I agree we shouldn’t prioritize the cause of reducing honey (even if you care about insect/invertebrate wellbeing, reducing honey probably isn’t the best way).
But I disagree with the total-utilitarianist frame of this argument. It’s plausible that the vast majority of bee-like beings (just like human-like beings) exist in the far future, where there are trillions of years and trillions of colonized planets. Just like humans, they might live very fulfilling lives due to far future technologies. The only intense suffering that any of them experience, occurs in today’s world, due to you taking their honey.
PS: But my personal opinion is that the wellbeing of bees isn’t that important.[1]
Because I’m rather biased in favor of humans (and to some extent, beings as complex as humans). I have a lot of moral uncertainty and I do worry about being wrong, but I won’t give in to Pascal’s muggings: I won’t say “oh, most E(utility) exists inside this very implausible dot in the probability space with extremely high utility—the possibility where I turn out wrong, and every insect or bacteria has the same moral value (or internal experience) as a human.”
I agree we shouldn’t prioritize the cause of reducing honey (even if you care about insect/invertebrate wellbeing, reducing honey probably isn’t the best way).
But I disagree with the total-utilitarianist frame of this argument. It’s plausible that the vast majority of bee-like beings (just like human-like beings) exist in the far future, where there are trillions of years and trillions of colonized planets. Just like humans, they might live very fulfilling lives due to far future technologies. The only intense suffering that any of them experience, occurs in today’s world, due to you taking their honey.
PS: But my personal opinion is that the wellbeing of bees isn’t that important.[1]
Because I’m rather biased in favor of humans (and to some extent, beings as complex as humans). I have a lot of moral uncertainty and I do worry about being wrong, but I won’t give in to Pascal’s muggings: I won’t say “oh, most E(utility) exists inside this very implausible dot in the probability space with extremely high utility—the possibility where I turn out wrong, and every insect or bacteria has the same moral value (or internal experience) as a human.”