Interesting! What do you think it would take for bees to live positive (in expectation) lives, and might advocacy to that end be more tractable than advocating for abstention from honey?
(Is it really "conservative" to estimate that time spent as a bee is "10% as unpleasant" as time spent as a factory-farmed chicken? Without knowing much, I would have guessed that a fair portion of a bee's life is reasonably pleasant, whereas factory-farmed chicken life is basically unrelentingly awful?)
I think it is. Part of this is because bees are pretty chronically hungry, overworked, etc. Part of it is that the painfulness of death seems like a non-trivial portion of the badness of chicken life. If bees have similarly painful deaths, then that contains a non-trivial portion of the badness.
There's no evolutionary pressure for bees to not live painful lives. In fact, there is an evolutionary pressure in the opposite direction. My most productive days have been riddled with stress and coffee. If my entire life was stressful, I'd probably commit suicide. But bees, lacking the intelligence to make such a connection, wouldn't. I didn't understand the concept of death until 5 years old. Furthermore, there are a ton of things that can kill or threaten individual bees. Thus, the evolutionary pressure is, in fact, in favour of bees living really stressful lives!
I can't back that up with hard numbers, but from what I've been reading about bee lives, it's pretty bad. BB mentions that 30% of bees die during the winter, but also, 4-11% die within their first day of adulthood, drone bees (~15% of the bee population) virtually all die slowly following expulsion, and hives have a 12-year average annual mortality rate of 39.6% (typically due to Varroa destructor).
It seems highly unlikely that a species' life in its natural environment could be characterised by constant pain. The purpose of pain is to change a creature's behaviour; constant pain would completely undermine this. I don't know to what extent farmed bees could be considered to live in "their natural environment", which depends both on how similar farmed hives are to the wild, and on the extent of bee evolution during the era of human agriculture.
There are many things in human lives which we find stressful at first but get used to - work, certain kinds of physical pain, etc. Perhaps bees wouldn't acclimatise to pain in the way humans do, and even if they do there are probably certain kinds of pain which they wouldn't acclimatise to. I could be persuaded that bees never get used to being "overworked", but it would be surprising.
Certain kinds of death are surely painful and drawn-out, e.g. death of starvation. By contrast if a bee is eaten alive, I'm sure it's immensely painful for a few seconds, but it probably isn't all that much pain overall.
I sent this to my brother, a canadian beekeeper. His response:
This has so many holes in it I don't know where to begin.
The business has two sources of income, the first renting bees out to pollinate crops, most if not all of these hives the honey is not collected. These bees live a terrible life. This business mainly exists in the US, not Canada.
Bee hives that are used to produce honey are a totally different business, where bees are well cared for, and stress levels are kept at a minimum as that produces the best harvest.
So if you are really a hard core vegan you should avoid all crops which need bees to pollinate, good luck with that one, in the US, crops relie on these bees as there are few wild pollinators left after pesticides have made them all but extinct.
There are also bees that are part of both businesses, as was my bee keeping. These bees stay in one location and are well cared for and likely live a much better life than wild bees. This is likely where most of our honey comes from.
(Smokers burn their wings off. Where did that come from?)
A “mere assertion” from an actual expert which field experience doesn’t mean much to a novice internet philosopher with a ideological axe to grind who wrote a hyperbolic article extrapolated mainly from another ideological project with less than rigorous standards for proof? Shocking.
Also yes, you have to be extremely deficient in competence to melt the wings of your bees with a smoker. Implying that this happens with meaningful frequency makes it obvious you have no idea what you are talking about. How do I know? I keep a few wild swarms. Do I think industrial beekeeping has a lot of issues? Sure. But your engagement on this subject is as incurious as your zealotry is fanatical.
How do you weigh the pollinator bee increase against the net decrease in overall wild insect populations on said almond farm? If we’re going by bad insect death numbers.
Also, I agree that bees live better lives than wild bees. If you handle your hive optimally, it might even be that your bees live great lives. This isn't true for most of the honey industry.
30% of bees die during the winter, 4-11% die within their first day of adulthood, drone bees (~15% of the bee population) virtually all die slowly following expulsion, and hives have a 12-year average annual mortality rate of 39.6% (typically due to Varroa destructor).
I love it when I read the title of a Bentham’s Bulldog post, think about it for a second, and say “Oh wow yup that makes sense, didn’t think about that”
Directionally interesting post, but doesn't it set off skepticism alarm bells in your head when you read "bees suffer 15% as much as humans"? When paired with a simple utilitarian view of morality that leads to some pretty wild conclusions: you should extend the life of seven honey bees by a year, instead of extending one human's lifespan by one year. For me this is far, far into reductio ad absurdum territory
You are conflating "bees suffer 15% as much as humans" with "bee lives have 15% of the value of human lives". The conclusion would need to be something like "we should prevent seven years of X-intensity bee suffering" instead of preventing one year of X-intensity human suffering".
I thought I had a gotcha here because people eat a lot less honey by mass compared to other animal products. But even if you adjust for consumption per capita, honey is still probably the worst. The average American eats about 1 kg of honey per year, 2 kg of shrimps, and 50 kg of chickens. You could be very doubtful about bee sentience and think bee lives are only slightly negative, and honey would still be the worst animal product by far. Which is to say: it would be better for a typical person to be omnivorous but happen to not eat honey than to be vegan except for honey.
Have you ever seen the Bee Movie? I think this very clearly demonstrated the consequences of an end to honey farming; Bee unemployment, b crises of meaning and ecological collapse.
In all seriousness though, I think there's a lot of anthropomorphizing of animals that have a very different experience of the world than we do. A Bee that works its entire life producing honey may look to be in hell to us, but its lived experience may very well be overwhelmingly positive, assuming there aren't outside negative stressors. Human farming might add stress to a colony, but it also might remove many stresses that were found in nature.
Bees produce honey so they can survive the winter, mostly for heat. For farmers that keep colonies around for the whole year, taking of the honey doesn't negatively effect their odds of survival. I think of it like sled dogs. Yes, they burn a lot of excess calories that if they were in nature would be punishing, but because of humans, they thrive despite this unnecessary energy burning. Many of them seem to very much enjoy the strenuous activity over just chilling, and in the case of insects, seem to be motivated to protect the hive so much that they literally sacrifice themselves by the thousands for the good of the whole. It seem strange to me that a billion years of evolution would produce insects that have a profoundly negative experience on the whole.
As for human involvement in that, I don't really know enough about it to say. Maybe the increased safety makes it positive. Maybe the unique stressors we can introduce makes it negative.
Good article! In spite of the sympathy bees gets from environmentalists, honeybee managing seems particularly sidelined in animal advocacy. Though the next animal advocacy event I'm going to has a long-conference on bee sentience, so maybe things are moving in the right direction!
for the record I don't eat honey and haven't for years, I just don't really like people saying "animal product X isn't even that tasty". I went vegan despite my favorite foods being animal products, I'm always looking for good replacements, and I think this line of thinking misses a couple important things: 1, that a LOT of people really like the flavor, and saying that kind of thing might give them the impression that vegans just happen to not like animal products, so it's easy for them to switch, but if they did like it they couldn't switch, and 2, it skirts around the point that really liking something doesn't give you license to do it. No matter how much fun a sadist gets out of torture, it doesn't somehow make it ok.
I agree that some animal products are tasty. Cheese tastes amazing and I genuinely liked the taste of meat when I still used to eat it. Honey is just too sweet for me, I guess
Some information from ChatGPT: Summer worker bees live 4-6 weeks in the summer, while those that stay the winter live 4-6 months. Drones live a few weeks.
Some bees die from pesticides, which are neurotoxins that cause disorientation, paralysis, and death, over minutes to hours.
Some bees die from parasites which cause a slow death over days to weeks.
Some bees are eaten by birds, spiders, or other predators
Drones die because "their abdomen ruptures during copulation". (sounds painful)
When a worker bee dies from "aging" they exhibit a gradual decline over the last 1-2 days of their life. According to ChatGPT, their bodies fail due to "intense labor".
Bees that do foraging fly so much that their wings become tattered, their flight muscles are exhausted and riddled with microscopic tears, and their bodies are plagued with extreme oxidative stress.
When bees get "old" they exhibit less efficient metabolism and they may struggle to regulate their body temperature or produce the energy needed for flight. They may become disoriented and unable to return to the hive.
When a bee is close to death, they often leave the hive to die, to reduce disease risk for the colony, or other bees may push them out.
ChatGPT is skeptical that natural death for a bee is painful - " they show nociceptive responses (they can react to harmful stimuli), but no evidence suggests they suffer or experience distress in a conscious way."
If they are conscious (which I think is likely), then none of this sounds great. Evolution did not select for them to have great lives.
a lot of non vegans use this as an argument against veganism, and since youre doing this kind of utilitarian analysis by multiplying bee pain by number of bees to determine how bad it is, how do you respond to these? Avocados, almonds, apples, cherries, blueberries, and many more. tons and tons of crop producers breed bees and mistreat them. can you not eat any of those then? and if no, should we limit our calorie intake of them? same with other bugs. you ever seen those videos of cranberries and the millions of spiders on them? they all die. It seems there are insane entailments from valuing bugs. It's better to eat pure grass fed beef than to eat fruits, and if not, you still shouldn't eat those fruits I listed, and you should limit your calorie intake to avoid causing more suffering since bugs die in crops production, and not to mention the number of bugs you hit with your car when you drive, cut the grass, take a walk in the forest, etc.. valuing insects (even just bees) just has too many insanely unintuitive entailments to be true
I think this is the wrong way of doing epistemology. If the world is weird (in that our actions harm tons of bugs) you shouldn't use that to stop valuing bugs. In a morally weird world, our ethical theory should say weird things. The entailments aren't insane--they're just different from what we'd have expected because we were ignorant of the facts.
As an analogy, suppose we discovered bacteria were conscious and agentic--just like people. In fact, imagine they were smarter than people. It would be absurd to conclude "well, they must not matter because that has insane entailments." It would just mean that the facts of the world are inconvenient. See also https://wonderandaporia.substack.com/p/surely-were-not-moral-monsters?utm_source=publication-search
I think there is some reason to avoid avocados, almonds, etc, but honey is the worst. Almonds are pretty bad too--so I avoid them. I try to avoid the others but am not as fastidious about it.
I think that killing insects is probably good because it lives bad lives.
Good article. I feel like a bit more of an analysis of the environmental impacts are needed. It feels potentially large.
Also I know this is not relevant to the main argument, but listening to a boring lecture is clearly net-positive to me. Life is easily good enough to outweigh a little boredom.
I don't understand a lot of things, so add this to the list: if you're a utilitarian interested in maximizing net good among all sentient beings, then why aren't you in favor of exterminating all humans?
At some point, you have to think that our attitudes to animals are fairly built-in or hard to massively change, save for big technological breakthroughs where we either turn people into vegans by directly manipulating their brains or create the conditions such that humans are able to interact with the world while massively reducing the amount of animals suffering caused. It's not clear that either of those changes will *ever* happen.
Given, though, that there 8.2 billion humans in the world, then not only is it the case that by eating meat, fish, honey, dairy, etc. are we causing tons of animal suffering. It's also the case that just by doing what it takes to survive--living in houses where we hire exterminators to make sure that insects don't crawl in; building buildings that kill and displace lots of insects and animals; harvesting crops on a massive scale, which also kills 7.3 billion animals *every year* (and that doesn't include insects!)--we kill immense numbers of animals and insects.
I don't know if you've done the calculation anywhere, but surely since you're a utilitarian and a vegan, you have some sense of how many bees a human is worth. I would guess a single human is not worth more than the lives of a million bees, and yet there is such a long way to go between now and a world where humans don't cause massive amounts of insect and animal suffering per year just by doing what it takes to have the infrastructure needed for civilization, to say nothing of our food choices.
Is the idea that suffering in nature is so bad anyway that, though humans make things much worse right now, it's possible that we'll be able to make it much better for all sentient beings in the future, so it's morally obligatory to keep the human race alive right now?
My thinking on this, although I haven't done the math, is that the universe is now in the best position it's ever been in to eliminate suffering, including wild animal suffering. We have some of the intelligence, dexterity, and beginnings to a lot of the technology needed to do it. Evolution and nature are brutal with total disregard of wellbeing, but they produced us, somewhat intelligent, somewhat compassionate animals, and there's no guarantee that even if we go extinct, the next species that gets to our level (if that ever happens) is as compassionate as us, not to mention the massive amount of time till then. And consider that even if a species has intelligence and communication (dolphins come to mind for me), they can't do that much technologically without hands.
And that's not to mention that wiping out humanity isn't some magically easy thing to do, I would argue that in some ways it might actually be more difficult than eliminating suffering. Even if you nuke the planet (which is itself not a magically easy thing to do), there will probably will be some people in bunkers or something who find a way to survive.
"there is such a long way to go between now and a world where humans don't cause massive amounts of insect and animal suffering per year"
My guess is that the way to go to eliminating suffering is much longer from here if humans suddenly cease to exist.
As David Pearce says, the future belongs to the life lovers.
I’m curious about the counterfactual with the bees being in the wild. Could you make the argument that there are also benefits to being raised by a beekeeper, like protection from predation, parasites, etc.?
But the counterfactual *isn't* the bees being raised in the wild. It's the bees not existing. And parasites predation etc are probably more common on farms.
I saw the following comment online, arguing that bees live better lives in captivity than the wild. Thoughts?
"You know the bees can and will leave if the hive conditions are worse than they could find out in a tree somewhere, right? ...it's called absconding. There isn't really any pressure to breed it out because it's not terribly difficult for an experienced beekeeper to just provide better conditions than the bees would otherwise find on their own"
So the non-identity thing is there, but if we table that for a second, are you saying that predation and parasites are more common in farmed bees rather than bees in the wild?
Maybe honey is really bad compared to meat at the same weight, but what about in the actual quantities that people eat those things? Quick googling says a teaspoon of honey is ~7 grams and a chicken breast is ~100 grams (though I think people are generally eating way more chicken than that). You might be directionally correct (ha ha) but imo it's less misleading to say one *serving* of honey is ~35x worse than one *serving* of chicken using your 500x worse by weight number, which I find more convincing anyway!
Even adjusting for that it's still a lot worse. As Glenn says:
I thought I had a gotcha here because people eat a lot less honey by mass compared to other animal products. But even if you adjust for consumption per capita, honey is still probably the worst. The average American eats about 1 kg of honey per year, 2 kg of shrimps, and 50 kg of chickens. You could be very doubtful about bee sentience and think bee lives are only slightly negative, and honey would still be the worst animal product by far. Which is to say: it would be better for a typical person to be omnivorous but happen to not eat honey than to be vegan except for honey.
Interesting! What do you think it would take for bees to live positive (in expectation) lives, and might advocacy to that end be more tractable than advocating for abstention from honey?
(Is it really "conservative" to estimate that time spent as a bee is "10% as unpleasant" as time spent as a factory-farmed chicken? Without knowing much, I would have guessed that a fair portion of a bee's life is reasonably pleasant, whereas factory-farmed chicken life is basically unrelentingly awful?)
I think it is. Part of this is because bees are pretty chronically hungry, overworked, etc. Part of it is that the painfulness of death seems like a non-trivial portion of the badness of chicken life. If bees have similarly painful deaths, then that contains a non-trivial portion of the badness.
There's no evolutionary pressure for bees to not live painful lives. In fact, there is an evolutionary pressure in the opposite direction. My most productive days have been riddled with stress and coffee. If my entire life was stressful, I'd probably commit suicide. But bees, lacking the intelligence to make such a connection, wouldn't. I didn't understand the concept of death until 5 years old. Furthermore, there are a ton of things that can kill or threaten individual bees. Thus, the evolutionary pressure is, in fact, in favour of bees living really stressful lives!
I can't back that up with hard numbers, but from what I've been reading about bee lives, it's pretty bad. BB mentions that 30% of bees die during the winter, but also, 4-11% die within their first day of adulthood, drone bees (~15% of the bee population) virtually all die slowly following expulsion, and hives have a 12-year average annual mortality rate of 39.6% (typically due to Varroa destructor).
It seems highly unlikely that a species' life in its natural environment could be characterised by constant pain. The purpose of pain is to change a creature's behaviour; constant pain would completely undermine this. I don't know to what extent farmed bees could be considered to live in "their natural environment", which depends both on how similar farmed hives are to the wild, and on the extent of bee evolution during the era of human agriculture.
There are many things in human lives which we find stressful at first but get used to - work, certain kinds of physical pain, etc. Perhaps bees wouldn't acclimatise to pain in the way humans do, and even if they do there are probably certain kinds of pain which they wouldn't acclimatise to. I could be persuaded that bees never get used to being "overworked", but it would be surprising.
Certain kinds of death are surely painful and drawn-out, e.g. death of starvation. By contrast if a bee is eaten alive, I'm sure it's immensely painful for a few seconds, but it probably isn't all that much pain overall.
I sent this to my brother, a canadian beekeeper. His response:
This has so many holes in it I don't know where to begin.
The business has two sources of income, the first renting bees out to pollinate crops, most if not all of these hives the honey is not collected. These bees live a terrible life. This business mainly exists in the US, not Canada.
Bee hives that are used to produce honey are a totally different business, where bees are well cared for, and stress levels are kept at a minimum as that produces the best harvest.
So if you are really a hard core vegan you should avoid all crops which need bees to pollinate, good luck with that one, in the US, crops relie on these bees as there are few wild pollinators left after pesticides have made them all but extinct.
There are also bees that are part of both businesses, as was my bee keeping. These bees stay in one location and are well cared for and likely live a much better life than wild bees. This is likely where most of our honey comes from.
(Smokers burn their wings off. Where did that come from?)
I think honey bees used to pollinate crops are bad too! For this reason, I don't eat almonds and try to avoid other plausibly bee-pollinated foods.
A mere assertion that the bees are treated nicely doesn't mean that much.
The smoker point came from the article I linked.
A “mere assertion” from an actual expert which field experience doesn’t mean much to a novice internet philosopher with a ideological axe to grind who wrote a hyperbolic article extrapolated mainly from another ideological project with less than rigorous standards for proof? Shocking.
Also yes, you have to be extremely deficient in competence to melt the wings of your bees with a smoker. Implying that this happens with meaningful frequency makes it obvious you have no idea what you are talking about. How do I know? I keep a few wild swarms. Do I think industrial beekeeping has a lot of issues? Sure. But your engagement on this subject is as incurious as your zealotry is fanatical.
How do you weigh the pollinator bee increase against the net decrease in overall wild insect populations on said almond farm? If we’re going by bad insect death numbers.
smokers can burn wings off, but only if handled by an amateur beekeeper. https://www.buddhabeeapiary.com/blog/why-do-beekeepers-use-smoke
Also, I agree that bees live better lives than wild bees. If you handle your hive optimally, it might even be that your bees live great lives. This isn't true for most of the honey industry.
30% of bees die during the winter, 4-11% die within their first day of adulthood, drone bees (~15% of the bee population) virtually all die slowly following expulsion, and hives have a 12-year average annual mortality rate of 39.6% (typically due to Varroa destructor).
I love it when I read the title of a Bentham’s Bulldog post, think about it for a second, and say “Oh wow yup that makes sense, didn’t think about that”
Directionally interesting post, but doesn't it set off skepticism alarm bells in your head when you read "bees suffer 15% as much as humans"? When paired with a simple utilitarian view of morality that leads to some pretty wild conclusions: you should extend the life of seven honey bees by a year, instead of extending one human's lifespan by one year. For me this is far, far into reductio ad absurdum territory
You are conflating "bees suffer 15% as much as humans" with "bee lives have 15% of the value of human lives". The conclusion would need to be something like "we should prevent seven years of X-intensity bee suffering" instead of preventing one year of X-intensity human suffering".
I thought I had a gotcha here because people eat a lot less honey by mass compared to other animal products. But even if you adjust for consumption per capita, honey is still probably the worst. The average American eats about 1 kg of honey per year, 2 kg of shrimps, and 50 kg of chickens. You could be very doubtful about bee sentience and think bee lives are only slightly negative, and honey would still be the worst animal product by far. Which is to say: it would be better for a typical person to be omnivorous but happen to not eat honey than to be vegan except for honey.
Have you ever seen the Bee Movie? I think this very clearly demonstrated the consequences of an end to honey farming; Bee unemployment, b crises of meaning and ecological collapse.
In all seriousness though, I think there's a lot of anthropomorphizing of animals that have a very different experience of the world than we do. A Bee that works its entire life producing honey may look to be in hell to us, but its lived experience may very well be overwhelmingly positive, assuming there aren't outside negative stressors. Human farming might add stress to a colony, but it also might remove many stresses that were found in nature.
Bees produce honey so they can survive the winter, mostly for heat. For farmers that keep colonies around for the whole year, taking of the honey doesn't negatively effect their odds of survival. I think of it like sled dogs. Yes, they burn a lot of excess calories that if they were in nature would be punishing, but because of humans, they thrive despite this unnecessary energy burning. Many of them seem to very much enjoy the strenuous activity over just chilling, and in the case of insects, seem to be motivated to protect the hive so much that they literally sacrifice themselves by the thousands for the good of the whole. It seem strange to me that a billion years of evolution would produce insects that have a profoundly negative experience on the whole.
As for human involvement in that, I don't really know enough about it to say. Maybe the increased safety makes it positive. Maybe the unique stressors we can introduce makes it negative.
Bentham has the worst case of anthropomorphizing I have seen. And also I think he is wrong about how he views ecology and animal pain.
Good article! In spite of the sympathy bees gets from environmentalists, honeybee managing seems particularly sidelined in animal advocacy. Though the next animal advocacy event I'm going to has a long-conference on bee sentience, so maybe things are moving in the right direction!
thankfully is disgusting anyway!
I wish I agreed.
for the record I don't eat honey and haven't for years, I just don't really like people saying "animal product X isn't even that tasty". I went vegan despite my favorite foods being animal products, I'm always looking for good replacements, and I think this line of thinking misses a couple important things: 1, that a LOT of people really like the flavor, and saying that kind of thing might give them the impression that vegans just happen to not like animal products, so it's easy for them to switch, but if they did like it they couldn't switch, and 2, it skirts around the point that really liking something doesn't give you license to do it. No matter how much fun a sadist gets out of torture, it doesn't somehow make it ok.
I agree that some animal products are tasty. Cheese tastes amazing and I genuinely liked the taste of meat when I still used to eat it. Honey is just too sweet for me, I guess
Some information from ChatGPT: Summer worker bees live 4-6 weeks in the summer, while those that stay the winter live 4-6 months. Drones live a few weeks.
Some bees die from pesticides, which are neurotoxins that cause disorientation, paralysis, and death, over minutes to hours.
Some bees die from parasites which cause a slow death over days to weeks.
Some bees are eaten by birds, spiders, or other predators
Drones die because "their abdomen ruptures during copulation". (sounds painful)
When a worker bee dies from "aging" they exhibit a gradual decline over the last 1-2 days of their life. According to ChatGPT, their bodies fail due to "intense labor".
Bees that do foraging fly so much that their wings become tattered, their flight muscles are exhausted and riddled with microscopic tears, and their bodies are plagued with extreme oxidative stress.
When bees get "old" they exhibit less efficient metabolism and they may struggle to regulate their body temperature or produce the energy needed for flight. They may become disoriented and unable to return to the hive.
When a bee is close to death, they often leave the hive to die, to reduce disease risk for the colony, or other bees may push them out.
ChatGPT is skeptical that natural death for a bee is painful - " they show nociceptive responses (they can react to harmful stimuli), but no evidence suggests they suffer or experience distress in a conscious way."
If they are conscious (which I think is likely), then none of this sounds great. Evolution did not select for them to have great lives.
a lot of non vegans use this as an argument against veganism, and since youre doing this kind of utilitarian analysis by multiplying bee pain by number of bees to determine how bad it is, how do you respond to these? Avocados, almonds, apples, cherries, blueberries, and many more. tons and tons of crop producers breed bees and mistreat them. can you not eat any of those then? and if no, should we limit our calorie intake of them? same with other bugs. you ever seen those videos of cranberries and the millions of spiders on them? they all die. It seems there are insane entailments from valuing bugs. It's better to eat pure grass fed beef than to eat fruits, and if not, you still shouldn't eat those fruits I listed, and you should limit your calorie intake to avoid causing more suffering since bugs die in crops production, and not to mention the number of bugs you hit with your car when you drive, cut the grass, take a walk in the forest, etc.. valuing insects (even just bees) just has too many insanely unintuitive entailments to be true
I think this is the wrong way of doing epistemology. If the world is weird (in that our actions harm tons of bugs) you shouldn't use that to stop valuing bugs. In a morally weird world, our ethical theory should say weird things. The entailments aren't insane--they're just different from what we'd have expected because we were ignorant of the facts.
As an analogy, suppose we discovered bacteria were conscious and agentic--just like people. In fact, imagine they were smarter than people. It would be absurd to conclude "well, they must not matter because that has insane entailments." It would just mean that the facts of the world are inconvenient. See also https://wonderandaporia.substack.com/p/surely-were-not-moral-monsters?utm_source=publication-search
I think there is some reason to avoid avocados, almonds, etc, but honey is the worst. Almonds are pretty bad too--so I avoid them. I try to avoid the others but am not as fastidious about it.
I think that killing insects is probably good because it lives bad lives.
Good article. I feel like a bit more of an analysis of the environmental impacts are needed. It feels potentially large.
Also I know this is not relevant to the main argument, but listening to a boring lecture is clearly net-positive to me. Life is easily good enough to outweigh a little boredom.
I don't understand a lot of things, so add this to the list: if you're a utilitarian interested in maximizing net good among all sentient beings, then why aren't you in favor of exterminating all humans?
At some point, you have to think that our attitudes to animals are fairly built-in or hard to massively change, save for big technological breakthroughs where we either turn people into vegans by directly manipulating their brains or create the conditions such that humans are able to interact with the world while massively reducing the amount of animals suffering caused. It's not clear that either of those changes will *ever* happen.
Given, though, that there 8.2 billion humans in the world, then not only is it the case that by eating meat, fish, honey, dairy, etc. are we causing tons of animal suffering. It's also the case that just by doing what it takes to survive--living in houses where we hire exterminators to make sure that insects don't crawl in; building buildings that kill and displace lots of insects and animals; harvesting crops on a massive scale, which also kills 7.3 billion animals *every year* (and that doesn't include insects!)--we kill immense numbers of animals and insects.
I don't know if you've done the calculation anywhere, but surely since you're a utilitarian and a vegan, you have some sense of how many bees a human is worth. I would guess a single human is not worth more than the lives of a million bees, and yet there is such a long way to go between now and a world where humans don't cause massive amounts of insect and animal suffering per year just by doing what it takes to have the infrastructure needed for civilization, to say nothing of our food choices.
Is the idea that suffering in nature is so bad anyway that, though humans make things much worse right now, it's possible that we'll be able to make it much better for all sentient beings in the future, so it's morally obligatory to keep the human race alive right now?
Two main reasons:
1) Humans reduce wild animal suffering https://benthams.substack.com/p/long-run-human-impact-on-wild-animal
2) The far future could be very good
Humanity is the only chance for wild animals to be free of suffering forever.
My thinking on this, although I haven't done the math, is that the universe is now in the best position it's ever been in to eliminate suffering, including wild animal suffering. We have some of the intelligence, dexterity, and beginnings to a lot of the technology needed to do it. Evolution and nature are brutal with total disregard of wellbeing, but they produced us, somewhat intelligent, somewhat compassionate animals, and there's no guarantee that even if we go extinct, the next species that gets to our level (if that ever happens) is as compassionate as us, not to mention the massive amount of time till then. And consider that even if a species has intelligence and communication (dolphins come to mind for me), they can't do that much technologically without hands.
And that's not to mention that wiping out humanity isn't some magically easy thing to do, I would argue that in some ways it might actually be more difficult than eliminating suffering. Even if you nuke the planet (which is itself not a magically easy thing to do), there will probably will be some people in bunkers or something who find a way to survive.
"there is such a long way to go between now and a world where humans don't cause massive amounts of insect and animal suffering per year"
My guess is that the way to go to eliminating suffering is much longer from here if humans suddenly cease to exist.
As David Pearce says, the future belongs to the life lovers.
I’m curious about the counterfactual with the bees being in the wild. Could you make the argument that there are also benefits to being raised by a beekeeper, like protection from predation, parasites, etc.?
But the counterfactual *isn't* the bees being raised in the wild. It's the bees not existing. And parasites predation etc are probably more common on farms.
I saw the following comment online, arguing that bees live better lives in captivity than the wild. Thoughts?
"You know the bees can and will leave if the hive conditions are worse than they could find out in a tree somewhere, right? ...it's called absconding. There isn't really any pressure to breed it out because it's not terribly difficult for an experienced beekeeper to just provide better conditions than the bees would otherwise find on their own"
They can but:
1) Often the wings of the queens are clipped so she can't leave. This makes the others not leave.
2) Bees are often very reluctant to relocate hives and only do it if the conditions are bad.
3) Bees have been artificially bred to be more docile and less likely to leave.
4) If the beekeeper takes the honey, then the bees are generally dependent on the hive.
5) Beekeepers often relocate hives, making honey bees disoriented and less likely to abscond.
So the non-identity thing is there, but if we table that for a second, are you saying that predation and parasites are more common in farmed bees rather than bees in the wild?
I don't have data on this, but I'd be pretty confident that that is true for parasites. Probably less for predation.
Maybe honey is really bad compared to meat at the same weight, but what about in the actual quantities that people eat those things? Quick googling says a teaspoon of honey is ~7 grams and a chicken breast is ~100 grams (though I think people are generally eating way more chicken than that). You might be directionally correct (ha ha) but imo it's less misleading to say one *serving* of honey is ~35x worse than one *serving* of chicken using your 500x worse by weight number, which I find more convincing anyway!
Even adjusting for that it's still a lot worse. As Glenn says:
I thought I had a gotcha here because people eat a lot less honey by mass compared to other animal products. But even if you adjust for consumption per capita, honey is still probably the worst. The average American eats about 1 kg of honey per year, 2 kg of shrimps, and 50 kg of chickens. You could be very doubtful about bee sentience and think bee lives are only slightly negative, and honey would still be the worst animal product by far. Which is to say: it would be better for a typical person to be omnivorous but happen to not eat honey than to be vegan except for honey.
I think this piece is written with far too much confidence in sources, inferences, and conclusions.
What about local honey harvested by conscientious people? Is it still terrible?