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Creepy-Crawlies and the Long Dreamless Sleep

image of large spider silhouette at night

In graduate school, I lived in a dingy little apartment near the sea. My apartment faced a slough, beyond which was the water. On the wall next to my door was a bright light. At first, I could turn this light on and off. But after a year or two, some men came and altered the light to make it stay on all night. The area around the light and the eave above it became a den of death. At night, droves of insects would emerge from the littoral darkness of the slough to flap and buzz in a confused frenzy around the light. Dozens of spiders awaited them. When I entered my apartment, I could see the insects wriggling pitifully in their webs.

The situation became too much for me. The spiders started to draw their webs over my door. A nasty one sprung on top of my head. I decided to take drastic action. I found a sprayable toxin for killing insects and arachnids, some horrible thing with a sickly sweet chemical smell. In the morning, when the spiders were hidden in their crevices, I sprayed the toxin all around the den and leapt back. For one second, nothing happened. And then, all at once, thirty or forty large spiders began to erratically descend, desperately clinging to threads of silk. They were writhing as the toxin destroyed them. Some of them curled as soon as they hit the ground. Others stumbled off before dying. It was horrible. I couldn’t shake the thought that those spiders, like the insects they caught in their webs, died in pain.

My colleague, Daniel Burkett, has recently written about some new empirical research which suggests that insects can experience pain. Burkett argues that if insects (or spiders, which are arachnids) can experience pain, then that pain matters morally and thus we have defeasible moral reason to avoid causing them pain.

The basic thought is that pain is inherently bad no matter where it occurs, and it’s unacceptably arbitrary to discount a creature’s pain simply because that creature isn’t a human being (or isn’t cute or friendly or lovable).

Burkett’s argument is unsettling. It implies that I may have done something terrible when I slaughtered those spiders.

I agree with Burkett’s basic argument. We have pro tanto moral reason to refrain from inflicting pain on any creature, no matter how creepy or crawly. However, I do not think (as Burkett seems to) that this means we have pro tanto moral reason to avoid swiftly killing insects, for example swatting mosquitoes or squashing lanternflies. First, I doubt that the process of swiftly swatting or squashing a creepy-crawly causes a morally significant amount of pain. Being swiftly swatted is analogous to being vaporized in an explosion. The process totally destroys the creature’s body (rendering it incapable of experiencing pain), and the destruction occurs in a fraction of a second. Second, it does not follow from the fact that we have moral reason to avoid causing a creature pain that we have moral reason to avoid painlessly killing it. And there are good reasons for thinking that painless death is not bad for insects in any morally relevant sense.

To see why, let’s take a step back and talk about why death is bad generally.

When someone dies, they permanently cease to exist. The dead are beyond any sort of experiential harm. The dead can’t suffer; the dead can’t feel distressed, sad, bored, or lonely (it’s true that the dying process can be painful, but dying things are still alive). The imperviousness of the dead to any sort of suffering raises an ancient philosophical puzzle:

why is death bad for or harmful to the dier at all? And why is painlessly killing someone wrong, apart from how this affects people other than the victim?

One popular answer is that death is bad for a dier if and because it deprives the dier of good things that the dier would have had or experienced had they not died when they did. Consider a person who is instantaneously vaporized by an explosion at forty. Suppose that this person would have lived another forty good years had she not been vaporized. The explosion is not bad for the victim because it causes her pain or distress; actually, the explosion renders her completely impervious to pain and distress. Rather, the explosion is bad for the victim because it prevents her from experiencing those good years and thereby makes it the case that there is less total good in her life than there otherwise would have been.

A related answer is that death is bad for a dier if and because it frustrates the dier’s desires and curtails the dier’s projects. Many of our desires are directed toward the future and can give us a reason to go on living. For example, I want to visit space someday. Unlike a desire to, say, get a cavity filled, this desire gives me reason to try to stay alive until I can achieve it. If I were to die in my sleep tonight, this desire would go unsatisfied. Arguably, even if I don’t feel sad about it, it’s bad for me if this desire is never fulfilled. My life is worse as a result, all else being equal. Similar things can be said, mutatis mutandis, about many ongoing projects that are cut short by death.

These explanations of death’s badness presuppose that the dier is a temporally extended subject. All living things are temporally extended in a physical and biological sense, of course. But persons are extended through time in a psychological sense, too.

My current self is connected to my past self by a continuous chain of beliefs, memories, desires, preferences, intentions, character traits, and so forth, which change over time in regular, familiar, and typically gradual ways. For example, I now have a memory of an experience my twenty-year-old self had while riding a rollercoaster. And if I live till forty, my forty-year-old self will be similarly connected to my current self. For example, my forty-year-old self might remember writing this essay. On top of this, I have desires and projects that are directed at the future. For example, I want my forty-year-old self to be happy. All this explains why it makes sense for me, now, to identify with my future self, and why it would make sense for me to feel self-interested dismay if I were to discover that I won’t make it to forty after all.

Now imagine a human being, M, whose internal mental life is completely discontinuous from day to day. M wakes up every morning with new desires, preferences, and intentions, which are all directed at the day to come. M has enough general knowledge to function in a basic way but no autobiographical memories of past days. When M goes to sleep at night, M’s mental life is erased and rebooted in the morning. Effectively, M’s mind is a series of distinct, evanescent subjects, each of which occupies a small fraction of a temporally extended biological whole.

Death would not have the same significance for M as it has for you and me. The main reason is that when M dies, this is less like cutting a person’s life short and more like preventing a new person (i.e., a new iteration of M) from coming into existence. And this makes a difference.

Morally speaking, killing a person is quite different from preventing a new person from coming into existence. Look at it from M’s perspective. If on Monday M discovers that M’s body will be vaporized in sleep on Friday night, it’s hard to see why M should, on Monday, be disturbed about this in a self-interested way. After all, M’s desires and projects are all directed at the immediate future, and the psychological subject who exists on Monday is going to disappear on Monday night in the reboot. Thus, the vaporization won’t terminate an ongoing internal life that M, on Monday, is a part of, or even one M is invested in. And for this reason, the vaporization is not going to deprive the M who exists on Monday of anything or frustrate any of M’s desires or projects. It’s as if someone else is being vaporized.

This suggests that the extent to which death is bad for a dier depends on the extent to which the dier has a complex psychological life – a psychological life that has future-directed elements and is unified over time by a continuous chain of beliefs, memories, desires, preferences, intentions, character traits, and so on.

With this insight, we are in a position to return to the issue of whether death is bad for insects, spiders, and the like.

Death is bad for creepy-crawlies only if they have temporally extended mental lives that are unified over time through reasonably thick chains of mental states like beliefs, memories, desires, preferences, intentions, and character traits.

And while some insects have the ability to remember things and execute somewhat complex tasks (bees have a relatively sophisticated spatial memory that can be used to navigate, for example), it seems overwhelmingly likely that at most very few creepy-crawlies have brains that are sophisticated enough to support such chains, much less desires and projects directed beyond the specious present that could give them a reason to continue living. In other words, creepy-crawlies probably live in the present to an even greater degree than M does. Brain size alone would seem to suggest this. Mosquito brains only have about 200,000 neurons. For comparison, human brains have 86 billion.

The upshot for our purposes is that death probably isn’t bad for creepy-crawlies, and therefore it seems doubtful that we have any pro tanto moral reason to avoid painlessly killing them (or rather any reason unrelated to the side-effects that killing them might produce). This is consistent with saying that we should not cause insects pain and that painful methods of killing creepy-crawlies, such as my sprayable toxin, are objectionable. But swatting and squashing is probably fine.

This line of reasoning is somewhat comforting to me. Scientists estimate that there are 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects alive at any given moment. Most of those will die very soon. Fortunately, that probably isn’t bad for them. However, like the insects in the den of death outside my old apartment and the arachnids I slaughtered, many of those insects will suffer a great deal in the dying process. The weight of that collective suffering is unfathomable. I can only hope that our tiny brethren pass swiftly into the long dreamless sleep that awaits us all.

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On the Morality of Squashing Lanternflies

photograph of spotted lanterfly

This summer, the East Coast of the United States has been plagued by the spotted lanternfly. First discovered in Pennsylvania in 2014, the lanternfly is a highly invasive species that – if allowed to spread throughout the U.S. – could devastate the ecosystem, and seriously impact the grape, orchard, and logging industries. States have been swift to respond. Ohio is setting traps, while Pennsylvania has employed sniffer dogs to track down their eggs. Connecticut and Virginia, on the other hand, have issued a very clear message to their residents: “Squash these bugs on sight!”

Several weeks ago, I discussed the revelation that insects might experience pain and – for this reason – might be worthy of moral consideration. This was based upon Peter Singer’s assertion that the only prerequisite for having interests is the capacity to experience pleasure and pain (since if something can experience pleasure then it has an interest in pursuing pleasure, and if something can experience pain then it has an interest in avoiding pain). Once identified, these interests must – according to Singer – be counted equally with the same interests when experienced by any other being.

Put simply, if it is morally wrong to cause X amount of pain to a human, then it must also be morally wrong to cause X amount of pain to any other creature capable of experiencing pain – even insects.

But that reasoning seems to run counter to what we’re being urged to do in light of the lanternfly invasion. Being squashed is clearly a painful experience. As such, we would consider it morally reprehensible to squash a human, or a dog, or even a mouse. Yet, for some reason, this very action is here being condoned. How can we make sense of this? Are we in fact doing something morally wrong every time we squash a spotted lanternfly?

An important first step is to note that the experience of being squashed will not be consistent across species. For a human, it will be utterly traumatizing – filled with not only physical pain, but the dread and terror of one’s imminent end. Arguably, the pain will be slightly less for the dog or mouse – if only since they will largely lack awareness of what’s happening to them. What, then, will the experience be like for the lanternfly? This is a difficult question – made all the more difficult by the fact that we are only on the cusp of discovering that insects might feel pain, let alone being able to quantify it. Let’s assume, then, that the amount of pain (both physical and psychological) experienced by a lantern fly upon being squashed is significantly less than that felt by a human or dog or mouse going through the very same experience. Perhaps it’s the equivalent of a human receiving a particularly bad papercut.

What this means, then, is that our moral attitudes towards squashing lantern bugs should be roughly the same as inflicting painful papercuts on others. And, chances are, even though the latter is a relatively minor harm, we would usually refrain from doing this on the assumption that it is morally wrong.

For this reason, we would seem to have a moral reason to refrain from inflicting the precise same amount of pain on lanternflies. To do otherwise would, according to Singer, be speciest.

But we cannot stop our moral considerations there. While it might be wrong to inflict pain on a single insect for no good reason, we also need to take into account how our actions will affect the pain and pleasure of other living beings. This is particularly relevant in the context of invasive species. Some species – by their very existence in an alien environment – create enormous suffering and death for the local fauna. Just look at the ecological devastation wrought by domestic cats. In such cases, a small amount of harm to some animals might be justified by the fact that it avoids a much greater harm to other animals.

The lanternfly might be one such case. While the damage they cause is largely flora-based – feasting on around 70 host plant species – the flow-on ecological effects are set to be devastating, as native fauna finds itself starving as a result of dwindling food supplies.

But here’s the thing: even if some greater good justifies us causing harm to an invasive species, we are under a moral obligation to do all we can to minimize the harm necessary to achieve that good.

And this shouldn’t be surprising. It might be morally permissible for me to break someone’s car window in order to save the life of a severely dehydrated dog on a hot summer’s day. But that same justification wouldn’t allow me to then go on to key their door and slash their tires.

The same limits apply here. Even if we have good reason to do all we can to destroy lanternflies, this does not warrant wanton cruelty. This is why ethicists are so concerned about implementing ‘bounties’ on certain invasive species. Perverse incentives can bring about perverse outcomes. If there is a greater ecological good to be achieved, we may be morally justified in causing harm to certain invasive species. However, this harm will only be permitted to the extent that it is necessary in order to achieve that good. Gratuitous harm will remain morally impermissible. We should endeavor, then, to solve ecological crises while treating invasive species as humanely as possible. And if insects can experience pain, then this includes them too.

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The Painful Truth About Insects

closeup photograph of mosquito

In a recent study, scientists from the Queen Mary University of London argue that insects possess central nervous control of ‘noiception’ – that is, the ability to detect painful stimuli. Put simply, this discovery makes it plausible that insects are capable of feeling pain in much the same way as humans and other animals. It’s worth considering, then, how this finding might be relevant to our moral considerations of insects.

Generally, we tend to think of humans as being equal. But what do we mean by this? Clearly it’s not that all humans are, in fact, equal. Humans differ enormously in their interests and capabilities. Some students want to become rock stars, others want to be mathematicians, while others might suffer from disabilities that make both of those options more difficult to pursue. Nor do we mean that all humans should receive equal treatment – since different humans have vastly different needs. The aspiring rock star needs a guitar, while the math-whiz needs access to quality education. The person suffering from a disability, on the other hand, might need extra assistance that would be unnecessary for their more able-bodied classmates.

It seems, then, that when we say that all humans are equal, we mean to say that the interests of all humans should be given equal consideration.

Put another way: we should care equally about all people – no person is of greater value than another. It’s this very notion that grounds the case against various types of bigotry like racism and sexism. To prioritize the interests of one person over another based purely on their ethnicity or gender is to deny the principle of equality.

In his seminal book, Animal Liberation, Peter Singer considers how the principle of equality might be extended beyond humans. If it’s wrong to prioritize the interests of certain beings based on their ethnicity or gender, then shouldn’t it also be wrong to prioritize them based on their species?

If animals have interests, how can we justify prioritizing our interests above theirs without, essentially, being speciest?

But this raises a very important question: do animals even have interests? It’s certainly clear that humans do. As noted above, some humans have an interest in becoming rock stars, while others have an interest in becoming mathematicians. And then there are those interests that are almost universally held by humans, such as interests in being healthy, safe, financially secure, and loved. But what about animals? It’s not obvious that there are goats who aspire to be rock stars, nor pigs that aspire to be mathematicians. Nor do any animals seem to show concern for things like financial security or love.

According to Singer, however, the only prerequisite for having interests is the capacity to experience pleasure and pain – or what we might call “sentience.” Why? Well, if something can experience pleasure, then it has an interest in pursuing pleasure. Likewise, if something can experience pain, then it has an interest in avoiding pain.

If some living being experiences suffering, then there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into account. And, if we adopt the principle of equality, then that suffering must be counted equally with the same amount of suffering when experienced by any other being.

So if kicking a person and causing them X amount of pain is morally wrong, then kicking a dog and causing that same amount of pain is just as wrong. Likewise, if it would be morally wrong to inflict Y amount of pain on a human in order to test the safety of a new cosmetic, then it will be just as morally wrong to inflict this same amount of pain on an animal for the same purpose.

Singer’s argument has huge ramifications for many of the ways in which we treat animals. Consider the animal suffering that goes into the production of a single cheeseburger – and how terrible we would consider that same suffering if it was experienced by a human. What’s more, this suffering is offset by only a small benefit to the human who eats the burger – a benefit that could just as easily be achieved via non-meat and non-dairy alternatives. In fact, much – if not all – of the animal products and by-products we consume start to become morally questionable when seen in this light.

Of course, one simple solution would be to discount – or disqualify entirely – the suffering of animals on the basis that they aren’t as intelligent as humans. But this is to go against the very principle of equality that many of us hold dear. When thinking about humans, we would consider it reprehensible to say that someone’s pain and suffering is less important simply because they are less intelligent than someone else. So we must take the same approach to animals.

The only consistent way to justify the suffering we inflict on animals is to say that their suffering counts for less simply because they are animals. But that’s speciesism – and it shares precisely the same (very bad) rationale that justifies racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry.

Indeed, Singer’s observations have motivated many people to adopt vegetarian or vegan lifestyles. But what are we to make of this new research that suggests insects might also be sentient? If an ant can feel pleasure and pain, then an ant has interests. And if an ant has interests, then the principle of equality demands that that suffering be counted equally with the same amount of suffering when experienced by any other being. Suppose, for example, that swatting a mosquito causes that mosquito to feel Z amount of pain. Suppose, then, that – for a human – that same amount of pain would be the equivalent of a hard slap to the face. If we believe that slapping a human is morally wrong, then the principle of equality would require us to reach the same moral judgement about inflicting the same amount of pain on a mosquito. This would mean, then, that swatting a mosquito was morally wrong.

It’s a strange conclusion, and one that is still very much open to debate. For one, we would need to establish that insects do in fact experience pain in the same morally relevant way as humans and other non-human animals. We would then need some way of measuring this pain in order to form reasonable moral judgements. It might, for example, turn out that the suffering experienced by a swatted mosquito is minuscule – much less, in fact, than the bite it gives to the next human it encounters. In such a case, we could possibly make a case for the moral permissibility of swatting that mosquito.

But in the absence of better information about whether – and to what extent – insects experience pain, what should we do? There’s a chance that there’s nothing problematic about causing insects to suffer. But there’s also a chance that we’ve been horribly wrong. Until only recently we were still unsure about whether non-human animals experienced pain, with veterinarians trained before 1989 taught to ignore animal suffering. In fact, doctors up until that decade were still skeptical that human babies experienced pain, with many infant surgeries routinely carried out without anesthesia. Given our poor track record of understanding pain in other living beings, the mere possibility that insects suffer should give us reason to pause and reconsider how we treat them.

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Is the Pain of Wild Animals Always Bad?

Close-up color photograph of a screwworm fly on a green leaf.

Should humans intervene to prevent wild animals from suffering? This question has received some attention as of late. Consider, for example, Dustin Crummett’s recent article here at the Post.

In response to this question, I suggest that it is not clear what types of animal suffering are bad. Consequently, it is not clear that human beings ought to intervene on their behalf. I will outline what I think are several types of pain, but I still suggest it is unclear whether human beings should intervene.

Before we hit it off, notice what this question is not. It is not a question of negative obligation: “should humans act in such a way that causes animal suffering?” This question, when we answer “no,” means human beings have a negative obligation to not cause harm. For instance, this question of negative obligation arises in the recent prohibition of a geothermal project in Nevada, a project which could threaten an endangered species of toad.

Instead, the present question is a positive one. When, if ever, should humans intervene to prevent wild animals from suffering? Crummett’s example of the New World screwworm is poignant and motivates us to intervene on behalf of suffering animals. The New World screwworm causes excruciating pain for the prey, and its elimination would not apparently result in ecological harm. In other words, its elimination would only seem to benefit the would-be-prey.

As Crummett argued, human beings ought to reduce wild-animal suffering. To make this point, Crummett entertains an example about a dog that lives in a poor state of experiencing cold, disease, and hunger before dying at an early age. He then uses this example to discern what is bad about the situation, and what is good about helping such an animal. He writes,

Why is what happens to the dog bad? Surely the answer is something like: because the dog has a mind, and feelings, and these events cause the dog to experience suffering, and prevent the dog from experiencing happiness. Why would the person’s helping the dog be good? Surely the answer is something like: because helping the dog helps it avoid suffering and premature death, and allows it to flourish and enjoy life.

Though this all seems intuitively plausible to me, I remain unconvinced. Even if I assume (for the sake of argument) that humans should prevent animal suffering, it is not clear what counts as suffering.

When I reflect upon pain more generally, it is not apparent to me that all kinds of pain are bad. Sure, I don’t like experiencing pain (except for going to the gym, perhaps). But we are talking about morals and value theory, not experience — when something is morally bad, it is not necessarily reducible to my experiential preference.

So, are all pains bad? Consider some different types of pain. In his recent monograph, philosopher David S. Oderberg distinguishes between three types of pain (distinctions not unlike the ones which St. Augustine posits in his little book, On the Nature of Good):

    1. Useful pain;
    2. Pain achieving;
    3. Useless pain.

A useful pain alerts you to something for a good reason. For example, it is useful to experience pain when you burn your hand on a hot stovetop; it is also useful to experience the pain that accompanies going to the gym.

“Pain achieving” is the pain that can accompany the successful operation of an organism’s natural operation or function. For example, pain achieving is the pain a child experiences with growing pains or when growing teeth.

Useless pain, in contrast, is pain that may alert you to an issue but serves no purpose. For example, a useless pain is the pain of chronic nerve damage or that of a phantom limb. This useless pain is useless because the alert it gives cannot successfully motivate the individual to react, or because there are no underlying issues or malfunction of the body to account for this.

According to Oderberg, only useless pain is bad. While the former pains might be unpleasant for the individuals in question, they are not always bad. Indeed, it is good that we experience a high degree of pain when we burn our hands on stovetops — why else would we move them? Surely, if we as human beings only had red lights go off in our peripheries whenever we were burned, it would not be as motivating.

Of the three options, Oderberg’s position that only useless pains are bad seems correct.

But notice a further complication. Even when the pain serves a further good, it can be bad in itself. As philosopher Todd Calder points out, while money can have a good of utility, it is intrinsically neutral. So too with pain. It might be a good of utility, but it could still be bad in itself.

This distinction between types of value explains why pains of utility can still be bad in themselves. While the pain of a sprained ankle is bad because it causes me to be irritable, it still can be bad in itself as a painful experience.

With these distinctions in mind, we come back to the original question: Should humans intervene in wild animal suffering?

It seems that the second distinction between intrinsic value and utility does not help us here. For, if all pain is intrinsically bad, and human beings ought to prevent all pain, we experience a moral overload. This is unrealistic, too onerous. Moreover, this conclusion would require us to intervene in all instances of pain, without discrimination regarding the kinds of pain and the degree of pain. Are we really to consider cases of an animal with a thorn in its side as serious as the case of an animal with a New World screwworm? Certainly not.

The first distinction instead offers a clear answer to the original question: Should humans intervene in wild animal suffering? Only if it is bad. And is the suffering of wild animals bad? If the suffering in question is an instance of useless pain, then yes.

To achieve a resounding “yes” to the original question, we need two things. First, we need a good reason for the assumption we started off with: that human beings are obliged to prevent animal suffering because it is bad (and such prevention amounts to a good act). Is this the case? I have not yet seen a good reason to believe it. Second, we need to see that there are instances of useless pain in wild animal suffering. Could the case of the New World screwworm count as an instance of useless pain? Perhaps. But it looks like it can count as an instance of ‘pain achieving’ as well. Because of this, it is not clear that human beings ought to intervene on behalf of wild animals.

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Is It Time to Show the Lobster a Bit of Respect?

photograph of lobsters in water tank at market

The United Kingdom is currently in the process of revising what the law says about sentience and the ethical treatment of animals. This week news broke that the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation has called for greater protections for non-vertebrates such as octopi and crustaceans. As a consequence, debate is emerging about whether practices such as boiling lobsters alive should be banned. Much of this debate seems to be centered on scientific facts regarding the nervous system of such animals and whether they are capable of feeling pain at all. But, perhaps this is the wrong mindset to have when considering this issue. Perhaps it is more important to consider our own feelings about how we treat lobsters rather than how the lobsters feel about it.

The ethical debate about the treatment of lobsters has mostly focused on the practice of boiling them alive when being prepared for eating. Lobsters are known to struggle for up to two minutes after being placed in boiling water and emit a noise caused by escaping air that many interpret as screaming. In response to such concerns, Switzerland, Norway, Austria, and New Zealand have all banned the practice of boiling lobsters alive and require that they be transported in saltwater rather than being kept in/on ice. But the debate always seems to hinge on the question of sentience. Can a lobster feel pain when being boiled alive? To answer that, questions of sentience become questions of science.

There is no clear consensus among scientists about whether the lobster nervous system permits it to feel pain. But how do you measure pain? To many the reaction to being in boiling water is taken as a sign that the lobster is in pain. Some studies have shown that lobsters will avoid shocks, a process called nociception where the nervous system responds to noxious stimuli by producing a reflex response. This explains why the lobster thrashes in the boiling water. However, other scientists have questioned whether the nervous system of the lobster is sophisticated enough to allow for any actual sense of suffering, arguing that a lobster’s brain is more similar to an insect. They suggest that the sensory response to stimuli is different than that to pain which involves an experience of discomfort, despair and other emotional states.

Indeed as invertebrates, lobsters do not have a central brain, but rather groups of chain ganglia connected by nerves. This can make killing them challenging as simply giving it a blow to the head will not do; a lobster must have its central nervous system destroyed with a complicated cut on the underside. It is recommended that they be stunned electronically. Because of this very different brain structure, it is suggested that lobsters lack the capacity to suffer. As Robert Bayer of the Lobster Institute describes the issue, “Cooking a lobster is like cooking a big bug…Do you have the same concern when you kill a fly or mosquito?”

Nevertheless, critics charge that this thinking is only a form of discrimination against animals with neurological architecture different from our own. Indeed, beyond nervous system reflex responses, because pain is difficult to directly measure, other markers of pain are often driven by using arguments by analogy comparing animals to humans. But creatures who are fundamentally different from humans may make such analogies suspect. In other words, because we don’t know what it is like to be a lobster, it is difficult to say if lobsters feel pain at all or if pain and suffering may fundamentally mean something different for lobsters than they do for humans and other vertebrates. This makes addressing the ethics of how we treat lobster by looking to the science of lobster anatomy difficult. But perhaps there is another way to consider this issue that doesn’t require answering such complex questions.

After all, if we return to Bayer’s remarks comparing lobsters to bugs, there are some important considerations: Is it wrong to roast ants with a magnifying glass? Is it wrong to pull the wings off flies? Typically, people take issue with such practices not merely because we worry about how the ant or the fly feels, but because it reveals something problematic about the person doing it. Even if the ant or the fly doesn’t feel pain (they might), it seems unnecessarily brutal to effectively torture such animals by interfering in their lives in such seemingly thoughtless ways, particularly if not for food. But would it all suddenly be okay if we decide to eat them afterwards? Perhaps such antics reveal an ethical character flaw on our part.

In his work on environmental ethics, Ronald L. Sandler leans on other environmental ethicists such as Paul Taylor to articulate an account of what kind of character we should have in our relationships with the environment. Taylor advocates that actions be understood as morally right or wrong in so far as they embody a respect for nature. Having such a respect for nature entails a “biocentric outlook” where we regard all living things on Earth as possessing inherent moral worth. This is because each living thing has “a good of its own.” That is, such an outlook involves recognizing that all living organisms are teleological centers of life in the same way as humans and that we have no non-question begging justification for maintaining the superiority of humans over other species. In other words, all living things are internally organized towards their own ends or goods which secure their biological functioning and form of life and respecting nature means respecting that biological functioning and the attainment of such ends.

Taylor’s outlook is problematic because it puts all life on the same ethical level. You are no more morally important than the potato you had for dinner (and how morally wrong it was for you to eat that poor potato!) However, Sandler believes that much of Taylor’s insights can be incorporated in a coherent account of multiple environmental virtues, with respect for nature being one of them. As he puts it, “The virtues of respect for nature are informed by their conduciveness to enabling other living things to flourish as well as their conduciveness to promoting the eudemonistic ends.” While multiple virtues may be relevant to how we should act — such that, for example, eating lobster may be ethical — how we treat those lobsters before that point may demonstrate a fundamental lack of respect for a living organism.

Consider the lobster tanks one finds at a local grocery store, where multiple lobsters may be stacked on top of each other in a barren tank with their claws stuck together. Many have complained about such tanks, and some stores have abandoned them as critics charge that they are stressful for the lobster. It is difficult to say that such “live” lobsters are really living any kind of life consistent with the kind of thing a lobster is. Does keeping lobsters in such conditions demonstrate a lack of respect for the lobster as a living organism with a good of its own? As one person who launched a petition over the matter puts it “I’m in no way looking to eliminate the industry, or challenge the industry, I’m just looking to have the entire process reviewed so that we can ensure that if we do choose to eat lobsters, that we’re doing it in a respectful manner.”

So perhaps the ethical issue is not whether lobsters can feel pain as we understand it. Clearly lobsters have nervous systems that detect noxious stimuli, and perhaps that should be enough to not create such stimuli for their system if we don’t have to. We know it doesn’t contribute to the lobster’s own good. So perhaps the ethical treatment of lobsters should focus less on what suffering is created and focus more on our own respect for the food that we eat.

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Bullfighting: Moral Good or Unnecessary Cruelty?

An image of a bull dying in a bullfight.

Bullfighting has always been controversial in the Spanish-speaking world. Strangely, most of the intellectual defenders of this ancient tradition have not been Hispanic themselves. In the twentieth century, the staunchest defender of bullfighting was Ernest Hemingway, an American. Yet, Hemingway was not a philosopher, and his defense of bullfighting relied more on emotion than on reason. The staunchest intellectual defender of bullfighting in the 21st century is a Frenchman, Francis Wolff. Unlike Hemingway, Wolff is a philosopher, and in a series of books and articles, he has attempted to make a philosophical defense of bullfighting, based on reasoned ethical arguments. Although these arguments are sometimes ingenious, they are for the most part flawed.

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