Thank you for your post. You present a well-reasoned and fascinating case for extending our moral circle to include insects.
I am an enormous insect lover and I have become hugely preoccupied with learning more about their subjective experiences and to what degree insects experience suffering. A couple of years ago I researched how the human consumption of insects–entomophagy, could support resilient diets. Initially, I was so enamored by the favorable land/water use of insect farming that I could largely overlook the ethical concerns behind entomophagy, but I have updated since then and grown increasingly more concerned about the ethics.
Here is an article I published about entomophagy largely extolling the environmental and nutritional upsides of insect consumption.
Here is a section on ethics that didn’t make it into this version of the rticle, but that I am looking to expand and revisit:
Ethics of Entomophagy
The ethics of eating animals is a question that provokes perennial philosophical interest. The eating of insects should be met with as much moral and ethical discussion as would surround the eating of any other living creature. According to Rozin & Ruby (2019), “the general lack of moral objection to raising insects for food is predicated on the belief that they do not suffer in the process; if this is untrue, then raising insects for food rather than larger invertebrates may actually increase overall suffering, given the much larger number of insects required to make one kilogram of food” (p. 161). Given the enormous quantity of insects that widespread entomophagy would require, it seems necessary to investigate further into insect suffering.
In 2005, Author David Foster Wallace wrote an article on the eating of lobsters that continues to perturb and inspire ethicists and laypeople today. Beginning as a review of the Main Lobster Festival, the article quickly evolves into a provocative philosophical analysis of the ethics of eating lobsters and how human beings consider, or more often don’t bother to consider, animals’ pain when it’s up against gustatory pleasure. Foster Wallace posits that when considering animal pain “...everything gets progressively more abstract and convolved as we move farther and farther out from the higher-type mammals into cattle and swine and dogs and cats and rodents, and then birds and fish, and finally invertebrates...” (p. 62). An investigation into the ethics of eating invertebrates such as insects will be difficult, but how insects are raised, harvested, and ultimately consumed is inextricably linked to how sustainable and moral the practice of entomophagy can be.
Final thoughts:
I would absolutely love to talk about this further. I think that insect farming will proliferate in the next few years and that there may be significant environmental benefits to this. However, I fear that the downsides will far outstrip the positives, especially if the following are true.
If insect-derived animal feed replaces/supplements soy-based feed and cheapens or enables the expansion of factory farming.
If insects suffer tremendously or if the cumulative suffering is staggeringly high.
Please reach out to me to talk more about this. I would also be extremely curious to get involved with research about this or other projects involving insect suffering/humane insect farming/entomophagy.
I think a lot of this makes sense for the general public, but I agree with other commenters that a lot of vegans do think insects are worthy of care or at least use the precautionary principle to avoid honey and silk.
I’m one of those people and I do think insects suffer but I still have less interest in putting a lot of resources in this direction. My perception of lower tractability is part of it, but it’s also that even for those who do think they suffer, we are just barely sure of that. I would guess that the experience/scope of suffering for such a simple organism is qualitatively different from vertebrates, so the scale arguments don’t hold as much weight to me.
To take one aspect of suffering, there’s a qualitative difference between suffering in the moment and having any concept of the fact that you have been suffering for however long, and another layer of qualitative difference between that and realizing you’re likely to continue suffering in the future. Most adult humans can do both, and I would guess that insects can do neither, while other vertebrates fall somewhere in between. Add to that all the other dimensions on which suffering likely differs and to me it becomes almost meaningless to compare the scale. As an analogy to qualitatively different types of human suffering, I don’t have the slightest idea how one would weight quadrillions of bullying experiences against millions of murders.
I’m hardly an expert, but that’s my sticking point.
Thank you for your post. You present a well-reasoned and fascinating case for extending our moral circle to include insects.
I am an enormous insect lover and I have become hugely preoccupied with learning more about their subjective experiences and to what degree insects experience suffering. A couple of years ago I researched how the human consumption of insects–entomophagy, could support resilient diets. Initially, I was so enamored by the favorable land/water use of insect farming that I could largely overlook the ethical concerns behind entomophagy, but I have updated since then and grown increasingly more concerned about the ethics.
Here is an article I published about entomophagy largely extolling the environmental and nutritional upsides of insect consumption.
Here is a section on ethics that didn’t make it into this version of the rticle, but that I am looking to expand and revisit:
Ethics of Entomophagy
The ethics of eating animals is a question that provokes perennial philosophical interest. The eating of insects should be met with as much moral and ethical discussion as would surround the eating of any other living creature. According to Rozin & Ruby (2019), “the general lack of moral objection to raising insects for food is predicated on the belief that they do not suffer in the process; if this is untrue, then raising insects for food rather than larger invertebrates may actually increase overall suffering, given the much larger number of insects required to make one kilogram of food” (p. 161). Given the enormous quantity of insects that widespread entomophagy would require, it seems necessary to investigate further into insect suffering.
In 2005, Author David Foster Wallace wrote an article on the eating of lobsters that continues to perturb and inspire ethicists and laypeople today. Beginning as a review of the Main Lobster Festival, the article quickly evolves into a provocative philosophical analysis of the ethics of eating lobsters and how human beings consider, or more often don’t bother to consider, animals’ pain when it’s up against gustatory pleasure. Foster Wallace posits that when considering animal pain “...everything gets progressively more abstract and convolved as we move farther and farther out from the higher-type mammals into cattle and swine and dogs and cats and rodents, and then birds and fish, and finally invertebrates...” (p. 62). An investigation into the ethics of eating invertebrates such as insects will be difficult, but how insects are raised, harvested, and ultimately consumed is inextricably linked to how sustainable and moral the practice of entomophagy can be.
Final thoughts:
I would absolutely love to talk about this further. I think that insect farming will proliferate in the next few years and that there may be significant environmental benefits to this. However, I fear that the downsides will far outstrip the positives, especially if the following are true.
If insect-derived animal feed replaces/supplements soy-based feed and cheapens or enables the expansion of factory farming.
If insects suffer tremendously or if the cumulative suffering is staggeringly high.
Please reach out to me to talk more about this. I would also be extremely curious to get involved with research about this or other projects involving insect suffering/humane insect farming/entomophagy.
I think a lot of this makes sense for the general public, but I agree with other commenters that a lot of vegans do think insects are worthy of care or at least use the precautionary principle to avoid honey and silk.
I’m one of those people and I do think insects suffer but I still have less interest in putting a lot of resources in this direction. My perception of lower tractability is part of it, but it’s also that even for those who do think they suffer, we are just barely sure of that. I would guess that the experience/scope of suffering for such a simple organism is qualitatively different from vertebrates, so the scale arguments don’t hold as much weight to me.
To take one aspect of suffering, there’s a qualitative difference between suffering in the moment and having any concept of the fact that you have been suffering for however long, and another layer of qualitative difference between that and realizing you’re likely to continue suffering in the future. Most adult humans can do both, and I would guess that insects can do neither, while other vertebrates fall somewhere in between. Add to that all the other dimensions on which suffering likely differs and to me it becomes almost meaningless to compare the scale. As an analogy to qualitatively different types of human suffering, I don’t have the slightest idea how one would weight quadrillions of bullying experiences against millions of murders.
I’m hardly an expert, but that’s my sticking point.