Crosspost from my blog that you should totally check out!
If I were an animal, I would be a bug. Statistically.
—David Sposito.
C.S. Lewis once said, “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.” In other words, the thing one cannot think is that Christianity is only a bit important—that following the way of Christ should be part of one’s life, but not a big part. You should not be the sort of person who goes to church once a month, occasionally feels contrite about their sins, but basically ignores Christianity most of the time.
This is how I feel about insect suffering.
I wrote an article recently about insects. In short, I argued that there are so many insects that their suffering is the biggest deal in the world. Most insects live only days or weeks and die painfully—as a result, reducing insect populations should be a top global priority. Inflicting brief, miserable, and hellish lives on countless quadrillions of beings is not compassionate. If the insects could scream in intensity proportional to their suffering, all other sounds in the world would be blotted out by the constant screaming of the insects.
Many people disagreed with my conclusion. They argued that insects mostly live fairly good lives, and as a result, we should try to increase insect populations rather than decrease them. They seemed to think that this was the moderate position—that actively trying to reduce insect populations is crazy and extreme.
This is wrong. You cannot be moderate about insects.
The human population has made literally quadrillions fewer insects exist. Every dollar going to charities that save human lives prevents around 14,000 years of insect life. Ordinary actions like driving to the store kill hundreds or thousands of insects, and energy use affects far more. Human civilization functions by paving over insects—the overwhelming majority of potentially conscious beings that are affected by our actions are bugs.
You can, of course, hold that insects don’t matter at all or that they matter infinitely less than other things so that we can, for all practical purposes, ignore their welfare. Certainly this would be very convenient. But the world does not owe us convenience and rarely provides us with it. If insects can suffer—and probably experience in a week more suffering than humans have for our entire history—this is certainly worth caring about. Plausibly insects can suffer rather intensely. When hundreds of billions of beings die a second, most experiencing quite intense pain before their deaths, that is quite morally serious, unless there’s some overwhelmingly powerful argument against taking their interests seriously. However, as I’ve explained at length, I do not think there is such an argument. Indeed, every justification for ignoring their interests has horrendously counterintuitive implications in rather mundane cases.
Pain is bad because it hurts. Headaches are not bad because their victims are intelligent, but because of how they feel. Utterly mindboggling quantities of suffering being experienced every second—quantities that dwarf that generated by the cruelest human atrocities—are thus quite significant problems. And the quantities of suffering are, indeed, beyond comprehension; if the most detailed report ever composed on the subject is to be believed, insects on average suffer a few percent as intensely as we do, potentially more. If we assume that being beaten with a cane is about 1% as painful as being killed, then insects experience about as much pain just in the moments before death as would be experienced globally if 300 billion people were being savagely beaten with canes every second.
But suppose one has the opposite judgment from my own and thinks that insects mostly have good lives. Thus killing and preventing the existence of insects is very bad. In this case, one’s conclusions are even more radical and counterintuitive.
As mentioned before, most of those affected by humans’ actions are insects. Those who think insects live good lives would thus disagree with me about whether insects are primarily affected positively or negatively. If one places any substantial weight on insects, they should thus think that human civilization has been quite a dreadful thing. They should think that saving lives is generally bad, that humans’ daily actions are like those of the people in Horton Hears A Who, who attempted to exterminate the tiny civilization. They should think one’s primary aim should be reversing the pace of environmental destruction, so as to increase by unfathomable amounts the number of happy insects. Perhaps such a person should even support climate change, for warmer climates have more insects.
This is, suffice it to say, not an intuitive position. At the very least, it implies that one cannot ignore insects most of the time in their ordinary lives. One cannot be like the Christian who occasionally goes to Church and reads the Bible, but mostly ignores their religious commitments in daily life. Insect welfare is either of no importance or unfathomable importance. It cannot be of moderate importance.
The view that says insects don’t matter at all is itself strange. It implies that microwaving millions of insects for trivial reasons would be fine. It implies that if it would be slightly more convenient to run a car by burning billions of live insects, doing so would be perfectly fine. It implies that one should ignore the majority of suffering on earth.
Could one sensibly think insect suffering to be only of moderate importance? Perhaps one values insects at suspiciously small levels, so that insect welfare is neither the most important thing in the world nor totally irrelevant. The problem is, of course, that this is totally arbitrary. It’s one thing to think that insect suffering doesn’t matter at all, but quite another to think that, purely by chance, the amount it matters is calibrated so that the unfathomable quantity of global insect suffering is important but not the biggest deal in the world. It would be like a Christian who applied a discount rate to years in heaven, so as to deliver the consequence that Christianity is of only moderate importance.
The reason one cannot be a moderate about Christianity is that the goods that Christians claim are at stake are infinite in number. When an infinite amount of something is at stake, either that is the most important thing or it doesn’t matter at all. The same thing applies to insects. When the number of insects so thoroughly swamps the number of people that almost all suffering is experienced by insects, either it is the most important thing or it doesn’t matter. If an insect dying painfully is only one six millionth as bad as a human having an experience as painful as death, the nearly 600 billion insect deaths per second still are the worst thing in the world—about as bad as 50,000 human experiences as painful as death experienced each second.
Modifying one’s concern about insects so as to enable one to reject the overwhelming importance of insect suffering would be obviously irrational. If you’re trying to figure out how bad it is for an insect to die in a cave, you don’t need to know how many other insects are dying outside of the cave. Reality does not owe us a guarantee that it will conform to our unreflective intuitions, formed before we learned any of the pertinent facts.
Now, in the face of this inconvenient fact—that either insects don’t matter or they are, for all practical purposes, the only things that matter—I anticipate many people holding that insects don’t matter. After all, the notion that insect suffering is the worst thing in the world is wildly counterintuitive. Just as we can confidently reject ethical arguments that tell us that extreme suffering isn’t bad, so too can we reject arguments that claim that insect suffering is the worst thing in the world.
But this would be a mistake.
The reason taking insect suffering seriously has surprising implications is that the world is surprising. It’s surprising that almost all suffering on Earth is experienced by insects. If the facts are very different from what you’d expect, so too should your ethical judgments be different from what you’d expect.
To give an example from
Silas Abrahamsen
, suppose you learned that each time you scratched your butt, it caused quadrillions of people on distant planets to be violently tortured to death. This would have wildly revisionary ethical implications. It would imply that the primary determinant of how much good a person does is whether they increase or decrease butt-scratching. But if we learned the world was that way, we shouldn’t reject the obvious datum that torture was bad—just so that we can hold on to the intuitions we formed before learning how the world worked.
If the world is weird, the right ethical judgment will be weird! The reason taking insect suffering seriously has counterintuitive implications is not because it’s unintuitive that suffering is bad. In fact, that’s one of the most intuitive ethical judgments. It’s because the world is weird, so that most of the suffering is had by the small weird creatures that we can’t avoid constantly killing!
If insects looked like people, we’d find it ghastly that hundreds of billions of them were dying every second. It’s only because we focus on morally arbitrary characteristics—what they look like—that we find it permissible to wholly ignore their interests.
We’re also obviously biased against taking insects seriously. Insects are small and weird looking. We don’t naturally empathize with them. Taking seriously their interests is inconvenient. Scope neglect—the tendency to neglect the differences between big numbers—results in us neglecting how much more serious it is when a quadrillion insects suffer than when a trillion insects do.
If the world only had a few thousand insects, the idea they matter a bit wouldn’t seem so weird. It’s only because they are so numerous that taking them seriously has counterintuitive implications. But your judgments about how much insects matter shouldn’t depend on the number of insects there are. If we discovered tomorrow that we’d overestimated the number of insects by several orders of magnitude, that shouldn’t lead us to think that individual insects matter more.
There are only two options. You can think that the cause of most of the world’s suffering is not very important or you can think that insect suffering is the biggest issue. But you must pick one. Insect suffering cannot be only moderately important.
I think it's reasonable to say "I put some credence on moral views that imply insect suffering is very important and some credence on moral views that imply it's not important; all things considered, I think it's moderately important."
A couple other comments are gesturing at this, but this logic could be applied to all kinds of things: existential risk is probably "either" extremely important or not at all important if you plug different empirical and ethical views into a formula and trust the answer; likewise present-day global health, or political polarization, or developed-world mental health, etc. Eventually, you can either (1) go all in on a particular ethical and meta-ethical theory, (2) be inconsistent, or (3) combine all these considerations into a balanced whole, in which probably a lot of things that pencil as "extremely important" in some views wind up being a moderately high priority. I don't think it's obvious that (3) is right, but this post does not make an argument that (1) is right, and I think the burden of proof is on the side arguing explicitly against moderation and intuitive conclusions.
One reason to think (3) is right is to look at the track records. You say you "cannot be a moderate Christian." I don't think religious fundamentalists have morally outperformed religious moderates. There are lots of people who take religious values seriously but not fanatically; some of the leaders of the world's greatest social movements used a lot of religious thinking and rhetoric without trying to follow every letter of the Bible.
If you use a standard expected-value-like method for determining preferences, you still get that insect suffering is very important. Say (for simplicity) you have a 50% credence that aggregate insect suffering is 10,000x more important than aggregate human suffering, and a 50% credence that it's 0x as important. In expectation, it is 5,000x more important.
If you reject expected value reasoning, then it's not clear how you can form consistent preferences. Perhaps under a "moral parliament" view, you could allocate 50% of your charitable resources to insects and 50% to humans. IIRC there are some issues with moral parliaments (I think Toby Ord had a paper on it) but there might be some way to make it work.
Note that a world where Insect suffering is 50% to be 10,000x as important as human suffering, and 50% to be 0.0001x as important as human suffering, is also a world where you can say exactly the same thing with humans and insects reversed.
That should make it clear that the ‘in expectation, [insects are] 5000x more important’ claim that follows is false, or more precisely requires additional assumptions.
This is the type of argument I was trying to eliminate when I wrote this:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/atdmkTAnoPMfmHJsX/multiplier-arguments-are-often-flawed
I think this is a good point about precise phrasing, but I think the argument still basically goes through that insects should be treated as extremely important in expectation. You can eliminate the two envelope problem by either make the numbers fixed/concrete, or you can use conditional probabilities.
Intuitively: suppose you thought there was an 50% chance you prevent a holocaust-level (10,000,000 lives) event happening to humans, but a 50% chance that this intervention would be completely useless. Alternately, you could do a normal intervention to save 1000 lives.
You could say "the normal intervention as a 50% chance to be ~infinitely more valuable than the holocaust-prevention thing"
But it's obvious you should do the holocaust prevention thing. Because here it's more obvious what the comparative/conditional stakes are. In one possible world, the 'world you can affect' is vastly larger, and that world should be prioritized.
Caveats: ignoring longtermist arguments, and the probability insects matter is << 50% imo
I don't know the weeds of the moral parliament view, but my suspicion is that this argument relies on too low of a level of ethical views (that is, "not meta enough"). That's still just a utilitarian frame with empirical uncertainty. The kind of "credences on different moral views" I have in mind is more like:
I don't know what my actual numbers are, and I'm not sure each of these views is really what the respective philosophy would say about insect welfare; I'm just saying, it's easy in this kind of framework to wind up having lots of moderate priorities that each seem extremely important on certain ethical views.