Taboo Morality

One reason you shouldn't take very seriously the intuition that insects don't matter

I’ve already written about Caplan’s defense of meat-eating but I’m going to do so again because it encapsulates everything wrong with the way a lot of people do ethics and is partially responsible for the downfall of Western civilization. Okay, maybe not that last bit, but I’m not sure.

The main argument for why you shouldn’t eat meat is very straightforward: eating meat in normal circumstances causes others excruciating agony for the sake of small personal benefits. But—and here’s the controversial bit according to Caplan—you shouldn’t cause others excruciating agony for the sake of small personal benefits. So therefore you shouldn’t eat meat in normal circumstances.

Caplan thinks that it’s sometimes okay to cause others excruciating agony for the sake of small personal benefits. He thinks this is obvious. After all, we all think it’s okay to drive cars—yet that kills a bunch of bugs, causing them excruciating agony for the sake of small benefits. So, claims Caplan, if you really accept that you shouldn’t cause others excruciating agony then you shouldn't drive your car. But clearly driving your car is fine—so therefore it must be fine to eat meat. Therefore, Caplan concludes, it must sometimes be okay to cause others excruciating agony for small benefits—probably if they’re dumb enough—and so it’s fine to eat meat.

Now even if you grant Caplan’s arguments, for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere, you should think eating meat is wrong. Even if there’s some threshold of intelligence at which one's pain stops mattering, it’s obviously way below the intelligence of animals—otherwise, you get the inconvenient result that it’s okay to torture babies and old people in the throes of sufficiently severe dementia and certain severely mentally disabled people. So Caplan’s argument is utterly unconvincing as a response to veganism.

Furthermore, given that insects mostly live wretched lives, it’s very unclear whether caring about insects actually makes driving better or worse than it would otherwise be. It might be that driving is super good because it kills a lot of insects who (the propagandists behind Grammarly suggested changing who to that—big Grammar hates insects!!) would have had thousands of offspring go on to live miserable lives.

But it has a bigger problem, one that is shared by much of how people reason about ethics! This problem explains people’s widespread irrationality about liberal eugenics, their widespread stupidity on abortion, and their widespread failure to take ethics seriously.