As long as there's good vegetable products to eat instead of meat, it seems silly to switch to eating bugs instead of meat (even if one assumes that insects don't feel pain).
One common method of cricket slaughter is freezing. When crickets get cold, they enter a state called diapause in which their bodily functions greatly slow down. Diapause is even more extreme than hibernation in mammals, so it's reasonable to assume that crickets are not conscious during diapause.
So when they are frozen, crickets go through a natural energy-conservation process and then are not conscious for their death. That's probably about the best death that a cold-blooded creature can have.
How do things that are universally considered non-sentient stack up on these criteria? Pretty everyone agrees that paramecia and trees are not sentient, but paramecia and trees can avoid noxious stimuli even if they don't rely specifically on a nervous system to do it.
Thanks for the interesting post! Based on my previous knowledge (from randomly reading relevant research), I thought many/most insects didn't feel pain. Its interesting and important if that's not the case.
One confusion I have about the application of the framework is that they seem to inherently favor the positive ("yes insects feel pain") side? So green = high confidence that the insect fulfills the criterion. But does white mean "we are very unsure whether or not the insect fulfills the criterion" or "we are very sure that the insect *doesn't* fulfill the criterion"? The latter wouldn't be biased (and it would just be a strange choice of colors), while the former would prevent negative statements. The choice of colors is also strange in this regard, because white seems to be neutral while green seems more polar, like the end of a spectrum. Additionally, the case where too little data is available, the squares are shaded, which is very close to white. This wouldn't make sense to me if shaded="we don't know whether the criterion is net" and white="we do know that the criterion isn't met".
So my question is: If I've meticulously experimented on rocks and found ample evidence that they do not fulfill any of the criteria, can I communicate that in this framework evaluation, or would I be stuck saying "we don't know"?
I think it's wrong to step on snails deliberately but I'm unconvinced al la Caplan we should care much if we incidentally kill them in building houses etc.
Before I respond to your point, I'd like to point out that actively farming insects is much closer to your first scenario than your second. No accidents are involved there, all the farming and killing is deliberate and a necessary part of the process, however one may ethically judge it. As such, I feel like your point is kind of orthogonal to the one discussed in this post.
Moving on:
While practical concerns may in practice overrule ethical concerns, I don't think the wrongness of an action is thereby changed. At most, it can be justified this way.
Suposse snails felt as much pain as a magically shrunken dog in the same situation would, and tat we knew this for certain. It may still be the case that we couldnt afford to remove every snail before building a house and that we as a society decide that the tradeoff is worth it (just like we seen to decide this way with farmed animals overall). However, every suffering snail would be a moral tragedy of the same nature and gravity as a similarly suffering dog. And if we stumbled upon a method to prevent that suffering, E.g. a snail magnet that softly picks up the snails so we can place them elsewhere, then there would be correspondingly strong ethical pressure to use it, even if it were quite expensive or otherwise resource intensive.
I wonder how we weigh a single large (and presumably at some higher level of consciousness) animals like a cow and small creatures like an insect.
If you knock my brain unconscious with a heavy blow or anesthetic, then proceed to turn my left hand in mashed potatoes with one of those ribbed hammers, I wouldn’t be able to mind. I’d be unconscious. The neurons between my hand and my brain would presumably be feeling it though. There’s no reason to assume that just because my brain was having issues all the neurons in between my wreck of a hand and my unconscious brain weren’t screaming out in the strongest of signals “EXCRUCIATING PAIN!”. I am no neuroscientist, but by mass alone I’d assume there’s far more neurons between my hand and my brain than in a single insect.
Ultimate I wonder, do we measure capacity to feel pain based on number of distinct entities (thus insects outnumber us dramatically and would have dramatically more capacity for pain), based on quantity of neurons experiencing pain signals (I assume blue whales would have 5x the capacity for pain vs. humans with their larger brains in this case), or based on being above some threshold for “experience” that we would assign to a human and a dog, might assign to an insect, and probably wouldn’t assign to a single cell?
I think what’s unconvincing about people worrying about insect pain to me (ignoring the practical reasons not to care much), is that there’s no clear model for what counts as a moral agent capable of feeling pain and worthy of protection. It seems to me that we can extend the care far beyond insects, down to individual cells that are competent enough to respond to negative stimuli (all of them). I’m composed of 36 trillion cells, and aware of not one of them. I have to assume it’s unpleasant to be one of the unlucky fellows lining my acid soaked stomach, or exposed to the burning radiation and impact of the outside world on my skin. They certainly have “less” capacity for pain, but considering there’s far more of them than the single consciousness in my head, maybe they outweigh me.
Just ramblings towards the end I guess, but in short I’m not convinced insects are moral actors.
I think what you gesture towards here is the difference between nociception (being able to register damage to tissue and the like) and the subjective aversive experience of pain. Being unconscious, you would have the former, but not the latter. And unless you are a panpsychist or the like, you wouldn't expect a single cell to experience pain, even if singlecelled organisms might be able to detect damage (I don't know if they can). So yeah, I think the question of cells, their number etc. doesn't really matter for the ethical case unless you think that every cell plausibly can feel pain as an emotion.
As for comparisons of size and different animals: It's plausible to me that different animals or even individuals have different intensities of pain perception. With anything as foreign as insects, it will be extremely hard to tell how their experience compares to ours, given that's its hard to even find out whether they experience the pain in the first place. Ethically however, it seems straightforward to me that two animals with equally sensitive pain perception have equal rights for ethical consideration, regardless of size, species etc. (though these aspects may bring in other factors relevant to the moral calculation). If I magically shrink a human to be the size of a mountain or a grain of rice, their moral status doesn't thereby change. Nor should we care more or less about crickets if we grew one species to be as large as a rabbit, provided their pain sensitivity doesn't thereby change.
As long as there's good vegetable products to eat instead of meat, it seems silly to switch to eating bugs instead of meat (even if one assumes that insects don't feel pain).
What the hell is “youth pastor voice”?
https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/youth-pastor-voice
One common method of cricket slaughter is freezing. When crickets get cold, they enter a state called diapause in which their bodily functions greatly slow down. Diapause is even more extreme than hibernation in mammals, so it's reasonable to assume that crickets are not conscious during diapause.
So when they are frozen, crickets go through a natural energy-conservation process and then are not conscious for their death. That's probably about the best death that a cold-blooded creature can have.
>eight criteria: nociception, sensory integration, integrated nociception, analgesia, motivational trade-offs, flexible self-protection, associative learning, and analgesia preference
How do things that are universally considered non-sentient stack up on these criteria? Pretty everyone agrees that paramecia and trees are not sentient, but paramecia and trees can avoid noxious stimuli even if they don't rely specifically on a nervous system to do it.
I think the authors actually make a good and nuanced case for their system in the paper introducing it: https://www.lse.ac.uk/business/consulting/reports/review-of-the-evidence-of-sentiences-in-cephalopod-molluscs-and-decapod-crustaceans
For one, they emphasize that none of the criteria are to be understood as a smoking gun, but as merely adding to the case of an animal being sentient.
Secondly, I'll let then speak for themselves:
"Our criteria are not unreasonably demanding (they
are not demands for absolute certainty). This can
be seen by noting that well-researched mammals,
such as lab rats (Rattus norvegicus), would
satisfy all of them (Navratilova et al., 2013). At the
same time, the criteria are also rigorous and robust.
This can be seen by noting that cnidarians (jellyfish
and sea anemones) would not convincingly satisfy
any of the criteria on the basis of current evidence
of which we are aware."
Thanks for the interesting post! Based on my previous knowledge (from randomly reading relevant research), I thought many/most insects didn't feel pain. Its interesting and important if that's not the case.
One confusion I have about the application of the framework is that they seem to inherently favor the positive ("yes insects feel pain") side? So green = high confidence that the insect fulfills the criterion. But does white mean "we are very unsure whether or not the insect fulfills the criterion" or "we are very sure that the insect *doesn't* fulfill the criterion"? The latter wouldn't be biased (and it would just be a strange choice of colors), while the former would prevent negative statements. The choice of colors is also strange in this regard, because white seems to be neutral while green seems more polar, like the end of a spectrum. Additionally, the case where too little data is available, the squares are shaded, which is very close to white. This wouldn't make sense to me if shaded="we don't know whether the criterion is net" and white="we do know that the criterion isn't met".
So my question is: If I've meticulously experimented on rocks and found ample evidence that they do not fulfill any of the criteria, can I communicate that in this framework evaluation, or would I be stuck saying "we don't know"?
The original paper introducing the framework and applying it is: https://www.lse.ac.uk/business/consulting/reports/review-of-the-evidence-of-sentiences-in-cephalopod-molluscs-and-decapod-crustaceans
I think it's wrong to step on snails deliberately but I'm unconvinced al la Caplan we should care much if we incidentally kill them in building houses etc.
Before I respond to your point, I'd like to point out that actively farming insects is much closer to your first scenario than your second. No accidents are involved there, all the farming and killing is deliberate and a necessary part of the process, however one may ethically judge it. As such, I feel like your point is kind of orthogonal to the one discussed in this post.
Moving on:
While practical concerns may in practice overrule ethical concerns, I don't think the wrongness of an action is thereby changed. At most, it can be justified this way.
Suposse snails felt as much pain as a magically shrunken dog in the same situation would, and tat we knew this for certain. It may still be the case that we couldnt afford to remove every snail before building a house and that we as a society decide that the tradeoff is worth it (just like we seen to decide this way with farmed animals overall). However, every suffering snail would be a moral tragedy of the same nature and gravity as a similarly suffering dog. And if we stumbled upon a method to prevent that suffering, E.g. a snail magnet that softly picks up the snails so we can place them elsewhere, then there would be correspondingly strong ethical pressure to use it, even if it were quite expensive or otherwise resource intensive.
Yes, I think what I have said counts against insect farming.
I wonder how we weigh a single large (and presumably at some higher level of consciousness) animals like a cow and small creatures like an insect.
If you knock my brain unconscious with a heavy blow or anesthetic, then proceed to turn my left hand in mashed potatoes with one of those ribbed hammers, I wouldn’t be able to mind. I’d be unconscious. The neurons between my hand and my brain would presumably be feeling it though. There’s no reason to assume that just because my brain was having issues all the neurons in between my wreck of a hand and my unconscious brain weren’t screaming out in the strongest of signals “EXCRUCIATING PAIN!”. I am no neuroscientist, but by mass alone I’d assume there’s far more neurons between my hand and my brain than in a single insect.
Ultimate I wonder, do we measure capacity to feel pain based on number of distinct entities (thus insects outnumber us dramatically and would have dramatically more capacity for pain), based on quantity of neurons experiencing pain signals (I assume blue whales would have 5x the capacity for pain vs. humans with their larger brains in this case), or based on being above some threshold for “experience” that we would assign to a human and a dog, might assign to an insect, and probably wouldn’t assign to a single cell?
I think what’s unconvincing about people worrying about insect pain to me (ignoring the practical reasons not to care much), is that there’s no clear model for what counts as a moral agent capable of feeling pain and worthy of protection. It seems to me that we can extend the care far beyond insects, down to individual cells that are competent enough to respond to negative stimuli (all of them). I’m composed of 36 trillion cells, and aware of not one of them. I have to assume it’s unpleasant to be one of the unlucky fellows lining my acid soaked stomach, or exposed to the burning radiation and impact of the outside world on my skin. They certainly have “less” capacity for pain, but considering there’s far more of them than the single consciousness in my head, maybe they outweigh me.
Just ramblings towards the end I guess, but in short I’m not convinced insects are moral actors.
I think what you gesture towards here is the difference between nociception (being able to register damage to tissue and the like) and the subjective aversive experience of pain. Being unconscious, you would have the former, but not the latter. And unless you are a panpsychist or the like, you wouldn't expect a single cell to experience pain, even if singlecelled organisms might be able to detect damage (I don't know if they can). So yeah, I think the question of cells, their number etc. doesn't really matter for the ethical case unless you think that every cell plausibly can feel pain as an emotion.
As for comparisons of size and different animals: It's plausible to me that different animals or even individuals have different intensities of pain perception. With anything as foreign as insects, it will be extremely hard to tell how their experience compares to ours, given that's its hard to even find out whether they experience the pain in the first place. Ethically however, it seems straightforward to me that two animals with equally sensitive pain perception have equal rights for ethical consideration, regardless of size, species etc. (though these aspects may bring in other factors relevant to the moral calculation). If I magically shrink a human to be the size of a mountain or a grain of rice, their moral status doesn't thereby change. Nor should we care more or less about crickets if we grew one species to be as large as a rabbit, provided their pain sensitivity doesn't thereby change.