Insect Suffering Is The Biggest Issue

The rebugnant conclusion and its consequences

1 Introduction

A beetle lay crushed in the dirt,
Its carapace cracked, torn, and hurt.
It twitched in despair,
Gasping for air —
A world unaware of its hurt.

(I think this might be one of my most important articles so I’d really appreciate if you could like, share, and restack it—thanks! Also, when I scheduled this article to be released, I did not know it was April 1. Really, seriously, this is not an April fools day post.)

Imagine we discovered that the world was filled with tiny worlds that we were constantly destroying, akin to the world in Horton Hears a Who. Every second, normal actions had extreme impacts on millions of beings just as intelligent and sentient as us. In such a world, given the sheer numerosity of the little people who fill the microworlds, our impacts on them would be way more important than everything else. While it may be hard to empathize with beings too small to see, our effects on them would be a lot more important than the humdrum political considerations that fill the public square.

In this essay, I will argue for something similar called the rebugnant conclusion: that our impact on insects is orders of magnitude more important than everything else.

I know this conclusion sounds crazy. But a lot of true things would have sounded ridiculous for most of history. Most people historically would have regarded the absolute wrongness of slavery as absurd, as well as the notion that we could build AI and the truths of quantum mechanics.

Humanity has consistently had too constricted of a moral circle. We’ve unjustifiably neglected the interests of others—first everyone outside our tribe, then those outside our race, until eventually reaching the lukewarm and inconsistent cosmopolitanism of the modern age. If we’ve spent much of history hurting and repressing those who are like us but just look a bit different, shouldn’t we expect that we’re probably underestimating the interests of those who are very unlike us?

2 The basic argument

Its legs gave a final weak bend,
No comfort, no kindness to lend.
The sky remained bright,
Unmoved by its plight —
A sorrowful, pitiless end.

The basic argument for thinking insect suffering is the worst thing in the world is really quite simple:

1. If something is plausibly responsible, every year, for millions of times more suffering than has existed in all of human history, and has been for hundreds of millions of years, it’s the worst thing in the world.

2. Insect suffering is plausibly responsible, every year, for millions of times more suffering than has existed in all of human history.

3. Therefore, insect suffering is the worst thing in the world.

(Note: I’m not interested in quibbling on whether there is a gerrymandered collections of things that are worse than insect suffering—e.g. the collection of all bad things. Obviously that’s worse. My point is that insect suffering is worse than disease, poverty, factory farming, etc).

The first premise is pretty plausible. Pain and suffering are bad. If someone were to torture you, that would be bad, not because you’re smart or human, but because it would hurt. Headaches are bad because of how they feel, not because you can do calculus or are human. That’s why it’s bad when mentally disabled people suffer, and would be even if we discovered that they were secretly not human.

What about the second premise that insect suffering is plausibly responsible, every year, for millions of times more suffering than has existed in all of human history? Insects can probably suffer according to our best evidence—they respond to anesthetic, make tradeoffs between pain and reward, avoid locations where they’ve been hurt, self-medicate, communicate, and much more. At the very least, insect suffering isn’t very unlikely, and the view they can is likely the majority view among experts.

The number of insects alive at any given time is ~10^18—about a hundred million times as great as the human population. From behind the veil of ignorance, you’d be billions of times likelier to be born an insect than a human. Most insects live very short lives, so probably more than twenty times that number of insects dies every year; this means by conservative estimates, about 600 billion insects die every second. Almost everyone is an insect. If insects suffer, extremely painful deaths inflicted on hundreds of billions of them every second utterly dwarfs human suffering.

Even if we make the extremely conservative assumption that their deaths are only one 600,000th as bad, in terms of suffering, as humans deaths, insect suffering is still obviously the worst thing in the world. If we divine 600 billion per second by 600,000, we get a million a second. By that highly conservative assumption, insects deaths cause as much pain as giving painful deaths to a million people a second would—totaling giving such experiences to about 31 trillion people a year. So even if we are ridiculously conservative about how bad an insect dying is, collective insect deaths—and this is ignoring all the rest of their sufferings—are as bad as giving an experience as painful as death to everyone in the world about once every three weeks.

That would obviously be the worst thing in the world. Insect suffering is much worse.

To think insect suffering is the worst thing, you don’t have to think only pleasure and pain matter. I certainly don’t think that. All you have to think is that suffering is one of the things that matters, so that utterly incomprehensible quantities of it are very morally serious. But this is very obvious. That’s why we give people anesthesia during surgeries—we recognize that it’s bad when they suffer greatly.

One might object that insects’ suffering is below the threshold at which pain becomes morally important. Just as no number of pinpricks can be as bad a torture, perhaps insects suffering is below the threshold of mattering—no amount of it can add up to be as bad as a single person dying painfully.

Now, first of all, the idea that thresholds like this exist is an extremely controversial ethical judgment vulnerable to powerful objections. Its proponents generally have to give up on the idea that if A is better than B which is better than C, then A must be better than C. If according to a pretty plausible ethical theory with many scholarly proponents, some issue is the worst thing in the world by orders of magnitude, it’s worth taking pretty seriously.

Second, even if this is right, insects are plausibly above the threshold. The most detailed report on insect suffering had a mean estimate of the extent of black soldier fly suffering as being 4.4% as intense as human suffering and a median estimate of 1.4%. Regarding bees, the median estimate was that they suffered 7.1% as intensely as humans, and the mean estimate was they suffered a whopping 14.8% as intensely! There’s high uncertainty in this estimate, so they might suffer less, they also might suffer much more. It’s not implausible that they suffer, say, a fifth as intensely as we do. It’s not even outside the realm of plausibility that they might suffer around as intensely as we do.

But if there’s any non-trivial chance that they suffer intensely, then insect suffering is obviously the most important thing in the world. If there was a slight chance that 600 billion occurrences of agony 20% as intense as painful human death were occurring every single second, that would obviously be the most significant thing in the world. Even if it was only 5% as intense—well, an experience 5% as bad as being starved to death or eaten alive is still really damn bad. It would be serious if experiences 5% as painful as a human death were being experienced 300 billion times per second.

When 300 billion beings die per second, and we’re uncertain about how much they suffer, any reasonable view will take that very seriously. A friend once calculated that there have been more insects on earth than stars in the observable universe. If the stars could suffer, their suffering would be more serious than ours.

Taking insect suffering seriously is counterintuitive. But it follows from obvious ethical judgments, like the badness of extreme agony. If insects looked exactly like people, the conclusion that insects matter a great deal wouldn’t be counterintuitive. The reason it’s counterintuitive is that we’re biased against it. Specifically:

1. It’s inconvenient, so our self-interest biases against it.

2. Humans display a bias called scope neglect. Because we can’t intuitively grok how much larger some big numbers are than others, we have a tendency to treat big numbers all the same. People will pay as much to save 2,000 birds as 20,000 and 200,000 birds. So when we hear that quadrillions of insects are suffering, our brain just hears a big number and doesn’t take it more than ten times as seriously as a hundred trillion insects suffering.

3. Similarly, the normalcy bias makes us hesitant to accept ethical conclusions too far outside the Overton window.

4. Insects are small and weird looking, so we don’t naturally feel empathy for them. It’s very hard to get one concerned about the interests of one with whom they don’t empathize.

5. There’s a widespread bias against thinking natural things are bad. People often declare things fine because they’re natural, even though cancer is natural but still a bad thing.

(If you have more objections, I’ve probably addressed them here where I talk about objections to shrimp welfare or here where I go over the evidence for widespread animal sentience including in insects.).

3 What to do?

The shadows crept close with a grin,
As dust settled softly within.
No cry pierced the gloom,
No hand stayed the doom —
A battle it never could win.

Suppose you are convinced that insect suffering is among the most serious issues. How should this change your views of the world?

Humans have astronomical impacts on insects. The average human, each year, reduces insect populations by about 14 million. In total, given how short insects lives are, this means that the average human could prevent hundreds of millions or billions of insects from coming into existence. Civilization may have reduced insect populations by about 78%, though that’s probably an overestimate. At the very least, it’s beyond doubt that our actions impact utterly mindboggling numbers of insects.

Most insects, unfortunately, don’t live very pleasant lives. Most are R-strategists, meaning they give birth to huge numbers of offspring, only a few of whom go on to reproduce. The overwhelming majority of insects who have ever been born live short lives of intense suffering. Most live just a few days or weeks before painfully dying from disease, starvation, or predation. If you lived a few weeks and then starved to death, your life probably wouldn’t be great. For similar reasons, I suspect almost all insects have net negative lives (for a longer defense of this, see here, here, and here). Thus, that humans’ actions likely drastically reduce wild animal suffering and this is quite a good thing. This is one reason human civilization is awesome!

So, in light of this, how should you live?

3.1 Give to organizations helping insects especially and also human charities

The easiest thing you can do at very little cost is to fill out this form telling the UK government that you’re against insect farming. It takes just a few minutes and could help utterly unfathomable numbers of insects. Read more about it here—which also provides sample answers if you’re not sure how to answer their questions. The last day to fill it out is today, so do it now!

Probably the best place to give if you’re concerned about insect welfare is here. The next few years are likely to be the most consequential in history for the insect industry. These insects are overcrowded, crippled by disease, starved, boiled, and microwaved to death. They’re then fed to factory farmed animals who themselves live in hellish conditions. The conditions on insect farms are about as bad as conditions can be for insects and there are quite literally zero welfare regulations. Slight improvements to conditions on farms are astronomically important.

Organizations focusing on helping insects also have the ability to bring insect issues more into the public consciousness. This raises the likelihood that we’ll eventually do something about the incalculably greater suffering of wild insects. This is one reason to give to the Wild Animal Initiative which is trying to build broader concern about wild animal suffering.

Another pretty good way to help insects is to save humans. Brian Tomasik conservatively calculated that a dollar given to the against malaria foundation likely prevents about 14,000 years of insect life. If insects live bad lives, then this is a very good thing (and in the off-chance it’s not, you’re still saving people). For this reason, the top human charities are probably better than all the top animal charities that focus on the welfare of vertebrates—only potentially being beaten out by the shrimp welfare project and organizations helping insects.

I currently give about 40% of my donations to help insects, 40% to the shrimp welfare project, and 20% to Givewell charities.

If you want to do some other practical things that likely reduce insect suffering, you can:

Convert a grass lawn to gravel.

Avoid eating insects.

Avoid homicide.

Avoid worm-bin composting.

(Maybe) try to eat fewer grains and more beans and nuts.

Overall though, the most important thing is probably donating.

3.2 Support civilization and habitat loss

Civilization has likely dramatically reduced the total number of insects. If each human reduces insect numbers by about 14 million each year, that’s a pretty damn good effect. So you shouldn’t become a misanthrope based on this depressed about the horrors of humans—instead, you should think human progress has been a really awesome thing @

Lyman Stone

.

You should also support habitat loss. More habitats=more animals experiencing very intense suffering. For this reason, habitat loss very likely reduces wild animal suffering. If you’re concerned about wild animals, therefore, you should support paving over ecosystems. At the very least, you should be extremely opposed to and horrified by rewilding—efforts to bring areas of nature back to industrialized areas.

Rewilding is probably worse than factory farming. We’ve rid various locations of torture chambers, and the rewilders want to bring back the torture chambers.

4 Conclusion

The breeze whispered soft through the air,
But none paused to offer a care.
The dirt claimed its shell,
No stories to tell —
Just silence and none were aware.

I talk about a lot of stuff on this blog. I discuss politics, scandals, people being wrong, and various niche areas of philosophy. This is by far the most important. The insects who die—hundreds of billions each second—may not cry in a language we can hear, but they are hurting, and they deserve better. For nearly a billion years, the world has been stained by the blood of insects—they starve, are crushed, and are eaten in numbers we cannot fathom (original said “by numbers we cannot fathom,” which would be very surprising if true). At this very moment, billions of insects are twitching and struggling to escape as the insect farms cast them into the microwave, limping away after being almost crushed to death, starving, and being eaten alive. If you imagine what it’s like from their perspective—to hurt as we do, in a world they cannot understand—it’s seriousness becomes clear.

There are a few lines from a song that I’ve been thinking about recently, called Here Come The Aliens:

If aliens are real then we'll discriminate against them.
We'll line em up and kill them all
And nobody can call it a genocide.
Place no value on their technical advancements,

The insects may as well be aliens—separated from us by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. When we torture trillions of them on the farms, no one cares, for they are too different for us to feel much sympathy. They are the aliens that dwell among us in unfathomable numbers—the primary beneficiaries and victims of our actions, the ones we can hurt and help. The only question is: which one will we choose.

(Anyone who sets up a recurrent monthly donation of at least $30 per month to givewell or the main organization helping insects in response to this article to the Insect Institute gets a free paid subscription).