But I see no reason for some cutoff, where I arbitrarily decide to care for everything above a certain level of complexity, and decide not to care about anything below. "Vertebrates and octopuses" does not seem like a group that share any exclusive traits, i.e. any moral reason I have to care about an octopus seems like it would lead me to care about an insect, just maybe to a lesser extent.
Even if you value insect lives extremely lowly - if there's any moral value to them at all, mass farming them in the trillions or, possibly someday, quadrillions would be a moral travesty, even of their moral value is extremely small per individual, right?
I feel like "there seems to be a reasonable possibility that insects suffer" implies that we should have some level of interest in preventing their excess suffering, where practical.
2: Scott Alexander has written on this recently and it covers much of the same ground that we are covering here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/i-will-not-eat-the-bug...
3: Some time ago I seem to remember the Swiss Government discussing a proposition to recognise the 'dignity' of insect and plants. Dignity was held to be a property distinct from suffering and I think part of the argument was that it was somehow mutual: damaging life in any form was harmful to the dignity of both the damager and the damagee. I have some sympathy with that idea. In other words, we should care about the bugs because we care about ourselves.
Disclosure, I do a lot of scientific work with Drosophila and this is something that I mull over from time to time as I slaughter them in their thousands...
I really enjoyed the ACX article; thank you for the recommendation! I agreed with a lot of the general points he was making.
Not sure about the "dignity" of e.g. plants, as I think there are plenty of ways to harm plants and animals that is helpful to humans. It's an interesting idea, though, and I do like the attempt to make a practical argument instead of a moral one.
In any case, while (to some extent) I care about the possible suffering of insects who are farmed in the trillions, I'm not particularly morally concerned about thousands killed for greater scientific gain. Could I ask generally what work you're doing with them? I'd be interested in learning more about it
It seems sensible to say - these creature with nocicepters and familiar aperture for feeling pain, who react to to bodily damage in ways that suggest that they can suffer, and for whom pain can obviously serve the same evolutionary benefit as it does in humans - they have a moderate to high chance of feeling pain and being conscious to some degree, so we should be careful.
Plants may release chemicals in response to physical threats, but they don't have the pieces of the nervous system we attribute pain to, don't seem to have any level of consciousness, and don't have an evolutionary benefit to subjective suffering. Therefore, morally, there's no reason to treat them as more than an inanimate object.
I feel like AI could theoretically someday have the potential to suffer, but that isn't really a current concern.
Based on all available evidence, the article's argument for at least being careful about insects' potential suffering seems sensible, but the plant argument strikes me as absurd.