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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.
The thought of having a viable insect population in my living quarters, nevermind of permitting its unchecked growth, gives me the twitchy eye and makes me mumble "Hans, get ze Flammenwerfer".
Beyond that, all I can see is "All quiet on the western front: effective altruists have their priorities backwards". Nothing new. Maybe touching grass would help those people, but I wonder about the mental ecosystem that produces such impossible notions of morality in the first place.
They wouldn't touch grass, they might crush the invisible slime civilisation by doing so.
(I'm running out of exclamations that aren't strings of cursing and swearing to use here).
How the blinkin' heck did Scott manage to be the one sane individual in this bunch? Whatever his quirks of personality, he's Mr. Average Normal Guy Ordinary Person by these standards.
Insect welfare is what you get when you take ideas seriously, but normies have the ideas a lot without taking them seriously. Normies who "believe in animal welfare" don't take the idea seriously. Even vegetarians don't treat seriously the ideas that lead to vegetarianism. Actually believing the things the normies are saying and taking them seriously leads to this mess.
(In this case I don't think even rationalism would support letting the insects live. Insect welfare falls out from animal welfare because the sentience of an insect is small but there are billions of them. There are not billions of insects in your apartment, so the disutility of killing them is low even if you take animal welfare seriously. I would agree that this sounds more like OCD.)
I might quibble with "take ideas seriously" here. I don't think what's happening is so much "taking ideas seriously" as "taking ideas to the farthest endpoints still supported by the underlying logic while not performing any real cost-benefit analysis on any of the steps on the road to that endpoint." It's a form of pretending that trade-offs don't exist, and not engaging in that kind of analysis by saying that logic doesn't require it. That's a consistent position, but precise logical consistency isn't necessarily the most important factor when considering a pragmatic policy choice.
There's a combination of excessive sentiment (while concern for animal welfare is good, concern to the levels of worrying about being a moth genocider are excessive), extreme sensitivity, and vulnerability to influence. Scrupulosity is part of it, as is the point about "cute animals".
This level of worrying about insects does seem, to me, to be because of being the type of person to take the concerns seriously on an almost religious level (and I'm going to bring in that she is a vegan, so that's already predisposed to be very ritually pure around consumption of non-animal food and resources), to incorporate the values to a degree that goes this far, and not see it as going far because you're in the bubble of like-minded people. Any ordinary midwit can be concerned about cows or pigs, the higher, more refined, 'shut up and multiply' person worries about fish and shrimp and moths.
I'm not doubting her sincerity, I am doubting her good judgement. As she admits, she ended up killing the moths anyway, and caused excess suffering in the end, besides the time spent living with a moth infestation.
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I think that's a good point.
This comment brought to you courtesy of the seagulls crying outside my window (because it's bin day and the little buggers are smart enough to have figured out that on certain days stuff is left outside that sometimes drops tasty morsels).
If you're used to seeing gulls and crows following the plough when the farmers start ploughing, because they're eating the worms and insects turned up when the soil is ploughed, then this is nature to you. To be brutal, everything is something else's food. To quote Willy Shakes, "We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots." In that context, insect suffering is meaningless, or at least not morally significant.
But if you're worried about the moral implications of insect suffering vis-Ã -vis taking action to kill a moth infestation, then you are in fact going against that nature you claim to value or prioritise. You are imposing human values on the natural world. If moths should not be killed because their suffering is morally significant, gulls and crows shouldn't eat insects either, because that is also "meat is murder".
So if we are going to impose human values on such categories, then there is no reason "humans are entitled to eat meat animals" is inferior to "I am a moth genocider" as values systems. Certainly, humans should not be deliberately cruel to animals, but that's not the moral question here.
'You are objectively evil for meat eating' is as artificial and arbitrary as any other imposition of our morals on those who don't share those values. Objective by what metric? Certainly not that of nature. Objective by human systems? Ah, there we come back again to "socially constructed" and "there is no objective moral system of right and wrong" and the likes.
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