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”?
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”?