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If you've ever come across someone on the Effective Altruism forum or ACX comments section who cares a lot about wild animal/insect welfare, you might have wondered if they'd thought things through.
Well, you'd be right.
Here we have the story of a bright-eyed young effective altruist who spent the better part of a year permitting a breeding colony of carpet moths to live in her apartment because she was concerned about the ethical implications of exterminating them.
I'll be honest. My first reaction was of sneering contempt. Animal welfare is IMO the most counterproductive idea that gets serious traction in rationalist spaces, so there is a good bit of schadenfreude from seeing, "I never thought the bugs would eat MY utility," out in the wild.
Still, I don't know anything about this person other than that she lives in a London flat and works for an EA organization (80,000 hours). I am reminded of that XKCD where even the most obvious facts are learned by someone for the first time thousands of times a day. Maybe Europe really is a commieblock hellscape where man lives entirely divorced from nature, where supposedly well-informed people can enter their late 20s without an intuitive understanding of the exponential growth of pest biomass. I remember well the time as a wee lad I saw an entire summer's growth of backyard tomato plants devoured in a week by 2 or 3 hornworms. Not everyone grows up with such a visceral demonstration of what civilization is up against.
Maybe these people really do need to touch grass.
You could apply the same logic to babies, which most people value morally but which do not understand morality or take actions based on it.
The utilitarian answer is that there is no such thing as "unique duties" in utilitarianism, or even really "duties" at all, the whole framework is wrong. There are only choices and their results. Some choices have better results than others, so they are preferable, and this is true even if you are the only moral being in the world. The better choice is better whether it is part of your "duty" or not, and whether the beneficiaries share your sense of morality or not. You should, as a practical matter, make choices like specializing on the tasks you're good at, and taking into account the second-order consequences of helping people with the ability and inclination to help others themselves. But this is only because doing so has better consequences, not because you stopped counting the welfare of the amoral/severely-disabled/etc. when deciding which choice has better results.
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