Comments
I think this is a brilliant contrast to the usual insect welfare discussion. I hope it sparks descriptions of some different possibilities.
The usual argument as I understand it, is that lives cut short is a Very Bad Thing. So when animals "die young" they have unfulfilled potential and traumatic lives. I don't think that's the correct way to look at it. Unfortunately, I don't know what the correct way to look at it is. A hypothetical way to frame it, is that most insects have average lifespans, but they have the potential to achieve an almost god-like existence (for an insect). Another hypothetical framing is that daily life eating and sleeping and growing is pretty fulfilling, and the short amount of time spent suffering from dying doesn't counteract that. Another hypothetical framing is that r-strategists find immense meaning in competition as it is such a huge part of their life history, and we wouldn't be able to understand it. I don't think these are obviously wrong nor do I think the going EA framing is obviously correct.
I fully believe that things we think is terrible are likely to be experienced very differently for other organisms. I have a couple reasons for this. One is that we live very comfortable safe lives and this has skewed our perception of how bad bad things are. (and made good things look pretty bland too!) This is especially strong when it comes to pain. I think pain isn't as bad as we think and we have mistakenly amped this up beyond all reason. People today are afraid of tiny amounts of pain. I don't think animals have the same outlook. Mindset is a huge determinant of pain.
Another is that we anticipate the future in ways that exacerbate painful experiences, often way way beyond the experience itself. It sounds weird to say, but bodily harm and poverty and "adverse weather" are not that bad when your mind isn't trying to prevent poor futures.
I appreciate the concept of "herbivores live in fear their entire life." This is exactly the kind of wildly different experience that we should imagine! Drawing from humans, both good things and bad things seem to get flattened over time. So an herbivore "living in fear every second" is probably not actually in overdrive their entire life. They probably are either alert or relaxed for a good proportion of their life. I am being hypocritical applying human-extrapolated framing here.
Among humans the things we find meaning in, the things we find intolerable, and our very basic perceptions are very different among us. Not only are wild animals in a very different situation, living a very different lifestyle than us, but they have very different perceptions, bodies, and desires. Which to me indicates they would be even more wildly different in their experiences of happiness and meaning than we are between each other. Most of that I think comes out positive for the animals.
I am not nearly as eloquent as the OP, but I would be happy to give more explanation of my opinions if anyone is interested to explore this further.
Sidenote: I think the shape of the dialogue is an artifact how wild animal welfare proponents with extreme uncertainty sometimes say "I can't be certain," which doesn't really register. And those who do feel confident have something (urgent) to express, which is that they think insects have net negative lives. There seems to be vague agreement that predators probably have net positive lives, but herbivores, insects, and r-selected species have net negative lives. This seems incorrect to me, or at least counterintuitive.
Why is the idea that insects have net negative lives dangerous, but the idea that they have net positive lives isn't dangerous? If you promote the idea that they have net positive lives when in fact they're net negative, you could end up doing tremendous harm.
I think it's fine to make arguments that insects' lives are positive on balance, but I reject the framing of "dangerousness". You are too quick to jump from "insects' lives are net positive" to "...and it should be taboo to argue otherwise".
I agree that both positions carry real risks. Classical utilitarian concepts like "net positive" or "net negative" lives don't seem very helpful here. We simply don't have the data to make even an educated guess, let alone a proper calculation.
There are several frameworks that might serve us better: preference utilitarianism, for one: insects clearly exhibit a preference to live. Or the "do no harm" principle. Or basic moral intuition: killing healthy individuals is not normally considered a way of helping them. And then there's the precautionary principle: driving species to extinction is irreversible, and it is virtually impossible to reduce insect populations at scale without doing exactly that.
I don't think arguing for net negative lives should be taboo quite the contrary. As I argued in my original post, speculative ideas have value, as long as they are presented as such. My concern is that some proponents of this view have moved beyond speculation and are now acting on it as if it was an established theory.
One example: on March 25, Bob Fischer and Rethink Priorities published a database of near-term interventions for wild animal welfare. Entry number three: "Biofuel subsidies as a mechanism for reducing invertebrate populations" uses the word reducing as a euphemism for killing insects through pesticides and habitat destruction. To be fair, the authors concluded that the EA community is not well-placed to intervene here. But the fact that they considered ways to accelerate such subsidies rather than oppose them suggests they view killing these animals as a good thing.
Should this view be silenced? No. They have freedom of speech, just as I do. But it's our job to push back. Good intentions don't earn anyone a free pass. A bug doesn't care whether it's killed for profit or for its own supposed benefit. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Hi Hans.
I think @Bob Fischer generally opposes decreasing the population of wild arthropods given the large uncertainty about whether they have positive or negative lives. Bob said the following on 25 March 2026.
Then I argued that it is unclear whether biofuel subsidies increase or decrease the number of macroarthropods, which were the animals covered in the shallow analysis. So I would not support biofuel subsidies even if I was certain that macroarthropods have negative lives, and neglected effects on other animals (in particular, microarthropods and nematodes). In reality, I believe biofuel subsidies are even less promising. I have practically no idea about whether macroarthropods have positive or negative lives, and I can see effects on macroarthropods being much larger or smaller than effects on microarthropods or nematodes. I think the priority should be decreasing the uncertainty about effects on soil invertebrates (for example, determining which have positive or negative lives for each biome), and welfare comparisons across species.
I'm glad Bob holds this view and I didn't want to single him out negatively. In fact I think his work is tremendously important. I especially appreciated the animal welfare table he co-authored, and in the same database there are interventions actually aimed at saving animals, like number 5: "Climate-friendly technologies and invertebrate mortality."
I still find it alarming that the research question in this particular case was something along the lines of "Can we assist in bringing invertebrate numbers down by accelerating subsidies?" instead of "Can we save lives by opposing these subsidies?"
I totally agree that research should be a main focus. It stops being effective altruism when one part of the community puts their effort into saving invertebrates while another part wants to kill those same animals.
What would actually convince you that a certain species lives a "net negative life"? Or that it lives a particular good life?
I agree (with both sentences). Here is the table.
I am open to exploring ways of increasing and decreasing the population of wild invertebrates. I guess the probability of these having positive/negative lives is roughly 50 %.
Great.
I see effective altruism as a question. Different people will necessarily arrive at different answers, and these may often diverge significantly. I would rather welcome everyone into the community based on their methods, not specific answers. I believe this tends to lead to better final answers due to stimulating discussions among people with diverse views.
What do you think about interventions which save human lives very cost-effectively, but may decrease the number of wild invertebrates a lot? I estimate GiveWell's top charities decrease 539 M soil-invertebrate-years per $, although I am very uncertain about whether they increase or decrease the population of soil invertebrates.
To be honest, I’m surprised you’re giving them a 50% chance of a net-positive life while equating one second of 'excruciating pain' to 24 hours of 'healthy life.' While that distinction might have seemed minor in our previous discussion, it’s of paramount importance here.
Pain perception is highly subjective and, more importantly, something one can adapt to. Consider someone with no experience in sports: getting tapped by a stray volleyball on a schoolyard might feel like a major ordeal. Meanwhile, a goalkeeper taking a 100km/h shot to the face will insist it was a great experience because they made the save. Even they might look soft compared to a Thai boxer, who will literally laugh in their opponent's face after taking a heavy hit.
Now guess who does crazy Thai boxer look up to? Wild animals. They are tough as nail as Marc Bekoff puts it in his masterpiece Wild Justice. If we must anthropomorphize, we should at least use empirical data from people who are actually accustomed to pain. Judging the lives of wild animals by the standards of academics used to a sedentary lifestyle is arguably the biggest mistake we could make.
Furthermore, we should always err on the side of caution. If we are designing a vaccination program, assuming the disease is devastating to them because it would be devastiting to us is a reasonable baseline. But if we are contemplating something as extreme as zoocide, we had better be absolutely certain that their lives aren't worth living by their standards, not ours.
A typically painful experience may become less painful via training. In addition, even if it remains significantly painful, people could still consider it worth it for other reasons (like helping their team win).
I meant that I guess the probability of wild invertebrates having positive/negative lives is roughly 50 % from their own perspective, which I agree is what matters. Imagine wild invertebrates have a welfare (from their own perspective) per animal-year of -1 (on some scale) with probability 99 %, and 1 with probability 1 %. Their expected welfare per animal-year would be -0.98 (= 0.99*(-1) + 0.01*1). Would you still oppose decreasing their population because it is not certain that their lives are negative? If not because it would be almost certain that they have negative lives, how low would the probability of them having negative lives have to be for you to oppose decreasing their population? Why any particular value? I would want to increase/decrease their population as long as they had a positive/negative expected welfare per animal-year if there were no more options besides changing their population. In practice, I think decreasing the very large uncertainty about whether they have positive or negative lives is a better option than changing their population.
I am an admittedly poor goalkeeper myself and I can assure you that it already feels good the very moment I make the save. I wouldn't even describe it as painful. I might see some stars, the point where the ball hit may feel numb, but it doesn't hurt. More broadly I would say a typical painful experience gets less painful or not painful at all through repeated exposure, or when you are in a situation where you don't have time to contemplate your pain. If the same is true for invertebrates, we might expect those animals living an exceptionally harsh life to be less sensitive to pain.
I know what you meant, but since you can't ask them you plugged your estimates into your formula. I would easily be ok with 10 minutes of excruciating pain for 24 hours of fully healthy life, and I would expect at least Hymenoptera to be less pain sensitive than me. If we take the conservative 10 minutes per 24 hours that I would accept, that would make me 600 times less pain sensitive than you are. So if I take the very same line of thinking that led you to believe there is a 50% chance of them having a net positive life, I would probably conclude there is a 99% chance of them having net positive lives.
Those are nice questions for a class in theoretical philosophy, but it will be hard to get those numbers unless we solve the hard problem of consciousness and build something like an experience machine. We don't even know how many invertebrate species there are, let alone what their daily lives look like, or when their consciousness begins, or whether hedonism is all that matters to them. And even if we could agree on a formula for a utilitarian calculation, you could conclude that their lives are certainly net negative while I am just as sure they are net positive, simply because of our different assumptions about pain sensitivity. So unless we have solved all those puzzles, the whole concept of net negative/positive lives is a matter of belief. Since I don't think we should make life or death decisions based on belief, I am again advocating for other ethical frameworks like preference utilitarianism: They clearly show a preference to live so giving them a home by habitat preservation or rewilding is good while killing them is bad.
Would you prefer 10 min of "severe burning in large areas of the body, dismemberment, or extreme torture" (excruciating pain) over losing 24 h of fully healthy life (ignoring the indirect effects if the excruciating pain; it would probably lead to death, and therefore result in a loss of life which is worse than losing 24 h of fully healthy life)?
If I were 600 times as sensitive to pain as you, I guess I would also be 600 times as sensitive to pleasure. So my guess for the probability that wild invertebrates have positive/negative would arguably not change.
Could euthanising pets be good for them, even if it goes against their preferences?
They didn't mention torture in the welfare paper, probably because it is a combination of humiliation/pain/helplessness. For the way they described it, yes I would.
I don’t see how that might be. We were already talking about a ratio.
I don't think that euthanasia would always go against her preferences. (I'm imagining my mum's dog here.) Humans definitely use euthanasia when it is available to them, and I certainly would. Also, in the wild she would hardly find herself in a situation where she is slowly decaying.
For me the ability to pursue goals as described by Peter Godfrey-Smith is very important. The reason why I would go through 10 minutes of excruciating pain for 24 hours of fully healthy life is because of all the things I could do in that time. Wild animals have the possibility to pursue their goals, farmed animals don’t. And pets as well as humans may lose that ability in the last period of their lives. I guess that’s when our time has come to pass the torch on to the next generation.
Which paper are you referring to? Are you referring to WFI's page about pain intensities? Here is how they describe excruciating pain.
Torture is not mentioned above, but my quote above ("severe burning in large areas of the body, dismemberment, or extreme torture") is from Cynthia Schuck-Paim, WFI's research director. In any case, if many prefer ending their lives over excruciating pain, it makes sense to assume they would prefer avoiding 10 min of excruciating pain over losing 24 h of fully healthy life?
Imagine a pet is born with some disease that allows them to live a long live, but one which has way more suffering than happiness. Do you think such pet should be euthanised? If yes, do you think its birth should ideally have been avoided in the 1st place? If yes, would you apply the same reasoning to wild animals which experience way more suffering than happiness (I guess some do)?
Yes, exactly the one you linked to. Since you linked it, I assumed it was clear from the context.
I’m certain there are people who would trade 24 hours of a healthy life just to avoid a shot of distilled water. On the other hand, some people are addicted to pain, such as those who engage in self-harm like cutting. They might willingly accept 10 minutes of excruciating pain for free. This is why empirical data from those accustomed to suffering would be so valuable. For me, the 10-minute mark is simply the trade-off I would personally accept.
If prevention is possible, that would be the ideal scenario in my view. The natural equivalent would be contraception for wild animal. A practice that holds significant promise. While many people try to help birds by using bird-safe glass, providing nesting boxes, or feeding them during winter, the downside is that an artificially inflated population can negatively impact the birds themselves and the insects they hunt. Contraception could offer a way to provide help while keeping populations balanced.
Yes, if the condition is severe. That represents a very specific intervention. In the wild, such an animal wouldn't survive anyway. Furthermore, since most chronic diseases in dogs result from human selection, I’m unsure how this specific logic applies to interventions in the wild.
Another argument for euthanasia is that the animal’s presence will likely be substituted. Either by another pet or by various wild animals. By freeing up ecological resources and space, other individuals can take its place who are likely to experience a much better quality of life. This reasoning translates well to wild animal welfare. If we believe certain species, like bees, live reasonably good lives while others, like Varroa destructor, primarily cause suffering, it makes sense to favor the former over the latter. That’s not the same as "bringing numbers down."
Do you have any specific species in mind? You mentioned nematodes which is a whole phyllum. Why do you expect them to have "net negative lives."
I asked to confirm because the page is not technically a paper.
I very much agree.
I think controlling the fertility of rodents can easily increase or decrease welfare. I believe it may impact soil animals way more than rodents, and I have very little idea about whether it increases or decreases the welfare of soil animals.
I agree.
No. I think I would guess random animals of many species to have negative lives with a probability of around 50 %, including species of nematodes. In addition, I do not expect the uncertainty about whether animals have positive or negative lives to be super correlated across species. So random animals of some species having positive lives would still leave me believing that random animals of some other species could easily have negative lives.
I was contemplating this phrase a lot so I want to give a more nuanced answer to it.
At least in humans it's well known that there are individuals that are quite happy in almost any circumstance while others take their lives despite living a life others would dream of. So when assessing if an animal lives a good life we should not only consider the circumstances but how they experience it. From an evolutionary standpoint for the highly competitive environments insects typically live in it seems more adaptive to be optimistic by default and take risks. The male praying mantis, for example, actively approaches the female despite the risk of being eaten during mating. That kind of behaviour is hard to explain without assuming some form of optimistic bias - the kind of disposition that makes taking extreme risks feel worthwhile. So I wouldn't be surprised to learn that most insects are happier than most humans.
What ultimately matters for me is just the subjetive experience of the animals. I only care about the circumstances because they inform the subjective experiences.
Me neither. However, there are good arguments for wild invertebrates having not only positive, but also negative lives.
I agree that it shouldn't be taboo to argue this, but I also think the idea that insects have negative lives is possibly more dangerous because of the potential second order effects if it is acted on. Logical actions if insects have net negative lives could be
- Wiping out of natural environments
- Reducing biodiversity
If we were fortunate enough that most insects had net positive lives while being sentient, the steps to improve the overall situation for insects might not be as drastic?
This is hard to be confident on either way though
I have to say I’m not entirely comfortable with the concept of net positive/negative lives, as neither can really be proven or disproven. I find the term "life worth living" as described by Peter Godfrey-Smith in his wonderful book "Living on Earth" more useful and intuitive.
From an evolutionary perspective, experiencing life as not worth living seems so maladaptive that I would almost rule it out.
If we assume that invertebrates experience their lives as worth living, there are many logical consequences. E.g. reducing light pollution, advocating for pesticide-free agriculture, promoting veganism, protecting habitat, engaging in rewilding and opposing the commercial transport of bees for pollination.