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.
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”?
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.
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?