How To Help Potentially Trillions of Insects In Minutes
Plus, I have a new and more accessible article about the anthropic argument
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Currently, the UK government is holding a consultation about whether to allow farmed insects to be fed to pigs and chickens. If this initiative goes through, potentially trillions of insects could be consigned to a brief, hellish existence before a painful death. If you want to read more about the sheer horror of insect farming, check out this article by Amos Wollen. In short, insects likely can feel pain, but are currently being mass starved (as in they literally don’t feed the adults at all), kept in cramped, overcrowded conditions, and then painfully killed, often by being boiled or microwaved to death. While insects are often treated as being good for the environment, because they’re better than traditional meat, they’re overall harmful to the environment, because they replace vegetable feed rather than meat.
Pain is bad because of how it feels! So the fact that we’re inflicting tremendous quantities of pain on huge numbers of animals is morally serious. Fortunately, there’s something you can do. This link has a survey that you can fill out and raise your concerns about insect farming—if you’re not sure what to say, it has some recommended responses. It’s most important for UK citizens to do it, but others could also be valuable. So if you’re in the UK, please, fill out the survey. For a few minutes of effort, you can potentially help out trillions of insects. Very few people weigh in on the consultation, so you actually can have a sizeable impact on policy.
If you want to read more about this initiative, check out Amos’s excellent article on the initiative (note: this is a different article from the earlier one abut insect farming). This is a very valuable thing you can do and will only take a few minutes—I hope you do it!
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Over at Pat Flynn’s blog, I have a guest post defending the anthropic argument. I explain the argument more briefly and more accessibly. So if you, like most of my readers, have heard me bang on about the anthropic argument but don’t really get it, I’d recommend you read that article.
Wait, now you have completely lost me - I was on board with the "save the shrimp" movement you initiated, but not with the claims made in this post. I think the evidence is pretty strong that insects don't feel pain - that they "likely can feel pain" is an absolute minority position among all relevant experts. The Amos article is very unconvincing given the wealth of evidence that insects aren't conscious.
It seems to me that the term 'pain' has two meanings here.
A. An aversive functional response to particular stimuli.
B. A qualitative experience of badness.
Insects, like NPCs in video games, definitely have A. Is there evidence to suggest they have B?