Insect Suffering Is The Biggest Issue In The World

This is surprisingly intuitive once one corrects for bias

I think insect suffering is the worst thing in the world by far. I know it sounds weird! But please hear me out—ideally with an open mind!

Many views seem intuitive but only because of bias. To southern slave-owners, the permissibility of slavery was intuitive. But this was only as a result of bias and a profound failure of empathy. They only considered things from their own perspectives, never thinking about what it would be like to be a tormented and subjugated slave. Had they done so, they’d have correctly judged slavery to be the abomination it was.

I think the same thing is true about insect suffering. People have the strong intuition that it doesn’t matter at all. But when one really reflects, this turns out to be for unreliable and superficial reasons. Insect suffering is genuinely important, and we only neglect it because of bias and irrationality. I think there are four considerations which when considered collectively make vivid the significance of the 10^18 insects presently suffering.

(Note: when I say insect, I’m really talking about plausibly-conscious arthropods—which is a class of very numerous organisms including crabs, shrimp, spiders, and other things that aren’t technically buts—but repeatedly using scientific terms like “arthropod” is lame, so I’m just going to talk about insects.)

Consider first: you shouldn’t directly trust your intuition that insect suffering doesn’t matter. You’re not an insect, you have no natural empathy towards insects, there’s social incentive not to care about insect welfare, and caring about them is inconvenient. Just like you shouldn’t trust the intuitions of white slave owners who have no empathy towards slaves, you shouldn’t trust your own direct intuitions about insects. If you feel no empathy towards a creature for superficial reasons, relating to its size and the way it looks, you’re obviously not in a position to reliably judge its worth.

(Note to stupid people: I am not making a comparison between black people and insects. I am making a broader point about untrustworthy intuitions.)

Second: insects plausibly can suffer a great deal. The most detailed report ever compiled on the subject estimated that they suffer at least 1% as intensely as we do, and on average around 10%. That could, of course, be an underestimate, but it could also be a dramatic overestimate.

If a creature can suffer, to decide how much its interests count, you should imagine yourself in its shoes. Ask yourself: how much would you pay to avoid having to experience a painful death from the perspective of an insect. These creatures potentially suffer quite intensely and often writhe around in agony for hours before eventually succumbing to death. The way they struggle is quite similar to how larger animals do. While they’re small, from their behavior it looks like they suffer intensely. Just as it would be wrong for a giant to assume that you don’t feel intense pain when crushed to death because you’re small, it’s also wrong to assume that about insects.

If insects screamed in volume proportional to their suffering, nothing could be heard over the cries of insects. If you lived the life of every creature who ever lived, you’d spend roughly 100% of your time as an insect. If you were a randomly selected organism placed behind the veil of ignorance, odds are nearly 100% that you’d be an insect. If you empathized more deeply, feeling the pain of all those around you within a 100-mile radius, every other sensation would be drowned out by the agony and pleasures of the insects.

In short, when we empathize with insects, we come to see that they matter.

Third, there are an astonishing number of insects, and they collectively feel an utterly unfathomable quantity of suffering (provided they can suffer). There are about 10^18 insects—100 million for every human. In expectation, human suffering is a rounding error compared to theirs. Every second at least hundreds of billions of insects die. There is something darkly amusing about the fact that holding we should take seriously the hundreds of billions of painful deaths every second is seen as insane and radical!

Even if we assume that the pain of their death is only about as bad as the pain of a human being punched in the face, insect deaths collectively cause about as much suffering as if everyone in the world was punched in the face a hundred times per second. And that’s assuming it takes them only one second to die and ignoring all the rest of their suffering.

In the face of that ocean of agony, we’d need some strong argument for ignoring it. But when you seriously consider what it’s like to be in agony, you can see that it’s bad. As I’ve noted before, there’s no plausible explanation of why human agony is bad that doesn’t imply the agony of other species is bad too.

People often say that our agony is worse because of various cognitive traits we have. We can do calculus, conceptualize of our life as a whole, and reason about morality. But this explanation has two problems:

1. This doesn’t apply to all humans. Babies and the severely mentally disabled cannot reason about morality, do calculus, or think of their lives as a whole. Nonetheless, severe, prolonged agony experienced by babies and the severely mentally disabled is obviously quite bad.

2. This seems entirely irrelevant to the badness of ones pain. When I think about unpleasant experiences I’ve had, their badness seems to be about how they feel. The fact that I’m smart and can think about my life doesn’t seem at all relevant to this. If I temporarily lost the ability to think rationally or conceptualize of my life as a whole, it would still be bad for me to be tortured. Headaches are bad because they hurt, not because the people who have them are smart.

To avoid these problems, people often suggest that the relevant characteristic that makes our pain important and insect pain unimportant is our species. The babies and mentally enfeebled come from a rational species, and this is why their pain is important. Animals do not, so even when they experience unfathomable amounts of agony, this doesn’t much matter. But this account has huge problems too:

1. Imagine we came across a planet full of creatures exactly like human babies, but with a catch: they never became adults. Their species never became rational. They remained permanently like human babies. Imagine they even look like babies. On this account, their suffering wouldn’t be very important. But this is ridiculous. When you next hold a baby, try seriously entertaining the thought that the only reason that their suffering is bad isn’t because of their present state, but because they share a species with intelligent creatures. The thought is completely insane.

2. Once again, this seems to obviously get wrong why pain is bad. When I think back to why it’s bad when I suffer greatly, it seems to have nothing to do with my intelligence or the intelligence of my species. Rather, it seems like it’s bad because it hurts. Why the hell do the mental capacities of creatures other than you affect how bad your suffering is?

3. Why the heck does species matter? Why not, say, kingdom or clade? This seems obviously wildly arbitrary and gerrymandered. Why the heck does the badness of one’s pain depend on qualities that people other than them possess? This would be like suggesting that how bad one’s pain is depends on what neighborhood one lives in—clearly ridiculous on its face.

Some people object that we don’t really know if insects suffer. And this is absolutely correct. We can’t be sure. But there’s a sizeable chance they suffer, as international bodies consistently conclude when they investigate this subject. They respond in many ways as if they suffer: responding to anesthetic, nursing their wounds, making tradeoffs between pain and reward, cognitively modeling both risks and reward in decision-making, responding in novel ways to novel experiences, self-medicating, and much more. If you’re not sure if creatures are suffering, then if they’re being harmed by the thousand-quadrillions, that’s pretty serious! Plus I think the evidence makes it more likely they suffer than not.

Others object that just as no mild pains can add up to be as severe as one extreme pain, no amount of insect pain matters as much as intense human pain. But this is dubious.

First of all, we don’t know how intensely insects suffer. The most detailed report on the subject guessed they suffer on average about 5-15% as intensely as we do. Now, if a person experiences something 15% as bad as dying painfully, that’s obviously morally serious. So if insects experience pain that intensely, it doesn’t matter if tiny pains don’t outweigh a few sizeable pains. Insects plausibly don’t just experience tiny, irrelevant pain.

Second, even putting aside these precise estimates, we don’t know much about how intensely insects suffer. We have no very compelling evidence about it. As a result, we shouldn’t assume with high confidence that they don’t suffer intensely. But if there’s even a 1% chance that they suffer 20% as intensely as we do, then insect suffering is still, in expectation, responsible for nearly all of the world’s extreme suffering.

Third, the view that lots of small pains can’t add up to one significant pain is quite philosophically controversial. Many philosophers reject it. But if insect suffering is the worst thing in the world by far on a widely-held philosophical view, then everyone should take it pretty seriously.

My fourth argument for why taking seriously insect welfare is intuitive is that when we modify the real world scenario to remove bias, it seems super obvious. To see this, let’s note a few things.

First, humans aren’t good at comparing big numbers. We display a bias called scope neglect, wherein we don’t intuitively grasp how much bigger a billion is than a million and intuitively regard them as the same. People will pay as much money to save 2,000 birds as 20,000 or 200,000.

To correct against this, instead of comparing the interests of 8 billion humans to 10^18 insects, let’s compare the interests of 100 million insects to one human (for that is the number of insects there are for every person).

Second, we’re biased against insects because they’re small and weird-looking—we don’t naturally empathize with them. To correct against this, let’s imagine that insects looked like people but still had the mental capacities of insects.

100 million is roughly the population of the United States. So now imagine that you were the only normal human in the United States. The other 100 million people (!!!!) were cognitively like insects but in human bodies. While you lived a mostly normal, comfortable life, these creatures were constantly starved to death, eaten alive, and crushed to death by giant creatures. They often writhed around in agony over the course of hours before eventually dying.

These people were, in many ways, like some of the most mentally disabled humans. While they could not speak or display any great intelligence, they still seemed to show signs of pain. When hurt, they would struggle to get away. They responded to anesthetic, made tradeoffs between pain and reward, could learn from others, appeared to get stressed, and seemed, in various other ways, to feel pain.

In such a country where there were 100 million of these humanoids, where every day you witnessed many of them starve in the streets, be crushed or devoured by larger creatures, cry and whimper in pain, and have their blood run out as their corpse is scraped against the pavement, would it be reasonable to think only your interests mattered? That you could do to these creatures as you wish, for their interests are billions of times less important than yours? Would it really be reasonable to see one of these creatures be eaten alive, and think that what happened was of virtually no importance?

Would it be reasonable to hold that these creatures, though they could probably feel pain, though they were probably collectively experiencing a literally unfathomable amount of pain, didn’t matter at all. They were, after all, members of an unintelligent species. Would it be reasonable to think that your problems matter so much more than theirs—that you can run them over with impunity, torment thousands of them in farms before eating them, and treat them as morally valueless robots?

Of course not! If you were the only intelligent human in the United States, and the rest of the country was filled with these creatures, you would not be the locus of nearly all the moral worth in the entire country. Nearly all of what matters in the country wouldn’t be what happened to you, but what happened to them. But insects are as numerous per person as these creatures, and only differ from them in utterly morally irrelevant ways—like how they look.

When one seriously thinks about how perverse it would be to treat these creatures as if they were valueless—to prioritize your own interests over the 100 million beings crying in agony and terror—they have begun to grok the senselessness and immorality of our neglect of insects.

(For what to do once you’re convinced insect suffering is super important, see here).