I think animals are often motivated by pain, fear and frustration to avoid things that would kill them in the short term, so it’s hard to take their responses and the appearance of wanting to live as evidence that their lives are worth starting or continuing.
I think the issues here are plausibly complex and subtle on deontological views. The harm anchovies cause to arthropods is also direct violence, just not by what we would normally consider to be moral agents. We aren’t deciding for this intervention whether or not we will personally kill anchovies or arthropods; we’re influencing others to do so more or less, and some of those others are humans who wouldn’t be sensitive to the harms to nonhuman animals either way, and some are anchovies. The anchovies harming arthropods isn’t much further out of our control, just one or two steps further along the causal chain, which is already at least a few steps long.
Maybe one way to reconcile your intuitions here with consequentialism would be through “person-affecting” views.
I think animals are often motivated by pain, fear and frustration to avoid things that would kill them in the short term, so it’s hard to take their responses and the appearance of wanting to live as evidence that their lives are worth starting or continuing.
I think the issues here are plausibly complex and subtle on deontological views. The harm anchovies cause to arthropods is also direct violence, just not by what we would normally consider to be moral agents. We aren’t deciding for this intervention whether or not we will personally kill anchovies or arthropods; we’re influencing others to do so more or less, and some of those others are humans who wouldn’t be sensitive to the harms to nonhuman animals either way, and some are anchovies. The anchovies harming arthropods isn’t much further out of our control, just one or two steps further along the causal chain, which is already at least a few steps long.
Maybe one way to reconcile your intuitions here with consequentialism would be through “person-affecting” views.