**Views expressed here are my own alone, obviously, and they do not represent general views of groups of which I’m a part. So if you read this and say “see, this is what the EAs think,” then know that this is false and most EAs don’t agree with me on this point. *
People think that regarding insect welfare as one of the most important things in the world is ridiculous. But there are about as many insects as there are blades of grass in the world. In fact, there are probably more—maybe by a factor of 1,000. If every blade of grass was distinctly conscious and capable of suffering intensely—if every blade of grass screamed in horrible pain all the time—then thinking that this mattered a great deal wouldn’t seem that weird.
If insects can suffer intensely, then there’s a lot of insect suffering in the world. Most insects live for about a week and then die painfully. If every blade of grass experienced intense suffering and joy, then it would seem that was of great moral importance.
Now, obviously there is a further question: do insects feel intense pain? I don’t know. I don’t know if they’re conscious, and if they are conscious, I don’t know if they feel very much pain. But I think it’s at least plausible that they do. I’ve laid out the case in more detail here, but in six bullet points:
Consciousness is pretty mysterious. We don’t really know what causes consciousness or why it does. So while there’s some chance that things with small brains have only diminutive consciousness, we shouldn’t be that confident in such a conclusion. It might be that pain is like eyesight: you can have it pretty robustly even with a simple brain. Maybe more complex pains allow more subtle varieties of pain, but not much greater intensity.
Animals, even simple ones, behave, when hurt, as if they’re in a lot of pain. A crab, when boiled, behaves a lot more like a person when they’re being tortured than a person when they stub their toe (you can find videos of this online if you so choose). So a natural inference, assuming there’s some connection between the crab’s behavior and their internal states, is that their internal states are of similar intensity to yours when you’re being tortured.
In a creature with a simple brain, when it’s in pain, pain might occupy its whole conscious experience. But in humans, in the rare cases when pain occupies our whole conscious awareness, it hurts us a great deal. It might be the same for insects. On this picture, the intensity of pain might have more to do with relative signal strength than absolute signal strength. Even simple beings might have intense signals relative to the other signals.
There’s a long history of humans underestimating consciousness in other creatures. For a long time, we thought infants and dogs weren’t conscious. Until about 2002, there was a pretty strong consensus that fish weren’t conscious. Now the general view
is that they are.Insects were thought to be simple automata until recently—now, anincreasingly common viewis that they’re conscious. If we know that humans have a long history of underestimating the mental lives of creatures different from us, then we should expect that we may be making the same error. We should not beextremely confidentthat the lights are either off entirely or just barely on.One function of pain is to teach creatures a lesson. If an animal feels pain when it does something, then it learns not to do it. Thus, organisms with bad memories may evolve to feel
moreintense pain.
While insects have small brains with few neurons, there’s
no correlationin humans between number of active neurons and intensity of experience.
All of this makes it, to my mind, pretty plausible that insects can feel intense pain. I’d say maybe 60% that at least some insects suffer and then 60% that they suffer intensely if they suffer at all. Others, who I respect, have even higher credence in insects being able to suffer intensely.
So all this is to say that I think it is plausible that there are about as many creatures who can suffer intensely as there are blades of grass. Just take a minute to look out at a field of grass. Then realize that for each blade, there might be an intensely conscious creature. Even if this isn’t guaranteed—even if it’s only a 10% chance—that is extremely morally weighty in expectation.
Four important things to note. First, this argument only establishes that what happens to insects is very important. There is a further question about which things are good for insects. If you want my take on that, and why I think one good way to spend money is to donate to charities that save human lives—because humans reduce wild animal populations—read here. So if you read this and say “this doesn’t establish that insects have bad lives” or “this doesn’t establish that we should be mostly concerned with insect suffering rather than happiness,” I agree!
Second, amazingly, this doesn’t make insects the most numerous plausibly conscious thing that there will be. The number of digital minds in the future could be staggeringly larger. Nick Bostrom once estimated that there could be 10^58 future digital minds. This is how many blades of grass you’d have if you replaced every single blade of grass with all the grass in the world—and then replaced all of those blades of grass with the number of blades of grass in the world, and then added a million times more blades of grass. When we are talking about numbers of entities, even on conservative estimates, that outclass the number of blades of grass in the world like Mount Everest outclasses a grain of sand.
Third, it won’t do to say that lots of little pains can’t add up to be as bad as a big pain. There is no very good reason to think that insects just have a little bit of pain. I think it’s reasonably likely that if you torture a fly, it feels something within an order of magnitude or two what you would feel if someone tortured you. And if there’s a 1% chance that they feel pain 1% as intensely as humans, in expectation nearly all the world’s suffering is experienced by insects.
Fourth, it isn’t plausible to say that insects not mattering is a Moorean fact. A Moorean fact is something that’s so obvious that you can reject any conclusion that disagrees with it. For instance, if someone gives you an argument for why you don’t have any hands, you can reject the argument because it’s more obvious that you have hands.
But you can’t just throw around the phrase “Moorean fact” to reject any counterintuitive conclusion that comes your way. Lots about the world is surprising. In particular, if some surprising moral conclusion is downstream of a surprising non-moral claim about the world, then you shouldn’t reject the moral claim on Moorean grounds. If the world is surprising, then our moral judgments about it will be surprising too. For instance, it might initially be surprising that the worst thing that your friend Bob ever did concerned goats. But when you learn that he exploded 59,000 goats, the surprisingness should go away.
So in a world where there are numbers of plausibly suffering beings more than the number of blades of grass, and these beings are basically 100% of the beings affected by our actions, it isn’t that surprising that this has weird moral implications. It is intuitively obvious that a being that can suffer intensely matters morally. The surprising thing is that insects are plausibly examples of such beings. But if they are, then caring deeply about their interests is intuitive.
When we learn that more plausibly intensely conscious beings starve to death every second than humans have ever lived, we shouldn’t pound the table and declare that this can’t possibly matter. We have discovered something surprising about what matters, and we should act on it.
You can’t conclude that insects don’t suffer intensely from the fact that it would have surprising ethical implications if they did. You can’t figure out how the world is from your moral intuitions. And you can’t conclude that insect suffering doesn’t matter from the fact that it would have counterintuitive implications if they did matter, because this gets the order of explanation the wrong way around—your judgment about how much all the insects matter in total should be *downstream *of your judgment of how much a particular insect matters when you think about what it’s like to be them.
To decide how much a *lot *of some kind of thing matters, you should start by trying to figure out how much one instance of the thing matters. Then you should multiply. I can’t get my head around the horrors of factory farming. The numbers are just too big. But I can get my head around the horror of one chicken being tortured. Then, to figure out how bad chicken factory farming is, multiply that number by around 80 billion.
Similarly, to figure out how much insects matter in total, start by thinking hard about how much one insect matters. In doing this, you should think about what it’s like to be an insect, for that is what determines how much insects matter, rather than attend to superficial features. So, for example, you should not think about how inconvenient it would be to care about insects, how weird they are, or how tiny they are. If you think about the experience of an insect, and note that it can plausibly experience a lot of pleasure and pain, you should regard its life as being important.
Then multiply that number by a quintillion.
If we learned that every single blade of grass was a conscious being who was in horrible pain all the time—ten times as intense as a human being tortured—this would have surprising implications. It would be weird and counterintuitive. But the thing to do wouldn’t be to declare that tortured beings in horrible pain, undergoing pain that feels like being boiled alive, don’t matter at all—that it’s an unassailable Moorean fact that common-sense moral priorities are basically right. The sensible thing to do would be to roll up our sleeves and try to make their lives better.
