How Does it Feel to Be a Bug?

As you may recall, Matthew Adelstein uses r-K selection theory to argue that the average bug’s life is not worth living. Quick version: Humans have a few offspring, who typically receive immense parental investment. Bugs have enormous numbers of offspring, who typically receive near-zero parental investment. Due to these radically different evolutionary strategies, the average human has a long and tolerable life, while the average bug has a brief life that swiftly ends in abject misery.

It is a clever observation, and not obviously wrong. But neither is it obviously right. Yes, the vast majority of bugs quickly die terrible deaths. But weighty factors cut the other way.

1. Unlike humans, bugs rarely linger in misery. They never suffer for years in assisted living or on life support.

2. Unlike humans, bugs probably have no sense of loss. They don’t miss lost friends or lost parents, or endure the hell of losing a child.

3. Unlike humans, bugs probably have no sense of disappointment. They don’t wish they’d studied harder in school, chosen a different job, married someone else, or had kids.

4. Unlike humans, probably have no sense of humiliation. They don’t think about their low status in bug society, fret about losing their high status, or worry about their children’s downward mobility.

5. Unlike humans, bugs probably have no sense of dread. As long as they aren’t currently suffering, they probably don’t worry about future suffering. They don’t worry about losing their jobs, or the health of a friend, and almost surely don’t fear aging — or even death.

6. Unlike humans, bugs are extremely well-adapted for their environments. They don’t eat themselves into morbid obesity because they evolved in a poor-food environment. They don’t crave unhealthy food or drink or narcotics. Indeed, unlike humans, they probably feel comfortable wherever they live, because almost all bugs live in environments that closely match their ancestors’ unto ages of ages.

From this, I draw two big conclusion: one weak, one strong. R-K selection theory notwithstanding…

1. It’s not entirely clear that average net happiness (positive versus negative experiences) is lower for bugs than humans.

2. It’s far from clear that average net happiness for bugs is negative.

Who cares? If, like Adelstein, you think that insect suffering is morally important, you should be seriously alarmed by his current call for mass extermination of insects. While you may be sparing an immense number of beings from lives of horrible suffering, there is a good chance that you are wiping about a vast number of beings whose lives are, on balance, well worth living. Instead of striving to kill bugs, you should be devoting massive brain power to studying the long-neglected question of “How does it feel to be a bug?”

If, in contrast, you realize that insect suffering is totally trivial from a moral point of view, you should just be amused. Amused how? By the moral whiplash of the dogmatic utilitarians, whose rebugnant meta-ethics imply that humanity’s summum bonum is to make insects either extinct or the lords of the Earth, pending decisive insight into the insect psyche.