âThere are only two options. You can think that the cause of most of the worldâs suffering is not very important or you can think that nematode suffering is the biggest issue.â
You can, of course, hold that insects donât 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 sufferâand probably experience in a week more suffering than humans have for our entire historyâthis 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 thereâs some overwhelmingly powerful argument against taking their interests seriously.
If you replace insects here with mites doesnât your argument basically still apply? A 10 sec search suggests that mites are plausibly significantly more numerous than insects. When you say âtheyâre not consciousâ, is this coming from evidence that they arenât, or lack of evidence that they are, and would you consider this an âoverwhelmingly powerful argumentâ?
It doesnât follow from there being no clear definition of something that there arenât clear positive and negative cases of it, only that itâs blurry at the boundaries. For example, suppose the only things that existed were humans, rocks, and lab grown human food. There still wouldnât be a clear definition of âconsciousâ, but it would be clear only humans were conscious, since lab grown meat and veg and rocks clearly donât count on any intepretation of âconsciousnessâ. Maybe all mites obviously donât count too. I agree with you that BB canât just assume that about mites though, and needs to provide an argument.
This post could just as well be:
âDemodex mites are not moderately importantâ
or
âNematodes are not moderately importantâ
âThere are only two options. You can think that the cause of most of the worldâs suffering is not very important or you can think that nematode suffering is the biggest issue.â
Nah
That would be right. Theyâre not conscious, so theyâre not important at all.
If you replace insects here with mites doesnât your argument basically still apply? A 10 sec search suggests that mites are plausibly significantly more numerous than insects. When you say âtheyâre not consciousâ, is this coming from evidence that they arenât, or lack of evidence that they are, and would you consider this an âoverwhelmingly powerful argumentâ?
Based on what?
Thereâs no clear definition of consciousness or suffering so how do you draw a clear line between insects and mites?
It doesnât follow from there being no clear definition of something that there arenât clear positive and negative cases of it, only that itâs blurry at the boundaries. For example, suppose the only things that existed were humans, rocks, and lab grown human food. There still wouldnât be a clear definition of âconsciousâ, but it would be clear only humans were conscious, since lab grown meat and veg and rocks clearly donât count on any intepretation of âconsciousnessâ. Maybe all mites obviously donât count too. I agree with you that BB canât 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?