructed, provided one accepts certain assumptions about morality.
For me, this piece really functions as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the utilitarian calculus and the broader worldview that equates moral good with maximising pleasure or minimising suffering.
If we grant your premises, which seem largely true, though there are a few objections raised in the comments (not that I want to get into those here), then the argument is sound. However, the conclusion, that insect welfare is “the biggest issue”, strikes me as ultimately absurd. It runs counter to nearly every moral intuition we have (and I’d argue that moral intuitions shouldn’t be casually dismissed. We rely on intuitive value judgments in virtually every domain of inquiry).
I appreciate your argument and admire your willingness to defend it. But to me, this is precisely the kind of extreme conclusion that reveals the limitations of utilitarianism when followed to its logical endpoint. It’s one of the reasons I ultimately stepped away from the view a few years ago.
Utilitarianism is one of the more “moderate” views in the field because at the very least it admits that individual insects have less welfare capacity than typical humans. Unitarian rights-based theories claim that right to life is equally strong for all sentient beings, which make insects an even bigger priority. What is your view on moral patienthood?
Hi, thanks for your reply. This is a difficult question. I should say as a disclaimer that I’m not coming from a rights-based ethical framework. I haven’t engaged deeply with rights-based theories, but from the limited exposure I’ve had, I’m not convinced they provide a particularly effective foundation for articulating or justifying moral judgments. They seem, to me, more like rhetorical containers rather than real moral artefacts, if that makes sense.
That said, my views on moral patienthood, while evolving, tend toward a kind of human-first perspective. I’d generally argue that human beings possess a kind of intrinsic moral worth, and that humanity, as a collective endeavour or end, ought to take precedence over other ends.
I do acknowledge that non-human animals are capable of being harmed or benefitted, and that we have some moral obligations not to inflict unnecessary harm onto them. However, when forced to choose between a human and a non-human animal, I anticipate I would almost always choose the human.
This perspective can be directly applied to the domain of cause prioritisation. If one holds that, as a general principle, human interests should take precedence over those of non-human animals, then it follows that causes which primarily benefit human beings will be prioritised over those that focus on non-human animals.
Of course, when comparing causes that fall entirely within the domain of non-human animal ethics, a different evaluative metric would need to be employed. However, given my prior commitment to a human-first moral framework and the reality of limited personal resources, it seems unlikely that I would allocate substantial effort toward evaluating or supporting animal-focused causes. Given my commitments, I should maximise my impact by concentrating on human-centred initiatives and, correspondingly, opting out of debates over the relative merits of animal-related causes.
Let me know if you have any reservations about anything I’ve just said there. Thanks again for reaching out.
Thank you for the detailed reply. I’m personally not satisfied by moral theories that attribute intrinsic moral significance to species-membership but I won’t be available for further discussion.
Regarding moral intuitions, I agree that it’s hard to feel concern for insects, from a gut level. However, it’s entirely possible that we react more easily to factors such as size, numbers and proximity.
On that topic, I suggest reading this excellent post, where the author addresses the mismatch between our gut reaction and the available evidence : https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2RdYDcwrnvdCn2SbK/the-case-for-insect-consciousness
Hi,
Thanks for your response and for the recommendation—an interesting read.
I should clarify that when I use the term “moral intuition,” I am referring to something more substantial than a gut feeling. The phrase “gut feeling” strikes me as somewhat deflationary in capturing the vividness and perceived reality of moral intuitions. That said, I should also note that I am not, strictly speaking, a moral intuitionist.
It is important to observe, however, that even if we grant that insects possess consciousness and are capable of suffering, concluding that they therefore deserve moral consideration would still require an additional premise: namely, something like “morality is fundamentally concerned with the mitigation of suffering”, or perhaps more broadly, “with the flourishing of conscious beings” etc.
Here’s my issue:
I approach ethics from a virtue-theoretic perspective. I don’t believe that morality is primarily about minimising suffering or achieving some general good across conscious entities. Rather, I understand morality as fundamentally oriented toward human flourishing (flourishing in a specifically human sense).
Therefore, even if I were to accept that insects are conscious, I remain unconvinced that their welfare should be a cause priority, let alone that it constitutes a genuine domain of moral concern.
But, even if we throw virtue ethics out of the window, and suppose that morality is not only about human flourishing, the position that tries to draw the priority of insect suffering from the fact that they are conscious would still have a lot of work to do: Why does consciousness equate to moral consideration? Why does consciousness mean suffering is possible? Suppose consciousness does mean suffering is possible, is this enough suffering or the same kind of suffering to equate moral concern? And so on and so on.....
You don’t have to think that only suffering and pleasure matter to think they’re among the things that matter. But it’s quite intuitively obvious that pain is bad in virtue of how it feels.
I’m confused by your response, as it introduces a line of reasoning that undermines your own argument.
Your central thesis appears to be the following:
Insect suffering either morally matters the most or doesn’t matter at all; treating it as moderately important is incoherent.
To support this, your argument seems to rest on a series of premises:
Insects vastly outnumber humans, making them the dominant class of potentially sentient beings on Earth.
Despite their size, insects may experience significant suffering, especially given the brief and often brutal nature of their lives.
Even if an individual insect suffers far less than a human, the sheer scale of their population means their aggregate suffering may vastly outweigh human suffering.
Therefore, if insect suffering matters, it matters the most. If it doesn’t matter, then it can be dismissed entirely but there is no coherent middle ground.
For this argument to succeed, however, it relies on an assumption: Either,
(i) Suffering and pleasure are the only things that matter,
or
(ii) Suffering and pleasure are the most fundamental things that matter, such that all other things that matter are derivable from them.
These assumptions are critical because they entail that we have a moral obligation to reduce suffering and increase pleasure in all moral contexts (assuming we have a moral obligation to uphold what morally matters—but we assume that anyway otherewise why are we even here).
If we accept either of these assumptions, then the transition from [3] to [4] is valid. That is, if suffering and pleasure are morally overriding or foundational, then yes, given the scale of insect suffering, its mitigation must be treated as the thing that matters most.
However, if we assume the new position that you have just now introuduced (that suffering and pleasure are among the things that matter, but not necessarily the most important), your argument fails. This is because:
Once we concede that suffering and pleasure occupy only a subset of the things that matter, then the move from [3] to [4] is no longer entailed.
This assumption allows for this claim to be true:
“There may be (and plausibly are) other values that override the imperative to reduce insect suffering in moral situations.”
If we allow that there exist things that matter more than pleasure or suffering, then there will be scenarios in which these things rightfully take precedence. Therefore, even if the total amount of insect suffering is immense, we are not necessarily obligated to prioritise it, if we are not prioritising suffering in the first place.
And once we step into a more pluralistic moral framework, where many things matter, the relative weight of insect suffering continues to decline. The more “things that matter” we admit into our moral calculus, the more frequently insect suffering will be deprioritised in favor of other concerns.
In light of this, your argument depends on a specific and controversial metaethical assumption:
That suffering and pleasure are either the supreme or foundational things that matter.
But by introducing the new assumption, as your own comment does, you implicitly concede that suffering and pleasure may not be paramount, thereby collapsing the very basis of your original claim.
Your argument fails no matter which path you take.
If you assume that suffering and pleasure are the only or most fundamental things that matter, your argument collapses into reductio ad absurdum.
If you instead assume that suffering and pleasure are only some among many things that matter, then there exists a potentially infinite set of more pressing moral priorities, and insect suffering is demoted accordingly.
Either way, the central claim that “insect suffering must be either of the most or no importance” fails.
You’re able to formulate your moral view clearly, which I appreciate.
However, what I have trouble with is understanding the precise quality that makes humans so special that morality should overwhelmingly be focused on them. This makes sense intuitively (we’re surrounded by humans, so we know them well). But for me, the morally most important thing about humans is their ability to feel positive and negative emotions (happiness, suffering), which is not exclusive to our species.
The question about the special trait that makes humans special has been discussed at length, but I don’t have a single resource in mind. I think this has been addressed by Peter Singer in Animal Liberation iirc. His AI can probably express these views : https://www.petersinger.ai/
Yes, I think this is one of the strongest (if not the strongest) arguments against my position, even though it’s been framed and articulated in various ways over time. It has been widely discussed, and I suspect my response may be unsatisfying to you.
To be honest, my stance on this point is largely intuition-motivated. I could find many things that I think set humans apart from animals, none of which have gone unchallenegd in the discourse, however. I acknowledge that this makes it feel incomplete or unsatisfactory, but it’s probabaly best not to launch a full on animal-rights debate here.
It would seem, then, that we’ve reached a sort of stalemate. Or, you’ve challenged my position. I’m happy to concede either way, but with that said, I won’t be dropping it as a result.
Regardless, thanks for the interesting conversation. Have a good one.
Interesting position though very curious—one on side, I understand, because evolution favoured these intuitions for quite some time.
On the other side, I find really strange the ability to recognise the value of a position intellectually, but not being able to adopt it at a gut level (I mean, it’s common, it’s just that most people do that in an unconscious way).
But props to you for recognising that. I hope you have a nice week.
I upvoted the article, it makes good points. But personally, I will mostly continue treating insects as moderately important. Your article implicitly assumes pure utilitarianism. Utilitarian calculations play an important role in my decision-making, but I don’t listen to them religiously. If I did, then there might still be more important things than insect suffering.
For example, I once thought that the conclusion of utilitarianism is that we should try to turn everything in the universe into hedonium (a homogeneous substance with limited consciousness, which is in a constant state of supreme bliss), even if our chances of success are minuscule (I see someone else argued for it here). But then I realised that I’m just not excited about that. So I concluded that I’m not a pure utilitarian. This argument about insects also makes me feel like I’m not a pure utilitarian.
I think the argument that insect suffering is of overwhelming importance doesn’t actually require pure utilitarianism. It probably works for any form of aggregationist, and maybe even partially agreggationist ethics. Indeed, itsw not clear the problem isn’t worse under certain formations of deontological views, where discounting the life of an insect relative to a human would be unacceptable
Imagine delegates of views you find actually significantly appealing. (At that level, I think the original post here is correct and your delegates will either use all their caring capacity for helping insects, or insects will be unimportant to them.) Instead of picking one of these delegates, you go with their compromise solution that might look something like, “Ask yourself if you have a comparative advantage at helping insects—If not, stay on the lookout for low-effort ways to help insects and low-effort ways to avoid causing great harm to the cause of helping insects, but otherwise do things that other delegates would prioritize where you have more of a comparative advantage.”
If you view all of morality as “out there” and objective, this approach might seem a bit unsatisfying because—on that view—either insects matter, or they don’t. But if Brian Tomasik is right about consciousness and if morality even as an effective altruist is still quite a lot about finding out “What motivates me to get up in the morning?,” rather than “What’s the one objectively important aim that all effective altruists should pursue?,” then saulius’s point goes through, IMO.
You can have a moral parliament view not just as an approach to moral uncertainty, but also as your approach to undecidedness about what to do in light of all the arguments and appeals you find yourself confronted with. There’s no guarantee that the feeling of undecidedness will go away under ideal conditions for moral reflection, in which case it would probably feel arbitrary and unsatisfying to go with an overall solution that says “insects matter by far the most” or “insects hardly matter at all as a cause area.”
Totally agree.
Executive summary: In this exploratory and polemical essay, Silas Abrahamsen argues that insect suffering is either overwhelmingly important or entirely negligible—there is no reasonable middle ground—and that failing to take it seriously is often a result of bias, intuition-driven moral error, and discomfort with the implications of scale.
Key points:
Insect suffering is either of paramount or negligible moral importance—given their vast numbers and potential for intense pain, moderate concern is irrational and incoherent.
Human activities, even ordinary ones like driving or donating to human-focused charities, inadvertently affect insect populations on a massive scale, potentially making insect welfare the dominant moral consideration.
Arguments for ignoring insect suffering typically rest on intuitions or convenience, but these break down under scrutiny and lead to implausible or morally troubling conclusions.
If insects do live good lives, that still implies radical conclusions—such as that environmental destruction is catastrophically bad due to lost insect well-being.
Moral intuitions shaped without awareness of insect-scale suffering are unreliable, and ethical reasoning should adjust to empirical reality, however strange or unsettling it may be.
The post draws an analogy to Christianity’s claim of infinite stakes—in both cases, moderate concern is untenable if the underlying assumptions are taken seriously.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
FYI, I assume the link here doesn’t go to the post you intended.
Great post, Matthew! I agree thinking that insects have positive or negative lives results in counterintuitive consequences. I personally have little idea about whether they are positive or negative, but this also results in a counterintuitive conclusion. I am practically agnostic about the vast majority of actions, in the sense of not knowing whether they are beneficial or harmful, although I think some like GiveWell’s top charities are super beneficial or harmful due to very cost-effectively changing the population of insects.
I couldn’t have said it better. I also read the linked paper, and it really resonated with a lot of doubts I already had about the apparent consensus about net-negative insect lifes. So thank you both!
I think it is worth noting that, even given the immense scale of insect welfare/suffering, some longtermist projects (especially those trying to prevent X-risks) might still be extremely important—not because humanities continued existence is so important in and of itself, but because humanity might have an enormous instrumental value for wild animal suffering. After all, if evolution (or AI) does not give rise to another lifeform with our means of altering the planet (and maybe beyond) before the sun runs out, we are the only ones who could actively change the insect’s lifes for the better. Of course, we might also make it worse (for example by spreading them to other planets if they do have net-negative lifes after all), so I guess this thought depends on the optimistic assumption that we either will actually care about (and for) them at some point or that our interests coincide with theirs (which seems a lot more plausible if they have net-positive lifes).
Anyways, thank you both again.
Thanks, Marc!
Considering there are 10^10 (= 10^(20 − 10)) times as many marine arthropods as humans, and my guess that the absolute value of the welfare of a random arthropod-year is 5*10^-5 of the welfare of a random human-year[1], I estimate the absolute welfare of marine arthropods is 500 k (= 10^10*5*10^-5) times the welfare of humans. Since there is lots of uncertainty about whether marine arthropods have positive or negative lives now, and whether humans or our descendents will improve them in the future, I do not know whether the future welfare of life on Earth is positive or negative. So I would focus on improving welfare instead of decreasing the risk of human extinction. In any case, I think reducing the nearterm risk of human extinction would not be astronomically cost-effective even if the future welfare of life on Earth was robustly positive. I am also sceptical of the possibility of meaningful longterm impacts.
25 % times my guess for the welfare range of a random arthropod of 2*10^-4, which is 10 % of Rethink Priorities’ median welfare range of silkworms of 0.002. 25 % is the absolute value of the mean of a uniform distribution ranging from −0.75 to 0.25, or from −0.25 to 0.75.
These are valid concerns and I wouldn’t really argue against them. I at least partially share your scepticism about meaningful longterm impacts, after all. (Though if anything, then preventing our extinction in the next centuries seems like the most promising candidate for longterm change—but of course it is also questionable wether we can actually predictably decrease the X-risk probability within this timeframe, let alone on a larger scale.)
I guess I am just very pessimistic about our ability (and willingness) to do something meaningful about wild animal welfare (especially for insects) within the next few (hundred) years. Aside of in- or decreasing their numbers, which is not a consideration, as long as we don’t even know (with some certainty) if their lifes are net-positive or net-negative. So it seems to me as if the only possibility for a substantial change with a predictable outcome in the area of wild animal suffering/welfare might happen only if we survive at least a few hundred more years and have 1. the time to investigate the most crucial questions and 2. a shift within political/ethical considerations which would allow to implement larger-scale programs solely for the purposes of wild animal welfare. I have no idea if the second condition will ever be met, though...
Nevertheless, given the massive uncertainty about the solvabilty of wild animal suffering and X-risk prevention, I still think that the fight for farmed animals (especially the more overlooked ones like fish and shrimps) might actually be one or maybe even the top priority right now. At least it might be the most impactful action where we actually know that we have a positive impact at all… (And who knows, maybe if we finally abolish factory farming some day, our view on animals might also change and make the second condition more likely—but I’m just speculating at this point, so I’ll leave it at that.)
Thanks for the good points, Marc!
I recommend focussing on invertebrates. I do not know whether interventions targeting vertebrates which change feed production, like chicken welfare reforms, but more so ones which aim to decrease the consumption of animal-based foods, are beneficial or harmful due to unclear possibly dominant effects on wild arthropods.
This post could just as well be:
“Demodex mites are not moderately important”
or
“Nematodes are not moderately important”
“There are only two options. You can think that the cause of most of the world’s suffering is not very important or you can think that nematode suffering is the biggest issue.”
Nah
That would be right. They’re not conscious, so they’re not important at all.
If you replace insects here with mites doesn’t your argument basically still apply? A 10 sec search suggests that mites are plausibly significantly more numerous than insects. When you say “they’re not conscious”, is this coming from evidence that they aren’t, or lack of evidence that they are, and would you consider this an “overwhelmingly powerful argument”?
Based on what?
There’s no clear definition of consciousness or suffering so how do you draw a clear line between insects and mites?
It doesn’t follow from there being no clear definition of something that there aren’t clear positive and negative cases of it, only that it’s blurry at the boundaries. For example, suppose the only things that existed were humans, rocks, and lab grown human food. There still wouldn’t be a clear definition of “conscious”, but it would be clear only humans were conscious, since lab grown meat and veg and rocks clearly don’t count on any intepretation of ‘consciousness’. Maybe all mites obviously don’t count too. I agree with you that BB can’t just assume that about mites though, and needs to provide an argument.
What about the argument that there are so many of them that even a tiny chance they are conscious is super-important?
At some point you really to engagge with the problem of consciousness noumenality. The fact that (so far, probably forever) we can only postulate consciousness not measure it.
I leave here my two posts about insect consciousness:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3nLDxEhJwqBEtgwJc/arthropod-non-sentience
and about Naturalistic Dualism:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5zbmEPdB2wqhyFWdW/naturalistic-dualism