> To southern slave-owners, the permissibility of slavery was intuitive.
This is nonsense. Huge numbers of slave owners believed that it was bad, or a necessary evil, and everyone knew that it was subject to open and vigorous debate.
> 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.
You suffer from similar cognitive biases. You have an unlimited willingness to feel empathy for anything you consider to be plausibly conscious because you are conscious. You have enormous social incentive to care about insects, since that allow you to show that you are a super principled EA and write blog posts. You are actually helped by alleviating insect suffering, since the personal satisfaction and social benefits from your donations to insect charities almost certainly outweigh the monetary value of those donations.
> 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.
There is no evidence that critical flicker frequency correlates to “subjective” experience as opposed to mechanical reactions depending on how fast an organism can process data. It proves nothing about the existence of speed of subjective experience. All of the evidence you cite in your blog posts are just reactions to things that can obviously occur without conscious experience. The only way to prove these things would be (maybe) to talk to the animals and see if they can speak to their experiences or find a decisive connection between human brain architectue and other animal as that clearly does not exist for insects.
> Ask yourself: how much would you pay to avoid having to experience a painful death from the perspective of an insect.
$0
> These creatures potentially suffer quite intensely and often writhe around in agony for hours before eventually succumbing to death.
No proof of conscious experience or that they perceive this writing as negatively painful.
> If insects screamed in volume proportional to their suffering, nothing could be heard over the cries of insects.
This is as factual as a sermon warning of the screams in hell of the damned.
> 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.
You must think that there is some point at which babies become conscious. Roughly when is it? Wherever it is, that shows that capacity matters. The fact that the baby cannot do suffering is largely irrelevant because it shows that at some point in development it has the neural architecture which enables those mega-level conceptions of badness.
Of a severely mentally disabled person was literally brain dead, which is what you’re describing, then they are not really alive and have no direct moral value.
> When I think about unpleasant experiences I’ve had, their badness seems to be about how they feel.
No. It’s feeling + a judgment that you’ve made that the feeling is bad. You are making that judgment, regardless of whatever you say you are.
> 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.
If you were unable to comprehend the pain as a bad thing, then it would not be bad for you. This would require a really really large loss of brain function (particularly for you). The words “think rationally” and “conceptualize my life as a whole” don’t do it justice…
> Their species never became rational. They remained permanently like human babies.
This planet would obviously be the product of divine intervention designed to test us.
> 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.
You would torture 600 babies to death to avert 0.000001% of insect suffering. Do you seriously expect empathy trolling about babies to work?
> Why the heck does species matter? Why not, say, kingdom or clade?
I don’t hold this view, but species matters because you can interbreed. If your view of ethics is super family focused, then specifies clearly matters for a non-arbitrary reason.
> as international bodies consistently conclude
Why is Jonathan Birch now an “international body”?
> 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.
I don’t know why any of these support an inference that they consciously suffer. The obvious alternate explanation is that they have evolved instincts and predictive capabilities to avoid death. That does not require consciousness, and it certainly does not require a subjective feeling of badness.
> The most detailed report on the subject guessed they suffer on average about 5-15% as intensely as we do.
Same report as above. Still takes into account a bunch of random criteria without explaining why they support consciousness. Why does “taste aversion” mean that something is conscious? It would be trivial to design a non-conscious taste averter.
> We have no very compelling evidence about it
We have the most compelling evidence imaginable: they have a minuscule, mechanic nervous system and have no experiences known that are unique to conscious beings.
> To correct against this, let’s imagine that insects looked like people but still had the mental capacities of insects.
If they looked like people but had the mental capacities of insects then I would be certain that they are not conscious because they would be using the same brain but still would have no mental faculties. They would prove some strong form of non-physicalism correct.
Ignoring the brains part, if they had the same mental capabilities as insects these humans would Immediately collapse on the floor and starve to death. Would they be distinguishable from a brain dead person? Maybe not…
> 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?
There would be neither streets nor pavement, since the humanoids will all immediately collapse and starve to death after being created. By hypothesizing streets and pavements, you are smuggling in a wildly inflated sense of intelligence.
//Huge numbers of slave owners believed that it was bad//
Yeah I was referring to the ones who didn't obviously.
//This is as factual as a sermon warning of the screams in hell of the damned.//
But we have strong evidence insects suffer unlike people in hell.
//You must think that there is some point at which babies become conscious. Roughly when is it?//
Babies are always conscious. I don't know when fetuses become conscious--different theories say different things.
//You suffer from similar cognitive biases. You have an unlimited willingness to feel empathy for anything you consider to be plausibly conscious because you are conscious. You have enormous social incentive to care about insects, since that allow you to show that you are a super principled EA and write blog posts.//
This seems pretty ridiculous. I could write about other stuff and people are mostly bored by my insect articles. The idea that this is even remotely in the same vicinity as the fact that from the time you're a child you're told to ignore insects and we feel not a shred of natural empathy for them is laughable. I don't take empathy to be a bias--I think it is in fact justified. But in any case, I don't appeal to direct intuitions about insects.
Not going to keep going through your comment as it's quite long and not much that's very interesting.
Good points! May as well cross post the comment I just made on Michael Huemer's blog since it applies here too:
Comparing animals to human infants and mentally disabled does less than nothing to convince me that we should treat animals better. I've experienced being an infant and being severely mentally disabled (alcohol induced, and once, sleepwalking) during my lifetime. More accurately, I DID NOT experience those things - almost certainly because I was nothing more than a mindless automaton while in those mental states. If I had been tortured in those states, there wouldn't have been anyone home to suffer. To the extent that babies are an appropriate analog for farm animals, it makes me less concerned about farm animals.
My intuition is that there are some minimum system requirements to have any experiences, let alone the ability to suffer, and humans just barely clear that bar most of the time. It doesn't take much to send us under. Since reducing humans to mental states closer to that of animals rapidly leads to mental states where we have no experiences at all, I estimate that the probability that farm animals can suffer is only slightly higher than the probability that rocks can suffer, so I'm not inclined to worry about it much.
I am a minority perhaps, but hardly a vanishingly small or strange one. I'd put myself in the same boat as people who are pro-choice on the grounds that fetuses are not capable of suffering. If pressed, many with that view would probably admit that the bright line that society draws at birth is more instrumental for optics and convenience than a recognition of some sort of intrinsic moral transformation bestowed by leaving a uterus.
I assume you meant to ask about giving infants anesthesia during surgery. Yes, we probably should, not because of pain, but because it's easier and safer to operate on a patient that isn't moving or struggling.
Nearly everyone thinks murder is bad, but pick it apart and you are going to find a lot of divergence. (Can murder be justified? Accidental? What about a war? Baby Hitler? etc)
I suspect you'll find similar divergence on the topic of infant suffering, especially if I told them that injecting just a bit of nuance into this topic can let them eat a cheeseburger without feeling guilty and without sanctioning a parade of human rights violations.
You don't have an experience when you're sleepwalking because... you're asleep. Most people do have experiences when extremely drunk, it sounds like you blacked out and therefore don't remember it, but you can't drink so much that you aren't having a conscious experience unless you're passed out. In either case, I don't see why you're confident that these two states are similar to those of animals, since animals are not always asleep or drunk.
Pain is bad because you are experiencing it. As you progressively impair a human's cognitive functioning, you eventually reach the point of blackout - the point where that human is no longer having experiences. It's notable that humans who are blacked out from alcohol at a party are often still dancing and conversing - so their cognitive functioning is still far beyond any farm animal and yet their capacity to have experiences is no better than a rock. If humans with impaired, but still clearly advanced cognitive capacities are incapable of having experiences, then how can we possibly expect farm animals to have experiences when they are working with even less cognitive capacity?
If you believe that the ability to have experiences and cognitive capacity are not linked, then you're free to wonder if maybe rocks or plants have experiences, but I'm comfortable being confident that they do not.
They're still having an experience. They just don't remember it.
You seem to be confusing the use of the word experience with the colloquial use of the word, which is "a thing that happened in the past which you remember."
I'd argue that the colloquial use is what we should care about when we talk about the badness of suffering. Why should we care about the goodness or badness of "experiences" we don't remember or aren't going to remember? As far as I'm concerned, such experiences happen to a mindless automaton or zombie with no moral significance.
Because the suffering still happened. On that view it's fine to torture someone to death as soon as they die because once they're dead there's no one who remembers their suffering
Wow some of the best weird highly articulate nonsense I have come across lately. How does someone take the time to write a long format article without ever thinking ‘Maybe what I feel is categorically different from an insect?’. I guess having identified ‘the biggest issue in the world’ helps.
I agree we feel in various ways different from how insects feel. But so long as insects can feel pain, I think we should try to prevent their pain! Just like if we came across intelligent aliens, it would be plausible that "what I feel is categorically different from" what they feel, but nonetheless, it would be bad if quintillions of them were suffering constantly!
Pain and suffering are not the same thing. There are no physiological or evolutionary (or theological-if that's your sort of thing) reasons to believe that insects suffer. And even if so as you note in the article there are about 100 million insects for every human so our part can only be negligible - the rest is just biology/life.
Sure by both pain and suffering I mean a kind of unpleasant conscious state with suffering being broader than pain.
There is reason to think insects suffer--I've laid it out in great detail here https://benthams.substack.com/p/betting-on-ubiquitous-pain. At the very least, given that they act in many ways like creatures who do suffer, we definitely shouldn't be more than, say, 99% sure they don't suffer. But even at 99% odds they don't suffer, insect suffering wins out in expectation.
Note that the position insects don't suffer is rejected by a sizeable portion of those who have studied the subject. Seems premature, in light of peer disagreement, to be super confident that they're wrong and to say there's no evidence for their position.
Oh so the screaming critter rabbit hole goes much deeper. But I get the genius level Bayesian reasoning: come up with an outlandish claim with fantastically dire consequences and since we can't ever really be absolutely sure of the falsity of anything we can conjure up some nonzero probability which makes it the 'biggest issue in the world'-in expectation.
Well, on what grounds? The mere fact that insects act somewhat similar to humans when partially squashed by a heavy object? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence especially when they are in contradiction with physical (the lack of anatomical features sensibly required for anything remotely similar to human suffering) and biological evidence (suffering in insects would be at best be useless/wasteful and hence be selected against).
> There are no physiological or evolutionary (or theological-if that's your sort of thing) reasons to believe that insects suffer.
This seems extremely overconfident and dismissive. Suffering would be evolutionarily beneficial as it would improve the odds of that a species propagates more successfully. I endorse the authors comments below.
Also, note that when you are talking about insects, you are talking about 5+ million species with highly varying degrees of capabilities. So the claim that there is no physiological or evolutionary reason to believe that any of these 5.5 million complex individuals could suffer is not as obvious as you are assuming.
No, my first two paragraphs are only about suffering, and the linked review primarily talks about pain but also suffering. Both are relevant for moral decision-making, so I think it's valuable to talk about both.
There’s not much point in my formulating a response to your argument, since i don’t accept the moral presuppositions underlying it (namely, that life is all about trying reduce suffering of sentient beings, which are all equal, and this because suffering is “bad” with no eye towards any higher transcendental value or goal).
Any argument can be undermined by simply questioning the assumptions behind it, so there’s really no point when it comes to something like this that ultimately boils down to a different morality.
So instead, i made a comment the point of which was just to point out to others that this is what results when your moral worldview (all about minimizing suffering to the greatest extent, and therefore in the most efficient manner possible) is taken to its logical conclusions. From your perspective, maybe that’s a good thing.
Okay but that wasn't a presupposition underlying the argument. If you're going to be snarky, at least have the good grace to not be a total moron who isn't even aware that people can give arguments for moral views.
I accept the argument here but still find it difficult to accept the premise that insects, with their tiny nervous systems, feel pain. Scrolling through the links, mostly from rethinkpriorities.org, I found the methodology for making estimates of sentience hard to pin down and unconvincing. I would appreciate a companion piece telling us a few simple, solid reasons why we should believe in insect pain. “Writhing in agony” is not something easy to define objectively in a way that distinguishes it from misfiring signals in response to garbled stimulus due to tissue damage.
(The only somewhat convincing argument I can make is that evolving pain seems certain once avoidance of pain is possible, and you have a brain that can learn from experience. This is useful if your environment and ways to respond get complex enough that capacity to learn to avoid behaviors that lead to tissue damage is an efficient survival mechanism. Insect exoskeletons incidentally are much better at avoiding damage than our situation of having soft tissue on the outside.)
He didn’t do so. He was using analogy of biased thinking from one area we all agree bias led people to accept what was wrong. He could have said the same about any human atrocity.
> (Note to stupid people: I am not making a comparison between black people and insects. I am making a broader point about untrustworthy intuitions.)
I love that I can still see the lingering policy debate trauma in your writing. Only a man who has debated race K teams searching for a link has this level of reflexive defensiveness
But this shouldn't convince you of that! Learning that there's more suffering than you thought there was shouldn't make you think the previous suffering mattered less.
See, that's where you go wrong. Given the syllogism:
1. Preventing suffering is the greatest issue in the world
2. Insects suffer more than anyone else
3. Therefore, insect welfare is the greatest issue in the world
People will either reject 1. or 2., because most people have an instinctive disgust response to insects, milder but similar in kind to that for feces and decaying bodies. Insects carry disease and eat crops.
I simply believe there are more important things than avoiding suffering. Existence isn't about avoiding suffering; we undoubtedly acquired pain receptors to learn what experiences are harmful or dangerous, and creatures without pain receptors couldn't avoid danger. That is to say, there is a reason to suffering, and suffering is not necessarily to be avoided.
Despite your many posts about it, you are not Christian, but if you are willing to entertain a Christian perspective, the Bible describes suffering as a virtue, and not something to be avoided.
"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."
Shouldn't the fact that I find myself NOT an insect thereby raise the odds that insects don't have consciousness, at least a significant amount?
No! This assumes that you were in some way randomly selected from among all organisms which is just completely the wrong way of thinking about everything on every single view of anthropics https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-024-04686-w.
actually, i think my thought above simply is, if I'm understanding the terminology right here, an expression of the SSA. You gave good reasons for thinking the SSA is wrong, but I don't think what I said is wrong "on every single view of anthropics", haha.
I think my initial comment implied random selection from among all CONSCIOUS organisms, analogous to the Presumptuous Archaeologist.
You give persuasive reasons against this view. so thanks.
Most versions of SSA don't include insects in our reference class. But I agree versions that do hold that you get a big update against insect consciousness. But that's a big reason to reject the view because you also get a big update against fish and reptile consciousness and bird consciousness.
This seems pretty obviously correct to me, relying on very few assumptions. It pretty much only requires people to believe that more conscious beings suffering is bad, and to think that these beings have at least a small chance to be conscious.
Some religions can get around these points by imbuing only humans with a soul, or by appealing to moral intuition (would god really put a bunch of stuff in the Bible about justice, community, adultery, and greed only to say once you reach heaven “sorry I forgot to mention that the biggest source of morality on earth is caring about insects and you’ve committed 10,000 genocides”) BUT pretty much all atheists should agree with this. I’m looking at the comments and everyone has a different objection that they seem confident in enough to risk committing many genocides, and none of them are the same or convincing.
The main complaint here is the standard demandingness that utilitarianism brings, but frankly if you’re an atheist the world might just suck. Sorry. There’s no reason to think the universe has perfectly been constructed such that the basic human intuitions about good and bad are completely correct — unless, of course, the universe was, by a higher power. Moral facts don’t need to be achievable or intuitive. When you’re building MORAL ACTIONS to take, then it’s important that it’s achievable because ideally you want to succeed at making the world a better place. But the universe has facts, and they may suck.
I don't think demandingness is an objection. It might mean there's a limit to how much we're required to do about insect suffering, but it won't have direct bearings on how bad suffering is.
Have you written anything on the odds that a tiny share of microfauna suffer? Surely microfauna suffering is the biggest issue in the world if we apply this same rigor and grant there are simply way more of them than insects.
I think the odds are very low. Now, there's a difference between how you treat really trivial risks with substantial risks. But I would grant that, though the odds are so low they suffer, bacteria suffering is kind of important in expectation just because there are so many of them.
My favorite article on your series of articles about insect suffering so far. The thought experiment at the end that removed scope neglect was particularly insightful.
This is convincing but I’m curious how it relates to things like being vegan since it suggests basically all large animal suffering is a rounding error. So if you’re deciding if factory farming is bad you should only consider what it does to insects not at all what it does to pigs and cows right? Does that mean your articles on why we should shut down factory farms are incorrect? Since a priori it feel 50-50 to me whether factory farms increase or reduce insect suffering and the odds that the bad effects on farm animals tip the scales are extremely low
I mean, I think there's some reason to both think:
1) Spreading values that care about animal welfare is good for insect suffering long-term.
2) Factory farms probably increase insect suffering by accelerating climate change which causes there to be more insects long term.
3) If you're very uncertain about whether torturing large numbers of animals will positively or negatively affect others, you should simply not torture large numbers of animals.
1. Is an argument about second order effects that might or might not be true. Like I think people have started insect farming partly to avoid factory farming. I went through a phase of being moderately interested in cricket protein for precisely this reason! 2. Maybe (I’ve heard factory farming is better for climate change than humane animal farming incidentally but doesn’t change comparison to veganism) but this doesn’t relate to the first order factory farmed animal suffering you have written about. 3. I’m not convinced this is true if we take your beliefs re insect welfare is correct! If you really truly believe there is a 50.00000000000% chance factory farming is good for insects then you should consider farm animals. But if you think there is a 50.1% chance that factory farming js good for insects (maybe it avoids cricket farming!) then clearly you gotta do it. Measuring farm animal welfare to identify good vs bad gives you very little probability weight on the correct course of action
1) I think it's very important that the values we promote are anti-insect farming. Though I'd imagine that people opposed to factory farming on animal cruelty grounds are also more anti-insect farming. Certainly that was my gateway into it. Also, I think factory farming increases insect farming because farmed insects are fed to fish.
2) Right, if there was strong reason to think it reduced insect suffering, then maybe factory farming would be okay. But in fact I think the reasons go the other way.
3) I'd say the odds are much higher than that! But spreading anti-factory farming values is probably pretty important for making sure the future is good for insects and other minds.
I guess it seems like your arguments are all in favor of it being instrumentally useful to publish farm animal-based anti-factory farm stuff, namely: it promotes good values to be anti-factory farm and factory farming is bad for insects on the object level. I tentatively agree with you on both counts, but just note that neither of these are an argument for the significance of farm animal suffering in and of itself. One way to put this is, if it turned out that actually pigs, cows, and chickens magically don't suffer (but everyone believed that they did and there was no way to convince anyone otherwise), that wouldn't change the correctness of the arguments you're making to me now, but it would change the strict accuracy of your previous anti-factory farming writing.
This feels very close to Efilism/Antinatalism. If you could snap your fingers and kill (or ideally prevent from having existed) all insects, would you do it?
Furthermore given that human and non-insect life depends on insects, does that mean non-insect animals ought to be killed (or made to have not ever existed) as well?
If you answered ‘yes’ to either of these questions then I think it’s dishonest to essentially bury the lede on these series of essays. You’re close to the thinking of a death cult and should be up-front about that.
Well we should all be antinatalists about some creatures. If we all lived in a torture chamber where every creature had terrible lives, antinatalism would be correct. The sad truth is, however, that insects are creatures with bad lives mostly unlike humans.
I wouldn't want to wipe out humans' or seriously risk jeopardizing humans because I think the future could be very good.
Until we somehow manage to replace all insects with something else that can allow non-insect life to exist, wiping out all insects would also wipe out all non-insects. So unless you have high confidence we’ll invent some insect-substitute soon, you must also be against all non-insect life, given that you feel it’s the highest moral priority.
Like I say, if you want to think this then fine, but leading readers down the garden path towards the conclusion that we should remove all life (or at least a big chunk of it) from the planet is dishonest. This is death-cult thinking and it’s worth having people know that.
You would have to wipe out a big chunk of all animal and plant life in order to make any kind of dent in the number of insects, so my point still stands.
Insects don't have intuitions! If there was a baby that lived a week and then starved to death, though the baby has no ethical intuitions, I'd still see that the state of affairs was bad. But in any case, this essay is about the significance of insects, not what we should do once we grant that they matter.
"On this account, their suffering wouldn’t be very important."
I'd agree with that. We already have them on this planet - they're called dogs. While I would definitely prevent dogs from suffering and certainly never harm a dog myself I would still donate my charity money to save one human life over any amount of dog life.
You also keep ignoring the religious perspective of humans having a unique soul, which maps out to the world today.
I did not ignore that in the post. I discussed reasons to think that humans' unique features don't make their welfare infinitely more important than others' welfare.
Yet if God gave a soul and declared it unique, it answers the soulless baby planet and other objections. (And God did say Black people have souls - we are all descended from one man, in the bible).
One has free will and choice (and is godlike) and hence infinite moral value.
And sccording to Jewish tradition, the souls is a literal piece of God Himself (that's the only way we could have free will). Hence, saving one human life is saving a part of God and thus of infinite value.
Seems weird that if we discovered an obscure and overlooked Torah verse saying some group had full on conscious awareness and intelligence but lacked a soul that their interests would matter 0% as much as other people.
I don't think you should hinge the wrongness of torturing people on anything as speculative as our having pieces of God.
I don't think I have seen you discuss any positive elements of insect's lives in your various posts on the topics. Do insects feel pleasure, with eating or mating? I assume that like their response to pain stimuli suggesting they feel pain, there is similar evidence with pleasure. Do insects derive any pleasure in their daily existence, or a sense of satisfaction in their completion of instinctual tasks. While I am confident these positive aspects are less intense than for people, the same goes for pain. Why are you so confident that their lives are negative or that we should consider their (most likely real, I concede) ongoing suffering to be largely counterbalanced?
> To southern slave-owners, the permissibility of slavery was intuitive.
This is nonsense. Huge numbers of slave owners believed that it was bad, or a necessary evil, and everyone knew that it was subject to open and vigorous debate.
> 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.
You suffer from similar cognitive biases. You have an unlimited willingness to feel empathy for anything you consider to be plausibly conscious because you are conscious. You have enormous social incentive to care about insects, since that allow you to show that you are a super principled EA and write blog posts. You are actually helped by alleviating insect suffering, since the personal satisfaction and social benefits from your donations to insect charities almost certainly outweigh the monetary value of those donations.
> 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.
There is no evidence that critical flicker frequency correlates to “subjective” experience as opposed to mechanical reactions depending on how fast an organism can process data. It proves nothing about the existence of speed of subjective experience. All of the evidence you cite in your blog posts are just reactions to things that can obviously occur without conscious experience. The only way to prove these things would be (maybe) to talk to the animals and see if they can speak to their experiences or find a decisive connection between human brain architectue and other animal as that clearly does not exist for insects.
> Ask yourself: how much would you pay to avoid having to experience a painful death from the perspective of an insect.
$0
> These creatures potentially suffer quite intensely and often writhe around in agony for hours before eventually succumbing to death.
No proof of conscious experience or that they perceive this writing as negatively painful.
> If insects screamed in volume proportional to their suffering, nothing could be heard over the cries of insects.
This is as factual as a sermon warning of the screams in hell of the damned.
> 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.
You must think that there is some point at which babies become conscious. Roughly when is it? Wherever it is, that shows that capacity matters. The fact that the baby cannot do suffering is largely irrelevant because it shows that at some point in development it has the neural architecture which enables those mega-level conceptions of badness.
Of a severely mentally disabled person was literally brain dead, which is what you’re describing, then they are not really alive and have no direct moral value.
> When I think about unpleasant experiences I’ve had, their badness seems to be about how they feel.
No. It’s feeling + a judgment that you’ve made that the feeling is bad. You are making that judgment, regardless of whatever you say you are.
> 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.
If you were unable to comprehend the pain as a bad thing, then it would not be bad for you. This would require a really really large loss of brain function (particularly for you). The words “think rationally” and “conceptualize my life as a whole” don’t do it justice…
> Their species never became rational. They remained permanently like human babies.
This planet would obviously be the product of divine intervention designed to test us.
> 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.
You would torture 600 babies to death to avert 0.000001% of insect suffering. Do you seriously expect empathy trolling about babies to work?
> Why the heck does species matter? Why not, say, kingdom or clade?
I don’t hold this view, but species matters because you can interbreed. If your view of ethics is super family focused, then specifies clearly matters for a non-arbitrary reason.
> as international bodies consistently conclude
Why is Jonathan Birch now an “international body”?
> 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.
I don’t know why any of these support an inference that they consciously suffer. The obvious alternate explanation is that they have evolved instincts and predictive capabilities to avoid death. That does not require consciousness, and it certainly does not require a subjective feeling of badness.
> The most detailed report on the subject guessed they suffer on average about 5-15% as intensely as we do.
Same report as above. Still takes into account a bunch of random criteria without explaining why they support consciousness. Why does “taste aversion” mean that something is conscious? It would be trivial to design a non-conscious taste averter.
> We have no very compelling evidence about it
We have the most compelling evidence imaginable: they have a minuscule, mechanic nervous system and have no experiences known that are unique to conscious beings.
> To correct against this, let’s imagine that insects looked like people but still had the mental capacities of insects.
If they looked like people but had the mental capacities of insects then I would be certain that they are not conscious because they would be using the same brain but still would have no mental faculties. They would prove some strong form of non-physicalism correct.
Ignoring the brains part, if they had the same mental capabilities as insects these humans would Immediately collapse on the floor and starve to death. Would they be distinguishable from a brain dead person? Maybe not…
> 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?
There would be neither streets nor pavement, since the humanoids will all immediately collapse and starve to death after being created. By hypothesizing streets and pavements, you are smuggling in a wildly inflated sense of intelligence.
//Huge numbers of slave owners believed that it was bad//
Yeah I was referring to the ones who didn't obviously.
//This is as factual as a sermon warning of the screams in hell of the damned.//
But we have strong evidence insects suffer unlike people in hell.
//You must think that there is some point at which babies become conscious. Roughly when is it?//
Babies are always conscious. I don't know when fetuses become conscious--different theories say different things.
//You suffer from similar cognitive biases. You have an unlimited willingness to feel empathy for anything you consider to be plausibly conscious because you are conscious. You have enormous social incentive to care about insects, since that allow you to show that you are a super principled EA and write blog posts.//
This seems pretty ridiculous. I could write about other stuff and people are mostly bored by my insect articles. The idea that this is even remotely in the same vicinity as the fact that from the time you're a child you're told to ignore insects and we feel not a shred of natural empathy for them is laughable. I don't take empathy to be a bias--I think it is in fact justified. But in any case, I don't appeal to direct intuitions about insects.
Not going to keep going through your comment as it's quite long and not much that's very interesting.
Thanks for the response. I don’t expect you to reply to the same criticisms 1000 times. Sorry if it felt that way.
Good points! May as well cross post the comment I just made on Michael Huemer's blog since it applies here too:
Comparing animals to human infants and mentally disabled does less than nothing to convince me that we should treat animals better. I've experienced being an infant and being severely mentally disabled (alcohol induced, and once, sleepwalking) during my lifetime. More accurately, I DID NOT experience those things - almost certainly because I was nothing more than a mindless automaton while in those mental states. If I had been tortured in those states, there wouldn't have been anyone home to suffer. To the extent that babies are an appropriate analog for farm animals, it makes me less concerned about farm animals.
My intuition is that there are some minimum system requirements to have any experiences, let alone the ability to suffer, and humans just barely clear that bar most of the time. It doesn't take much to send us under. Since reducing humans to mental states closer to that of animals rapidly leads to mental states where we have no experiences at all, I estimate that the probability that farm animals can suffer is only slightly higher than the probability that rocks can suffer, so I'm not inclined to worry about it much.
Do you think we should refrain from giving infants surgeries during pain on the grounds that their pain doesn't matter?
You seem to be among the only people who has this very strange intuition. Surely you shouldn't be super confident in it!
I am a minority perhaps, but hardly a vanishingly small or strange one. I'd put myself in the same boat as people who are pro-choice on the grounds that fetuses are not capable of suffering. If pressed, many with that view would probably admit that the bright line that society draws at birth is more instrumental for optics and convenience than a recognition of some sort of intrinsic moral transformation bestowed by leaving a uterus.
I assume you meant to ask about giving infants anesthesia during surgery. Yes, we probably should, not because of pain, but because it's easier and safer to operate on a patient that isn't moving or struggling.
Nearly everyone thinks infants suffer.
Nearly everyone thinks murder is bad, but pick it apart and you are going to find a lot of divergence. (Can murder be justified? Accidental? What about a war? Baby Hitler? etc)
I suspect you'll find similar divergence on the topic of infant suffering, especially if I told them that injecting just a bit of nuance into this topic can let them eat a cheeseburger without feeling guilty and without sanctioning a parade of human rights violations.
Legit crazy dude
I totally agree
You don't have an experience when you're sleepwalking because... you're asleep. Most people do have experiences when extremely drunk, it sounds like you blacked out and therefore don't remember it, but you can't drink so much that you aren't having a conscious experience unless you're passed out. In either case, I don't see why you're confident that these two states are similar to those of animals, since animals are not always asleep or drunk.
Pain is bad because you are experiencing it. As you progressively impair a human's cognitive functioning, you eventually reach the point of blackout - the point where that human is no longer having experiences. It's notable that humans who are blacked out from alcohol at a party are often still dancing and conversing - so their cognitive functioning is still far beyond any farm animal and yet their capacity to have experiences is no better than a rock. If humans with impaired, but still clearly advanced cognitive capacities are incapable of having experiences, then how can we possibly expect farm animals to have experiences when they are working with even less cognitive capacity?
If you believe that the ability to have experiences and cognitive capacity are not linked, then you're free to wonder if maybe rocks or plants have experiences, but I'm comfortable being confident that they do not.
They're still having an experience. They just don't remember it.
You seem to be confusing the use of the word experience with the colloquial use of the word, which is "a thing that happened in the past which you remember."
I'd argue that the colloquial use is what we should care about when we talk about the badness of suffering. Why should we care about the goodness or badness of "experiences" we don't remember or aren't going to remember? As far as I'm concerned, such experiences happen to a mindless automaton or zombie with no moral significance.
Because the suffering still happened. On that view it's fine to torture someone to death as soon as they die because once they're dead there's no one who remembers their suffering
Wow some of the best weird highly articulate nonsense I have come across lately. How does someone take the time to write a long format article without ever thinking ‘Maybe what I feel is categorically different from an insect?’. I guess having identified ‘the biggest issue in the world’ helps.
I'll take this as a compliment.
I agree we feel in various ways different from how insects feel. But so long as insects can feel pain, I think we should try to prevent their pain! Just like if we came across intelligent aliens, it would be plausible that "what I feel is categorically different from" what they feel, but nonetheless, it would be bad if quintillions of them were suffering constantly!
Pain and suffering are not the same thing. There are no physiological or evolutionary (or theological-if that's your sort of thing) reasons to believe that insects suffer. And even if so as you note in the article there are about 100 million insects for every human so our part can only be negligible - the rest is just biology/life.
Sure by both pain and suffering I mean a kind of unpleasant conscious state with suffering being broader than pain.
There is reason to think insects suffer--I've laid it out in great detail here https://benthams.substack.com/p/betting-on-ubiquitous-pain. At the very least, given that they act in many ways like creatures who do suffer, we definitely shouldn't be more than, say, 99% sure they don't suffer. But even at 99% odds they don't suffer, insect suffering wins out in expectation.
Note that the position insects don't suffer is rejected by a sizeable portion of those who have studied the subject. Seems premature, in light of peer disagreement, to be super confident that they're wrong and to say there's no evidence for their position.
Oh so the screaming critter rabbit hole goes much deeper. But I get the genius level Bayesian reasoning: come up with an outlandish claim with fantastically dire consequences and since we can't ever really be absolutely sure of the falsity of anything we can conjure up some nonzero probability which makes it the 'biggest issue in the world'-in expectation.
Well as I say, in this case I don't think the probability are zero percent or anywhere near zero percent.
Well, on what grounds? The mere fact that insects act somewhat similar to humans when partially squashed by a heavy object? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence especially when they are in contradiction with physical (the lack of anatomical features sensibly required for anything remotely similar to human suffering) and biological evidence (suffering in insects would be at best be useless/wasteful and hence be selected against).
> There are no physiological or evolutionary (or theological-if that's your sort of thing) reasons to believe that insects suffer.
This seems extremely overconfident and dismissive. Suffering would be evolutionarily beneficial as it would improve the odds of that a species propagates more successfully. I endorse the authors comments below.
Also, note that when you are talking about insects, you are talking about 5+ million species with highly varying degrees of capabilities. So the claim that there is no physiological or evolutionary reason to believe that any of these 5.5 million complex individuals could suffer is not as obvious as you are assuming.
If you want to more faithfully approach the topic, I recommend the author's comments below and this review article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0065280622000170
You are confounding pain and suffering.
No, my first two paragraphs are only about suffering, and the linked review primarily talks about pain but also suffering. Both are relevant for moral decision-making, so I think it's valuable to talk about both.
Sure if your most pressing moral question is whether you should squash that pesky fly or not.
This, my friends, is what descent into self-parody looks like.
This, my friends, is what not being able to reply to arguments looks like.
There’s not much point in my formulating a response to your argument, since i don’t accept the moral presuppositions underlying it (namely, that life is all about trying reduce suffering of sentient beings, which are all equal, and this because suffering is “bad” with no eye towards any higher transcendental value or goal).
Any argument can be undermined by simply questioning the assumptions behind it, so there’s really no point when it comes to something like this that ultimately boils down to a different morality.
So instead, i made a comment the point of which was just to point out to others that this is what results when your moral worldview (all about minimizing suffering to the greatest extent, and therefore in the most efficient manner possible) is taken to its logical conclusions. From your perspective, maybe that’s a good thing.
Okay but that wasn't a presupposition underlying the argument. If you're going to be snarky, at least have the good grace to not be a total moron who isn't even aware that people can give arguments for moral views.
Your work would need to be worthy of serious consideration to merit a serious reply. It is not.
It’s certainly the buggiest issue.
Stopped reading immediately after you compared black people to bugs. Wow. Do better.
lol
I accept the argument here but still find it difficult to accept the premise that insects, with their tiny nervous systems, feel pain. Scrolling through the links, mostly from rethinkpriorities.org, I found the methodology for making estimates of sentience hard to pin down and unconvincing. I would appreciate a companion piece telling us a few simple, solid reasons why we should believe in insect pain. “Writhing in agony” is not something easy to define objectively in a way that distinguishes it from misfiring signals in response to garbled stimulus due to tissue damage.
(The only somewhat convincing argument I can make is that evolving pain seems certain once avoidance of pain is possible, and you have a brain that can learn from experience. This is useful if your environment and ways to respond get complex enough that capacity to learn to avoid behaviors that lead to tissue damage is an efficient survival mechanism. Insect exoskeletons incidentally are much better at avoiding damage than our situation of having soft tissue on the outside.)
He didn’t do so. He was using analogy of biased thinking from one area we all agree bias led people to accept what was wrong. He could have said the same about any human atrocity.
Joke
> (Note to stupid people: I am not making a comparison between black people and insects. I am making a broader point about untrustworthy intuitions.)
I love that I can still see the lingering policy debate trauma in your writing. Only a man who has debated race K teams searching for a link has this level of reflexive defensiveness
Lmao
I am now convinced that preventing suffering (human or animal) is not the greatest issue in the world.
But this shouldn't convince you of that! Learning that there's more suffering than you thought there was shouldn't make you think the previous suffering mattered less.
See, that's where you go wrong. Given the syllogism:
1. Preventing suffering is the greatest issue in the world
2. Insects suffer more than anyone else
3. Therefore, insect welfare is the greatest issue in the world
People will either reject 1. or 2., because most people have an instinctive disgust response to insects, milder but similar in kind to that for feces and decaying bodies. Insects carry disease and eat crops.
That's why I didn't give that syllogism!
Lol this is unironically this comic:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-07-15
I simply believe there are more important things than avoiding suffering. Existence isn't about avoiding suffering; we undoubtedly acquired pain receptors to learn what experiences are harmful or dangerous, and creatures without pain receptors couldn't avoid danger. That is to say, there is a reason to suffering, and suffering is not necessarily to be avoided.
Despite your many posts about it, you are not Christian, but if you are willing to entertain a Christian perspective, the Bible describes suffering as a virtue, and not something to be avoided.
"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."
Shouldn't the fact that I find myself NOT an insect thereby raise the odds that insects don't have consciousness, at least a significant amount?
No! This assumes that you were in some way randomly selected from among all organisms which is just completely the wrong way of thinking about everything on every single view of anthropics https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-024-04686-w.
thanks. You appear to have written this article....is there, by chance, a non-paywalled way to look at it? :)
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11229-024-04686-w.pdf
This just links back to the paywall
Oh sorry https://philpapers.org/archive/ADEATT.pdf
actually, i think my thought above simply is, if I'm understanding the terminology right here, an expression of the SSA. You gave good reasons for thinking the SSA is wrong, but I don't think what I said is wrong "on every single view of anthropics", haha.
I think my initial comment implied random selection from among all CONSCIOUS organisms, analogous to the Presumptuous Archaeologist.
You give persuasive reasons against this view. so thanks.
Here's the link https://philpapers.org/archive/ADEATT.pdf.
Most versions of SSA don't include insects in our reference class. But I agree versions that do hold that you get a big update against insect consciousness. But that's a big reason to reject the view because you also get a big update against fish and reptile consciousness and bird consciousness.
Yup, makes sense. Thanks for the reply.
Yes 🙌
This seems pretty obviously correct to me, relying on very few assumptions. It pretty much only requires people to believe that more conscious beings suffering is bad, and to think that these beings have at least a small chance to be conscious.
Some religions can get around these points by imbuing only humans with a soul, or by appealing to moral intuition (would god really put a bunch of stuff in the Bible about justice, community, adultery, and greed only to say once you reach heaven “sorry I forgot to mention that the biggest source of morality on earth is caring about insects and you’ve committed 10,000 genocides”) BUT pretty much all atheists should agree with this. I’m looking at the comments and everyone has a different objection that they seem confident in enough to risk committing many genocides, and none of them are the same or convincing.
The main complaint here is the standard demandingness that utilitarianism brings, but frankly if you’re an atheist the world might just suck. Sorry. There’s no reason to think the universe has perfectly been constructed such that the basic human intuitions about good and bad are completely correct — unless, of course, the universe was, by a higher power. Moral facts don’t need to be achievable or intuitive. When you’re building MORAL ACTIONS to take, then it’s important that it’s achievable because ideally you want to succeed at making the world a better place. But the universe has facts, and they may suck.
I don't think demandingness is an objection. It might mean there's a limit to how much we're required to do about insect suffering, but it won't have direct bearings on how bad suffering is.
Have you written anything on the odds that a tiny share of microfauna suffer? Surely microfauna suffering is the biggest issue in the world if we apply this same rigor and grant there are simply way more of them than insects.
I think the odds are very low. Now, there's a difference between how you treat really trivial risks with substantial risks. But I would grant that, though the odds are so low they suffer, bacteria suffering is kind of important in expectation just because there are so many of them.
So, you literally _are_ going to be Pascal-Wagered here, huh?
My favorite article on your series of articles about insect suffering so far. The thought experiment at the end that removed scope neglect was particularly insightful.
Thanks!
This is convincing but I’m curious how it relates to things like being vegan since it suggests basically all large animal suffering is a rounding error. So if you’re deciding if factory farming is bad you should only consider what it does to insects not at all what it does to pigs and cows right? Does that mean your articles on why we should shut down factory farms are incorrect? Since a priori it feel 50-50 to me whether factory farms increase or reduce insect suffering and the odds that the bad effects on farm animals tip the scales are extremely low
I mean, I think there's some reason to both think:
1) Spreading values that care about animal welfare is good for insect suffering long-term.
2) Factory farms probably increase insect suffering by accelerating climate change which causes there to be more insects long term.
3) If you're very uncertain about whether torturing large numbers of animals will positively or negatively affect others, you should simply not torture large numbers of animals.
1. Is an argument about second order effects that might or might not be true. Like I think people have started insect farming partly to avoid factory farming. I went through a phase of being moderately interested in cricket protein for precisely this reason! 2. Maybe (I’ve heard factory farming is better for climate change than humane animal farming incidentally but doesn’t change comparison to veganism) but this doesn’t relate to the first order factory farmed animal suffering you have written about. 3. I’m not convinced this is true if we take your beliefs re insect welfare is correct! If you really truly believe there is a 50.00000000000% chance factory farming is good for insects then you should consider farm animals. But if you think there is a 50.1% chance that factory farming js good for insects (maybe it avoids cricket farming!) then clearly you gotta do it. Measuring farm animal welfare to identify good vs bad gives you very little probability weight on the correct course of action
1) I think it's very important that the values we promote are anti-insect farming. Though I'd imagine that people opposed to factory farming on animal cruelty grounds are also more anti-insect farming. Certainly that was my gateway into it. Also, I think factory farming increases insect farming because farmed insects are fed to fish.
2) Right, if there was strong reason to think it reduced insect suffering, then maybe factory farming would be okay. But in fact I think the reasons go the other way.
3) I'd say the odds are much higher than that! But spreading anti-factory farming values is probably pretty important for making sure the future is good for insects and other minds.
I guess it seems like your arguments are all in favor of it being instrumentally useful to publish farm animal-based anti-factory farm stuff, namely: it promotes good values to be anti-factory farm and factory farming is bad for insects on the object level. I tentatively agree with you on both counts, but just note that neither of these are an argument for the significance of farm animal suffering in and of itself. One way to put this is, if it turned out that actually pigs, cows, and chickens magically don't suffer (but everyone believed that they did and there was no way to convince anyone otherwise), that wouldn't change the correctness of the arguments you're making to me now, but it would change the strict accuracy of your previous anti-factory farming writing.
I'd definitely agree there's some non-trivial possibility factory farming benefits insects.
Factory farms are a legitimate ethical and ecological concern for sure !
You have my grudging respect for biting down on this bullet with retard strength
This feels very close to Efilism/Antinatalism. If you could snap your fingers and kill (or ideally prevent from having existed) all insects, would you do it?
Furthermore given that human and non-insect life depends on insects, does that mean non-insect animals ought to be killed (or made to have not ever existed) as well?
If you answered ‘yes’ to either of these questions then I think it’s dishonest to essentially bury the lede on these series of essays. You’re close to the thinking of a death cult and should be up-front about that.
Well we should all be antinatalists about some creatures. If we all lived in a torture chamber where every creature had terrible lives, antinatalism would be correct. The sad truth is, however, that insects are creatures with bad lives mostly unlike humans.
I wouldn't want to wipe out humans' or seriously risk jeopardizing humans because I think the future could be very good.
Until we somehow manage to replace all insects with something else that can allow non-insect life to exist, wiping out all insects would also wipe out all non-insects. So unless you have high confidence we’ll invent some insect-substitute soon, you must also be against all non-insect life, given that you feel it’s the highest moral priority.
Like I say, if you want to think this then fine, but leading readers down the garden path towards the conclusion that we should remove all life (or at least a big chunk of it) from the planet is dishonest. This is death-cult thinking and it’s worth having people know that.
Right that's why I wouldn't want to wipe out all insects!
You would have to wipe out a big chunk of all animal and plant life in order to make any kind of dent in the number of insects, so my point still stands.
We're already doing that and I'm in favor of doing more. Pro-natalism for people, anti-natalism for bugs!
*Antinatalism for insects and non-human organisms.
Isn't it only a bad life by your own human intuitions? On what grounds do you say it's a bad life from insect intuitions?
Insects don't have intuitions! If there was a baby that lived a week and then starved to death, though the baby has no ethical intuitions, I'd still see that the state of affairs was bad. But in any case, this essay is about the significance of insects, not what we should do once we grant that they matter.
On what basis do you assert that babies, let alone insects, don't have ethical intuitions?
"On this account, their suffering wouldn’t be very important."
I'd agree with that. We already have them on this planet - they're called dogs. While I would definitely prevent dogs from suffering and certainly never harm a dog myself I would still donate my charity money to save one human life over any amount of dog life.
You also keep ignoring the religious perspective of humans having a unique soul, which maps out to the world today.
I did not ignore that in the post. I discussed reasons to think that humans' unique features don't make their welfare infinitely more important than others' welfare.
Yet if God gave a soul and declared it unique, it answers the soulless baby planet and other objections. (And God did say Black people have souls - we are all descended from one man, in the bible).
What do souls do? How is a creature with a soul different from one without?
One has free will and choice (and is godlike) and hence infinite moral value.
And sccording to Jewish tradition, the souls is a literal piece of God Himself (that's the only way we could have free will). Hence, saving one human life is saving a part of God and thus of infinite value.
Do babies have free will?
Seems weird that if we discovered an obscure and overlooked Torah verse saying some group had full on conscious awareness and intelligence but lacked a soul that their interests would matter 0% as much as other people.
I don't think you should hinge the wrongness of torturing people on anything as speculative as our having pieces of God.
I don't think I have seen you discuss any positive elements of insect's lives in your various posts on the topics. Do insects feel pleasure, with eating or mating? I assume that like their response to pain stimuli suggesting they feel pain, there is similar evidence with pleasure. Do insects derive any pleasure in their daily existence, or a sense of satisfaction in their completion of instinctual tasks. While I am confident these positive aspects are less intense than for people, the same goes for pain. Why are you so confident that their lives are negative or that we should consider their (most likely real, I concede) ongoing suffering to be largely counterbalanced?
Yes though for reasons I describe, I think their lives are mostly bad.