Thinking Insect Suffering Is The Biggest Deal In The World Is Surprisingly Intuitive

By Bentham's Bulldog @ 2025-05-19T15:27 (+24)

This is a crosspost of a blog post I wrote! 

I think insect suffering is the worst thing in the world by far. I know it sounds weird! But please hear me out—ideally with an open mind!

Many views seem intuitive but only because of bias. To southern slave-owners, the permissibility of slavery was intuitive. But this was only as a result of bias and a profound failure of empathy. They only considered things from their own perspectives, never thinking about what it would be like to be a tormented and subjugated slave. Had they done so, they’d have correctly judged slavery to be the abomination it was.

I think the same thing is true about insect suffering. People have the strong intuition that it doesn’t matter at all. But when one really reflects, this turns out to be for unreliable and superficial reasons. Insect suffering is genuinely important, and we only neglect it because of bias and irrationality. I think there are four considerations which when considered collectively make vivid the significance of the 10^18 insects presently suffering.

(Note: when I say insect, I’m really talking about plausibly-conscious arthropods—which is a class of very numerous organisms including crabs, shrimp, spiders, and other things that aren’t technically buts—but repeatedly using scientific terms like “arthropod” is lame, so I’m just going to talk about insects.)

Consider first: you shouldn’t directly trust your intuition that insect suffering doesn’t matter. You’re not an insect, you have no natural empathy towards insects, there’s social incentive not to care about insect welfare, and caring about them is inconvenient. Just like you shouldn’t trust the intuitions of white slave owners who have no empathy towards slaves, you shouldn’t trust your own direct intuitions about insects. If you feel no empathy towards a creature for superficial reasons, relating to its size and the way it looks, you’re obviously not in a position to reliably judge its worth.

(Note: I am not making a comparison between black people and insects. I am making a broader point about untrustworthy intuitions.)

Second: insects plausibly can suffer a great deal. The most detailed report ever compiled on the subject estimated that they suffer at least 1% as intensely as we do, and on average around 10%. That could, of course, be an underestimate, but it could also be a dramatic overestimate.

If a creature can suffer, to decide how much its interests count, you should imagine yourself in its shoes. Ask yourself: how much would you pay to avoid having to experience a painful death from the perspective of an insect. These creatures potentially suffer quite intensely and often writhe around in agony for hours before eventually succumbing to death. The way they struggle is quite similar to how larger animals do. While they’re small, from their behavior it looks like they suffer intensely. Just as it would be wrong for a giant to assume that you don’t feel intense pain when crushed to death because you’re small, it’s also wrong to assume that about insects.

If insects screamed in volume proportional to their suffering, nothing could be heard over the cries of insects. If you lived the life of every creature who ever lived, you’d spend roughly 100% of your time as an insect. If you were a randomly selected organism placed behind the veil of ignorance, odds are nearly 100% that you’d be an insect. If you empathized more deeply, feeling the pain of all those around you within a 100-mile radius, every other sensation would be drowned out by the agony and pleasures of the insects.

In short, when we empathize with insects, we come to see that they matter.

Third, there are an astonishing number of insects, and they collectively feel an utterly unfathomable quantity of suffering (provided they can suffer). There are about 10^18 insects—100 million for every human. In expectation, human suffering is a rounding error compared to theirs. Every second at least hundreds of billions of insects die. There is something darkly amusing about the fact that holding we should take seriously the hundreds of billions of painful deaths every second is seen as insane and radical!

Even if we assume that the pain of their death is only about as bad as the pain of a human being punched in the face, insect deaths collectively cause about as much suffering as if everyone in the world was punched in the face a hundred times per second. And that’s assuming it takes them only one second to die and ignoring all the rest of their suffering.

In the face of that ocean of agony, we’d need some strong argument for ignoring it. But when you seriously consider what it’s like to be in agony, you can see that it’s bad. As I’ve noted before, there’s no plausible explanation of why human agony is bad that doesn’t imply the agony of other species is bad too.

People often say that our agony is worse because of various cognitive traits we have. We can do calculus, conceptualize of our life as a whole, and reason about morality. But this explanation has two problems:

  1. This doesn’t apply to all humans. Babies and the severely mentally disabled cannot reason about morality, do calculus, or think of their lives as a whole. Nonetheless, severe, prolonged agony experienced by babies and the severely mentally disabled is obviously quite bad.
  2. This seems entirely irrelevant to the badness of ones pain. When I think about unpleasant experiences I’ve had, their badness seems to be about how they feel. The fact that I’m smart and can think about my life doesn’t seem at all relevant to this. If I temporarily lost the ability to think rationally or conceptualize of my life as a whole, it would still be bad for me to be tortured. Headaches are bad because they hurt, not because the people who have them are smart.

To avoid these problems, people often suggest that the relevant characteristic that makes our pain important and insect pain unimportant is our species. The babies and mentally enfeebled come from a rational species, and this is why their pain is important. Animals do not, so even when they experience unfathomable amounts of agony, this doesn’t much matter. But this account has huge problems too:

  1. Imagine we came across a planet full of creatures exactly like human babies, but with a catch: they never became adults. Their species never became rational. They remained permanently like human babies. Imagine they even look like babies. On this account, their suffering wouldn’t be very important. But this is ridiculous. When you next hold a baby, try seriously entertaining the thought that the only reason that their suffering is bad isn’t because of their present state, but because they share a species with intelligent creatures. The thought is completely insane.
  2. Once again, this seems to obviously get wrong why pain is bad. When I think back to why it’s bad when I suffer greatly, it seems to have nothing to do with my intelligence or the intelligence of my species. Rather, it seems like it’s bad because it hurts. Why the hell do the mental capacities of creatures other than you affect how bad your suffering is?
  3. Why the heck does species matter? Why not, say, kingdom or clade? This seems obviously wildly arbitrary and gerrymandered. Why the heck does the badness of one’s pain depend on qualities that people other than them possess? This would be like suggesting that how bad one’s pain is depends on what neighborhood one lives in—clearly ridiculous on its face.

 

Some people object that we don’t really know if insects suffer. And this is absolutely correct. We can’t be sure. But there’s a sizeable chance they suffer, as international bodies consistently conclude when they investigate this subject. They respond in many ways as if they suffer: responding to anesthetic, nursing their wounds, making tradeoffs between pain and reward, cognitively modeling both risks and reward in decision-making, responding in novel ways to novel experiences, self-medicating, and much more. If you’re not sure if creatures are suffering, then if they’re being harmed by the thousand-quadrillions, that’s pretty serious! Plus I think the evidence makes it more likely they suffer than not.

Others object that just as no mild pains can add up to be as severe as one extreme pain, no amount of insect pain matters as much as intense human pain. But this is dubious.

First of all, we don’t know how intensely insects suffer. The most detailed report on the subject guessed they suffer on average about 5-15% as intensely as we do. Now, if a person experiences something 15% as bad as dying painfully, that’s obviously morally serious. So if insects experience pain that intensely, it doesn’t matter if tiny pains don’t outweigh a few sizeable pains. Insects plausibly don’t just experience tiny, irrelevant pain.

Second, even putting aside these precise estimates, we don’t know much about how intensely insects suffer. We have no very compelling evidence about it. As a result, we shouldn’t assume with high confidence that they don’t suffer intensely. But if there’s even a 1% chance that they suffer 20% as intensely as we do, then insect suffering is still, in expectation, responsible for nearly all of the world’s extreme suffering.

Third, the view that lots of small pains can’t add up to one significant pain is quite philosophically controversial. Many philosophers reject it. But if insect suffering is the worst thing in the world by far on a widely-held philosophical view, then everyone should take it pretty seriously.

My fourth argument for why taking seriously insect welfare is intuitive is that when we modify the real world scenario to remove bias, it seems super obvious. To see this, let’s note a few things.

First, humans aren’t good at comparing big numbers. We display a bias called scope neglect, wherein we don’t intuitively grasp how much bigger a billion is than a million and intuitively regard them as the same. People will pay as much money to save 2,000 birds as 20,000 or 200,000.

To correct against this, instead of comparing the interests of 8 billion humans to 10^18 insects, let’s compare the interests of 100 million insects to one human (for that is the number of insects there are for every person).

Second, we’re biased against insects because they’re small and weird-looking—we don’t naturally empathize with them. To correct against this, let’s imagine that insects looked like people but still had the mental capacities of insects.

100 million is roughly the population of the United States. So now imagine that you were the only normal human in the United States. The other 100 million people (!!!!) were cognitively like insects but in human bodies. While you lived a mostly normal, comfortable life, these creatures were constantly starved to death, eaten alive, and crushed to death by giant creatures. They often writhed around in agony over the course of hours before eventually dying.

These people were, in many ways, like some of the most mentally disabled humans. While they could not speak or display any great intelligence, they still seemed to show signs of pain. When hurt, they would struggle to get away. They responded to anesthetic, made tradeoffs between pain and reward, could learn from others, appeared to get stressed, and seemed, in various other ways, to feel pain.

In such a country where there were 100 million of these humanoids, where every day you witnessed many of them starve in the streets, be crushed or devoured by larger creatures, cry and whimper in pain, and have their blood run out as their corpse is scraped against the pavement, would it be reasonable to think only your interests mattered? That you could do to these creatures as you wish, for their interests are billions of times less important than yours? Would it really be reasonable to see one of these creatures be eaten alive, and think that what happened was of virtually no importance?

Would it be reasonable to hold that these creatures, though they could probably feel pain, though they were probably collectively experiencing a literally unfathomable amount of pain, didn’t matter at all. They were, after all, members of an unintelligent species. Would it be reasonable to think that your problems matter so much more than theirs—that you can run them over with impunity, torment thousands of them in farms before eating them, and treat them as morally valueless robots?

Of course not! If you were the only intelligent human in the United States, and the rest of the country was filled with these creatures, you would not be the locus of nearly all the moral worth in the entire country. Nearly all of what matters in the country wouldn’t be what happened to you, but what happened to them. But insects are as numerous per person as these creatures, and only differ from them in utterly morally irrelevant ways—like how they look.

When one seriously thinks about how perverse it would be to treat these creatures as if they were valueless—to prioritize your own interests over the 100 million beings crying in agony and terror—they have begun to grok the senselessness and immorality of our neglect of insects.

(For what to do once you’re convinced insect suffering is super important, see here).


 


Henry Howard🔸 @ 2025-05-19T22:38 (+16)

Two points:

1. Why stop at insects, why not write this same article about demodex mites, earthworms or krill?


2. I think there’s a big reason why the concerns of insects and smaller animals are dismissed that you haven’t touched on, which is that any consideration of these animals leads to absurd conclusions, like that every moral pursuit of humanity up to now is actually meaningless compared to improving the lives of insects. Most people can see that this is not a fruitful avenue of thinking.

I think you’re underestimating the average person by suggesting that the only reason they’re not interested in insect welfare is entrenched social norms. Whereas there were reasonable alternatives to slavery, and there are reasonable alternatives to factory farming, I think the average person can intuit that there’s no reasonable alternative to just politely ignoring the suffering of the quintillions of insects, worms and mites on the planet.

Pete Rowlett @ 2025-05-21T02:08 (+12)

Your first point seems like a legitimate question to me.  I've not read much about those animals, but I would assume there are many of them, perhaps far more than there are insects.  I would be curious to read about indicators of their sentience.  The author, however, described evidence of several indicators of insect sentience ("responding to anesthetic, nursing their wounds, making tradeoffs between pain and reward, cognitively modeling both risks and reward in decision-making, responding in novel ways to novel experiences, self-medicating"), but doesn't seem to think the animals you listed are conscious.  I would guess they are missing some of these indicators.

Your second point is less interesting.  A couple of your claims seem false, or at least incompatible.  For example, the conclusion that every other moral pursuit of humanity is relatively meaningless if insects are given consideration also requires that helping insects be tractable, which you don't seem to think.  If we cannot and could never help insects, the greatest moral pursuits must be other (likely more normal) things, which I suppose would make them relatively meaningful.  If we do say that helping insects is tractable and conclude that other pursuits are relatively meaningless, we can still acknowledge that on an absolute scale those other pursuits are incredibly meaningful, and that many of those pursuits are instrumentally useful for our goal of helping insects.

You also make the claim that "the average person can intuit that there’s no reasonable alternative to just politely ignoring the suffering of the quintillions of insects, worms and mites on the planet."  Again, I think one ought to be skeptical of their intuitions, especially surrounding issues that they have very little knowledge of.  A nascent field of research has sprung up around these issues, and I suspect that more insights and paths forward will emerge as we learn more.  There are, however, things we can do already.  Brian Tomasic has written "How to Kill Bugs Humanely," which almost everyone can apply in day-to-day life.  A quick search of Wild Animal Initiative's research library revealed "Improving pest management for wild insect welfare," which says that "Agricultural pest insect management practices may be a particularly tractable avenue for improving the expected welfare of a large number of insects."

If I wanted to write something to disagree with the post, I'd have explored other avenues such as these:

  1. The alleged indicators of sentience cited in the research aren't good at indicating sentience -- here are some better ones, and here's why I think they're better
  2. Some insects do show evidence of indicators cited in the research, but many don't
  3. Insects generally fail to show evidence of the indicators that I think are best
  4. The insects that are most likely to be sentient (based on some set of indicators) are also the hardest to help (or something else arguing intractability)
  5. The methodology in the research coming up with moral weights/welfare capacities is weak (This would be a critique that I'd be particularly interested in from someone trained in research methods, and I think it's an easier target)
  6. Extreme suffering matters so much more than moderate suffering that the likely aggregation of far more instances of moderate suffering is insufficiently significant to make intervening worthwhile
  7. Altruists should be risk-averse, and insect work is risky in relevant ways (https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/how-can-risk-aversion-affect-your-cause-prioritization/)
  8. Sentience isn't the trait we should be focused on; the metaethical foundations are weak

I think the early questions are particularly interesting and underexplored, but there are many other options too!  I downvoted your comment because I think it doesn't effectively engage with the substance of the disagreement, not because I disagree. I would be excited to see more comments from people whose views don't overlap with mine, which currently lean towards supporting work on issues affecting small non-human animals, provided that they engage with the core disagreements in a meaningful way.

tobycrisford 🔸 @ 2025-05-20T07:28 (+11)

I'm not sure if I agree with you or not, but I don't know why you were getting so downvoted for this comment (before I strong up-voted, just to balance things out).

I thought the karma system was supposed to be independent of agreement/disagreement? I want to see your side of the discussion explored in the comments. I don't think people should be downvoting this kind of objection!

Your point 1 seems like a very good question to me, and I would be interested to read the author's reply.

Your second point also seems like a reasonable response to the piece, and I'm sure represents what a lot of people would feel, especially if not familiar with EA. The author did a good job of anticipating and responding to lots of potential objections, but I don't think directly addressed this "doesn't this lead to absurd conclusions?" objection.

The whole argument does feel like it resembles a Pascal's mugging, in the same vein as strong-longtermism. When you try to do expected value maximization using Bayesian subjective probabilities (e.g. around extinction risk or likelihood of insect sentience or intensity of insect experience), and then start considering situations with huge amounts of potential value, it does seem like a recipe for decision paralysis: "but look how big these numbers are, you can't be that certain they don't matter, surely??"

Anthony DiGiovanni @ 2025-05-21T14:43 (+10)

FWIW, while I didn't downvote the comment, I can see how folks would consider "Why stop at X?" a lazy "gotcha" argument or appeal to absurdity heuristic, which seems worth discouraging.

tobycrisford 🔸 @ 2025-05-22T07:13 (+3)

Would you give your wallet to a pascal mugger?

If yes: Guess what? I am a sorcerer from a parallel universe who has the ability to conjure arbitrary numbers of sentient beings into existence at will, and subject them to extreme torture. You tell me how unlikely you think this claim is. I will then threaten 10x the reciprocal of that number, unless you give me £100. I can send you my details and we can arrange the transfer.

If no: How do you explain this other than by an appeal to absurdity? I would love to know the solution to this problem.

Unless or until we have a better solution to this problem than "that's absurd", then I think we have to allow appeals to absurdity, especially when used against an argument that bears some resemblance to this pascal mugger example, at least superficially.

Anthony DiGiovanni @ 2025-05-22T07:52 (+10)

I happen to have a response here that doesn't appeal to absurdity. :) (Cf. Karnofsky here.)

tobycrisford 🔸 @ 2025-05-22T18:42 (+1)

Haha, ok, fair enough, I was not expecting that response!

Your solution (and Karnofsky's) sound very interesting to me. But I'll need to read both links in more depth to properly wrap my head around it.

A few questions though:

  • Karnofsky's worked example for applying their multi-model technique leads with: "does this action deviate greatly from 'normality?'"  Why is this not just a more formalized version of the appeal to absurdity heuristic?
  • Not everyone is a galaxy-brain philosopher who can come up with complex blogposts like those to explain why giving their wallet to a Pascal mugger is wrong, yet everyone gets the correct (presumably) answer to this thought experiment anyway. And I think most are getting there by using some kind of absurdity heuristic? I think that should count in favour of the usefulness of the appeal to absurdity heuristic! Really feels like there's a good galaxy-brain meme in this. (I get I'm rolling back here on my early suggestion that we could abandon the absurdity heuristic as soon as just one person could come up with a solution to the problem of pascal's mugger).
  • Back to the actual subject of this post: Do you think the approach outlined in your 2 links could be used as an argument against the overwhelming importance of insect suffering, at least for someone who was extremely uncertain about the likelihood of insect sentience or its intensity?
Anthony DiGiovanni @ 2025-05-24T10:00 (+2)

Thanks! I unfortunately don't have time to engage fully with this thread going forward, but briefly:

  • To be clear, I don't share Karnofsky's overall framework. I'm skeptical of the "regression to normality" criterion myself. (And I don't find his model of the problem behind Pascal's mugging probabilities compelling, since he still uses precise estimates.)
  • In the Pascal's mugging case, I think people have some fuzzy sense that the mugger's claim is made-up, which can be more carefully operationalized with imprecise credences. But if we can't even point to what our "this is absurd" reaction is about, and are instead merely asserting that our pretheoretic sense should dictate our decisions, I'm more skeptical. Especially when we're embracing an ethical principle most people would consider absurd (impartial altruism).
Henry Howard🔸 @ 2025-05-22T00:06 (+2)

Appeal to absurdity is a reasonable objection and shouldn't be discouraged. We need to be able to say clearly why idea X doesn't also imply some similar absurd idea Y.

NickLaing @ 2025-05-20T12:35 (+8)

@tobycrisford 🔸 unfortunately on mamy animal welfare threads, more extreme dissenting views get downvoted to oblivion without strong up votes (like mine and yours) to compensate. This pattern seems mostly to apply to animal welfare threads unfortunately, and I think more discourse would be encouraged if animal welfare supporters didn't obliterate dissenting views.

Only a handful of us, including myself and @Henry Howard🔸 engage with different perspectives on these animal welfare threads and I think it would be more useful if these kind of comments were encouraged, even if only to better understand what many (probably most) non EA people might be intuiting and thinking when they see these arguments.

I'm mostly not engaging with these threads because I often don't find the engagement particularly rewarding unfortunately. I'll keep trying from time to time :D

I think @Henry Howard🔸 s 2 points are very important, even if you don't necessarily agree with them.

Henry Howard🔸 @ 2025-05-20T23:16 (+5)

Agreed Nick. One of my recent comments has 7 agrees, 11 disagrees but -10 karma. If 7 people agree with a comment it's unlikely to be disruptive trolling that needs to be buried.

Clear misuse of voting and evidence of heavy forum bias that I sense but can't prove.

NickLaing @ 2025-05-21T06:25 (+2)

I'm not sure it's "misuse" of voting exactly, I  think people should vote how they want. I just think this downvoting pattern is unfortunate for encouraging discourse and a diversity of views.

Bentham's Bulldog @ 2025-05-20T09:19 (+8)
  1. I'm doubtful that any of those are conscious, but I agree that given that it's possible they are, their interests matter a decent amount in expectation--though probably less than insects.  
  2. If the world is very weird then the right ethical view should get weird results.  For more on this see https://wonderandaporia.substack.com/p/surely-were-not-moral-monsters and https://benthams.substack.com/p/lyman-stone-continues-being-dumb?utm_source=publication-search starting at "Lyman's a pro-natalist".  A view shouldn't be judged by matching intuitions about the actual world if those intuitions were formed unreliably. 
Henry Howard🔸 @ 2025-05-20T23:07 (+3)

I'm doubtful that any of those are conscious

 

Why? The average person says that same thing about insects.

SummaryBot @ 2025-05-19T15:38 (+1)

Executive summary: This exploratory post argues that insect suffering is plausibly the largest source of suffering in the world, and that dismissing it is primarily a result of cognitive bias, not sound moral reasoning; the author aims to make concern for insect welfare feel intuitive by examining empathy failures, moral analogies, and the sheer scale of insect suffering.

Key points:

  1. Bias undermines our moral intuitions about insects: The widespread belief that insect suffering doesn’t matter is shaped by lack of empathy, social norms, and aesthetic aversion—similar to how past injustices (like slavery) were upheld by biased intuitions.
  2. Insects plausibly suffer—and may do so intensely: Scientific evidence suggests insects may feel pain at ~1–10% the intensity of humans, with behavioral indicators like wound-nursing, learning, and responses to anesthetics supporting this.
  3. Insect suffering likely dwarfs human suffering in scale: With ~10^18 insects alive and billions dying every second, even low-probability, low-intensity suffering among them could far outweigh human suffering in expectation.
  4. Arguments for privileging human suffering often fail: Claims that cognitive sophistication, species membership, or intelligence justify discounting insect pain are challenged as philosophically weak, arbitrary, or morally irrelevant.
  5. Empathy grows when biases are stripped away: Through thought experiments that equalize scale or appearance (e.g. humanoid insect analogues), the author shows that many would find insect suffering morally urgent if not for their current biases.
  6. Even uncertainty about insect suffering justifies moral concern: Given the plausible risk of immense suffering, precautionary reasoning supports taking insect welfare seriously—especially in light of neglectedness and potential tractability.

 

 

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