What if Klein Barron are right about insect sentience?
If Klein Barron are right, then insects may well be able to feel pain. If they can, then the standard approach to animal ethics generates some implausible results. Philosophers need to develop alternatives to this framework to avoid them. Bob Fischer, assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at Texas State University, works on animal ethics and the epistemology of modality, and is co director the Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals. http:/www.bobfischer.net Some things matter morally; some things don't. On the former list, you'll find people, chickens, and lions; on the latter, dead leaves, banana peels, and gravel. When your actions might affect people, you should think about how they'll be affected; when your actions might affect dead leaves, you needn't. Historically, we've put insects on the latter list. This isn't to say that we never think about how our actions might affect them, but just that insofar as we do, it's not for their own sake. Why shouldn't we let the bees die? Because agriculture would suffer (among many other things) Or, why shouldn't we let children tear the legs off spiders? Because they might thereby become cruel. On the standard view, bees and spiders matter, but not in and of themselves. I doubt that this is quite right, but nor is it too far from the truth. We're guilty of many moral evils, a host of which involve nonhuman animals. Perhaps insects have some intrinsic moral importance, and so we ought to show more concern for them than we currently do. Still, I'm not inclined to draw moral parallels between, say, our use of insecticides and industrial animal agriculture. Even if insects matter, pigs matter much more. So were we ever to face a choice between harming pigs and harming insects, it's clear what we should choose. Unfortunately, the dominant approach in animal ethics doesn't fit neatly with these truisms. My aim here is to explain why, and then to suggest a way forward. Animal Sentience 2016.115: Fischer on Klein Barron on Insect Experience 2 Recall our two lists: on the one hand, the things that matter morally; on the other, the things that don't. What's shared by the beings on the former that's lacking in the beings on the latter? A natural answer is: sentience. The beings on the former list have a perspective on the world; there is something that it's like to be each one of them. Moreover, things can go better and worse for them experientially that is, they can feel pleasure and pain. If insects are sentient, we've got them on the wrong list. To be clear, Klein Barron's (2016) argument for insect sentience doesn't commit them to saying insects can feel pain, and they're careful not to take a stand on that issue. Mere consciousness what we might call minimal sentience may be possible without the capacity to experience pain. However, the standard argument against insect pain is that the behavioral evidence isn't sufficient to attribute consciousness we can explain what looks like pain behavior as the product of simple reflexes. (See, e.g. Wigglesworth 1980, Eisemann et al. 1984, Smith 1991, and Elwood 2011. If Klein Barron are right, though, we have reasons to attribute states of awareness having nothing to do with apparent pain behavior. If that's right, then there should be a presumption in favor of taking that behavior at face value. So let's assume, for the sake of argument, that insects are both conscious and can feel pain that is, they're fully rather than minimally sentient and that they matter morally as a result. What follows? Well, consider the number of bugs killed by cars. Arnold van Vliet, a Dutch entomologist, came up with an estimate: "In 2007, over 7 million cars [in the Netherlands] traveled about 200 billion kilometers. If we assume for simplicity that every month the average is the same for all cars, then 16.7 billion kilometers are traveled a month. In just the license plates, 3.3 billion bugs are killed per month. The front of the car is at least forty times as large as the surface of the plate. This means that cars hit around 133 billion insects every month. In half a year, that is 800 billion insects."1 If the Dutch kill 800 billion insects every six months, then the mind boggles at the number across the globe. And if insects matter morally and so we ought to factor them into our moral deliberations then we've got some explaining to do. Even if insects are dramatically less important than we are, that difference may be offset by their sheer number. If each bug is morally important, can we justify non essential driving?2 1 http:/www.treehugger.com/cars/trillions of insects killed by cars every year says study.html 2 Strictly speaking, we don't need the assumption that insects are sentient or even that they're probably sentient to get this problem going. Even if Klein Barron haven't shown we should assign a probability greater than .5 to insect sentience, we might think that they've raised the probability of that hypothesis. But now suppose that before reading Klein Barron, we were nearly certain that insects aren't sentient we judged the probability to be around .00001% Now, however, we take the probability to be a lot higher, though still extremely low say, 1% When you consider the sheer number of insects, even a low estimate of the odds of sentience is going to generate high expected disutility from harming them. For more on insects and risk, see Fischer (2016) Animal Sentience 2016.115: Fischer on Klein Barron on Insect Experience 3 This problem has driven at least one philosopher to a fairly radical conclusion. Peter Carruthers (2007) is an advocate for higher order theories of consciousness, so he doesn't think that insects are sentient. But he also doesn't think that sentience is what matters: instead, he has the (somewhat idiosyncratic) view that it's frustrated desires. We can set the disagreement aside here, however, since Carruthers argues that insects indeed have a belief/desire psychology, and it's clear that they don't always get what they want. Accordingly, he contends that "the challenge for ethical theory" is to reconcile or reject one of the following claims: 1. When people suffer, the basic ground for our sympathy and moral concern lies in their states of frustrated desire. 2. Invertebrates share with us a form of belief desire psychology, and are capable of having their desires frustrated. 3. The sufferings of invertebrates make no direct moral claims on us. 4. The sufferings of some "higher" animals (paradigmatically dogs, cats, horses, and primates) do make direct moral claims on us (296 297, emphasis added) It's easy to sympathize with the third claim, which Carruthers takes for granted. If we reject it, then we're at risk of saying that it's wrong to take two trips to the grocery store when you could take one. Given that that's off the table, we need another way out. Carruthers doesn't think that all four claims can be reconciled, so he abandons (4) We should pause to appreciate the significance of this move. Carruthers thinks we should give up the idea that you shouldn't kick a dog in the ribs because it hurts the dog, independently of any consequences that injuring an animal might have for a human being (whether yourself or someone else) That's what it means to say that the sufferings of some "higher" animals don't make direct moral claims on us. And that is not a trivial conclusion. Carruthers recognizes this, and so he tries to explain away the intuition in favor of holding onto (4) His proposal, which is developed at length in Carruthers (1992) is that we do have obligations regarding animals including insects but not to them. That is, they don't matter in and of themselves, but only for the reason outlined earlier: we shouldn't deform our characters, since doing so may have negative consequences for people; however, if we harm animals for insufficiently good reasons, that's exactly what we'll do. Moreover, the only reason we have obligations to infants (among others) and not just regarding them, is because the social contract isn't endorsable if we don't assume direct obligations to some beings who aren't themselves contractors. This isn't because the contract would mis describe our children: on this view, morality is a system of rational agreements between agents, and infants aren't agents. Rather, it's because it would be irrational for us to endorse a contract that wasn't sustainable, as would be a contract that denied our children full moral consideration. But that, of course, is a long way of saying that they don't matter intrinsically, but instead because we care about them. Animal Sentience 2016.115: Fischer on Klein Barron on Insect Experience 4 This vision of our children is tough to swallow. It's also hard to stomach that the only reason it's wrong to kick your dog is because you might become a worse person as a result. But these are essential features of Carruthers's framework. Are there are any other options? Here are four worth considering: 1. Give up sentience as the standard. We were wrong about the feature that's common among the beings on the former list. Of course, we can't go with Carruthers's proposal either, since it leads to the same set of problems. But perhaps we can find another candidate. 2. Adopt a graduated account of moral importance. Insects matter, but just barely. The more complex you are, the more you matter morally, where complexity maps roughly onto the phylogenetic scale. 3. Deny that insects have various interests. Perhaps insects are sentient, which means that they probably have an interest in avoiding pain. Still, they might not have an interest in continued existence, so killing them quickly might be OK. 4. Appeal to unforeseen consequences. Perhaps it's the case that if we were to drive less, things would actually be worse for insects. Perhaps our driving is hastening the sixth great extinction, which w