[sillysaurus3]

I try not to kill flies, no. The only exception is for multiple flies that won't go away. Ditto for ants.

It's a bit strange that violence toward insects is fine, but violence towards dogs is not. Ever killed a dog because it annoyed you?

That said, doing it for science at least has a justification.

[mikeash]

It's because insects have such a primitive nervous system that we don't see them as being aware in the same way that a dog is.

You draw the line somewhere, right? Drawing the line at a certain complexity of the nervous system is more sensible than drawing it at "animals" in general, IMO.

[Falling3]

Err on the side of caution. Draw the line as far as practically possible. We have a long history of underestimating the mental abilities of other animals. Heck, now we've got evidence of ants passing the mirror test.

[mikeash]

Do you breathe through a filter and sweep the ground in front of you like the Jains?

[dTal]

>as far as practically possible

There's a big difference in effort, and not much difference in outcome, between doing as the Jains do and simply endeavouring not to kill things on purpose.

[mikeash]

I don't see what's impractical about breathing through a filter and sweeping the ground. Inconvenient, to be sure, but that's far from the same thing.

I mean, I wouldn't do it, but it seems to me that if you're advocating "as far as practically possible" then it would include that.

[matz1]

I draw the line at Human and Not Human.

[mirimir]

Well, that is the biological norm.

And better than friend vs stranger ;)

[PerfectElement]

Any objective justification for that or just your own bias?

[labdsf]

Just as mirimir said, it is biological norm to draw line between your own kind and everyone else. For example, both dogs and cats don't kill each other, but dog can easily kill a cat.

[giggles_giggles]

Chimps form tribes and go to war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

[b6]

Both dogs and cats do kill each other. It is not uncommon at all.

[3131s]

Yep, cats fight brutally all the time. My wife's old cat was a fighter and had the scars to prove it. No doubt he had killed many cats, and then he eventually succumbed to an infection from a nasty neck wound acquired in a fight.

[matz1]

Just because I'm human.

[TuringTest]

Are you a mammal?

[frostymarvelous]

Especially if we're adrift and starving. In that situation, the more complex the nervous system, the better.

[darth_mastah]

Why limit yourself? Draw the line between you and not-you. Such fun.

[Eleopteryx]

>You draw the line somewhere, right

Yeah, I just have to worry about higher beings justifying the termination of my primitive nervous system "for science". Perhaps my consciousness is so dim relative to theirs that it would be analogous to me squashing a bug. I hope that their methods are advanced enough that they don't need to.

[freeflight]

>Yeah, I just have to worry about higher beings justifying the termination of my primitive nervous system "for science".

They might as well just terminate your primitive nervous system for their own nutritional needs or out of mere hunting instinct. Plenty of animals do this all the time, nature isn't romantic idealistic, it's ruthless and unforgiving.

[Godel_unicode]

Or alternatively, beautifully efficient.

[kwhitefoot]

Efficient at what? Efficiency is always relative to a particular goal, what did you have in mind?

[greggyb]

Propagation of a species.

[mirimir]

Eating other species does have selective advantages.

[balthamael]

Any consciousness vastly superior to ours would be so complex that we wouldn't even be aware of it. So it wouldn't matter what it would do to us. It's the same with most animals. We might as well be gods to them. An ant lives in a completely different reality. The whole concept of "animal rights" is based on the flawed notion of trying to equate our reality to that of completely different beings. Something that is unable to even understand the concept of rights is incapable of having them, or morals, to begin with. Rights are not given, they are taken. There is a reason why humans rule Earth and not gerbils. Rights or morals didn't exist until we invented them. There is no objective spiritual truth out there.

Consciousness requires a critical mass of brain power. A wolf is relatively intelligent but not conscious, they are biological machines that only think about killing and mating and they have been doing that, without change for hundreds of thousands of years. And if the environment doesn't change then they will continue being identical for hundreds of thousands of years more. Trying to give animals human properties is really very foolish. It's like trying to do that with computers, just because they can give us illusions of intelligence and consciousness, but because computers don't have cute faces and cuddly bodies nobody thinks about it. Evolution really is very efficient but brutally so. Only reason why humans have things like compassion is because it has been evolutionarily advantageous to us. A single human is really quite weak and underpowered, we need to cooperate, it's the key to our progress. It is also why we think babies are cute and why we are instinctively protective of them and why sex feels good. There really is no deeper meaning behind any of it. If we had evolved from tigers then the world would look very (brutally)different, because tigers are solitary and territorial animals that have absolutely no use for things like compassion, empathy or cooperativeness. We wouldn't think twice about killing anything if it suited us, not even other tigers and it would be completely normal to us. If some hairless ape came to us on his high horse and started preaching about morals and rights then we would think that he was crazy, and then we would eat him.

[frostymarvelous]

The fact that I just erased my comment out of fear that it would be misunderstood and downvoted to hell scares me.

[monocasa]

I mean, ants have passed the mirror test.

[orthecreedence]

Every time I advocate for animal rights on this forum, it's met with downvotes and people huffing and puffing about the benefit to humanity and science.

Your argument is sound...flies are animals. They have exoskeletons, six legs, and compound eyes but they are animals nonetheless. However, our cultural "worth" of flies is much lower than that of dogs, so even people who supposedly value logic above all else would rather scoff and silently disagree than challenge their own shaky belief system.

Granted, if a few dead caterpillars can cure our accumulating trash problem, that's a tradeoff I am ok with.

[greenshackle2]

Do you have a fully-coherent, logical system for deciding which lives to care about, and how much? I'd be interested to hear.

'Animals' is not a natural kind. There's no logical reason to care about all animals just because they are animals.

I care about dogs, pigs, other people, etc. not because they're 'animals', but because I think they are plausibly conscious (to varying degrees) and they can experience joy and suffering. Insects, not so much.

I'm unwilling to care any nonzero amount about insects. Here is why.

There are something like a billion billion insects in the world. Given their short lifetimes, it means dozens of billions of billions are born and die each year. Wild insect lives are mostly short and brutal. If you care at all about an insect's life, that tiny amount multiplied by dozens of billion billions means your moral concern for insects should pretty much swamp out any other concern.

You'd have to select how much you care about each insect life with suspicious precision for the sum total to be significantly different from zero, but less than how much you care about human and dog lives.

So to be coherent, you have to either not care at all about insects, or your first priority in life should be to help insects. I, uh, choose not to care.

(Some people seriously care though. See: http://reducing-suffering.org/the-importance-of-insect-suffe...)

[orthecreedence]

So you argument is that it's fine to not care for insects because there are a lot of them, and because their lives are short and brutal.

I would say the opposite. Animals whose lives are rife with pain and misfortune can use all the help anyone is willing to offer. Granted, I will not seek out every fly and try to "save" it. But if I come across one I can help, I will do so. I think you're making the argument "either you HAVE to care about every fly or you CANNOT care about any flies." Perhaps that logic works for you, but I think it's a fallacy. I can care about flies without needing to care about the well-being of every fly. I also adhere to non-interference. If a fly is caught in a spider web, I will leave it. To free the fly is to starve the spider. Some things we just don't have control over. But I will do my best personally to not harm other animals.

I said this in another comment, but I'll repeat:

> I will show kindness to animals, but only to the point where it doesn't completely impede my life or my ability to find happiness.

In other words, it doesn't impede life or my happiness to catch a fly and bring it outside. Therefor it falls under the "show kindness to animals" category.

(I should add an addendum to that: any animal that is attacking me physically is subject to death (horse flies, mosquitoes, dogs, bears, etc)).

Given all that, I do not judge people who don't care about insects. I get it, completely. But that doesn't mean I won't stop challenging people's viewpoint on why it's ok to kill some animals and not others.

[greenshackle2]

> it's fine to not care for insects

Well no it's not exactly 'fine'. Maybe we will figure out some day that insects are a little bit conscious and it may turn out we have collectively been literally worse than Hitler for not caring.

In the meantime I choose not to care, not as a fully logical decision, but for my own sanity and well-being. I'm a dumb ape who tries (and even maybe succeeds) to be logical sometimes, my moral 'system' is a hodge-podge of intuition, rule-based and consequentialist thinking, I don't claim I have found a fully logical moral system.

> it's fine to not care for insects because there are a lot of them, and because their lives are short and brutal.

No no no, I'm saying, if you care at all, you should care about all of them, because as a rule their lives are short and brutal.

It's not like with humans where a lot of us have ok lives, so you can focus on the ones that have a bad time. Pretty much all insects have a bad time (if they are 'having a time' at all, i.e. if they are conscious).

I'm saying I reject caring about any one insect because it very probably leads to a repugnant conclusion (that I should care about insects above all else), based on utilitarian math -- unless you choose very very carefully how much you care about each insect.

I understand most people only care about local things. I think that's a moral failing, ideally I want to care just as much about people far away than about local people. I don't in practice but I try (I do donate to charities that help people in poor countries far from home.)

If I follow that logic and extend my caring to insects, I should care about all insects.

> I think you're making the argument "either you HAVE to care about every fly or you CANNOT care about any flies." Perhaps that logic works for you, but I think it's a fallacy

That's not my argument, that's my conclusion, based on utilitarian math, and I'm making a probabilistic argument, not a deductive logic argument, so calling it a fallacy is a type error on two counts.

> I also adhere to non-interference. If a fly is caught in a spider web, I will leave it.

What's the logic behind that? If a child stumbles into a pond and drowns, or is mauled by a wild coyote, will you let them die on the basis of non-interference?

[orthecreedence]

> What's the logic behind that distinction? If a child stumbles into a pond and drown, or is mauled by a wild coyote, will you let them die on the basis of non-interference?

Great point, you got me there. All life forms being equal, then yes if I adhered to my own system I suppose I would have to silently watch a child get mauled by a coyote. Obviously, I wouldn't take it that far, so perhaps there's more criteria to the decisions than I'm admitting or able to even dig out of my psyche at the moment. I'll think about this.

Your other points about utilitarian math are well-taken, and perhaps I misunderstood you there.

> If I follow that logic and extend my caring to insects, I should care about all insects.

So if you care about starving children, and apply the same rules you apply to children to insects, you'd be donating a lot to charity, basically. Makes sense =]. So once again, my live-and-let-die attitude towards insects is at odds with my "help unfortunate members of humanity" "morality." Another good point (granted, I don't donate much to charity, but if I did, I would probably donate to poor/starving people as opposed to insect charities).

> I'm a dumb ape who tries (and even maybe succeeds) to be logical sometimes, my moral 'system' is a hodge-podge of intuition, rule-based and consequentialist thinking, I don't claim I have found a fully logical moral system.

This is probably the most coherent, self-aware moral system I've heard. Most people try to ascribe their beliefs to some overarching theme that they pretend to follow in all circumstances, when in reality most of our actions are governed by a tiny fraction of what we believe to be morality, and the rest is knee-jerk reactions to situations that affect us emotionally one way or the other. Not only that, but our beliefs (as you pointed out in my case), are a "hodge-podge" of rules, emotions, and hardwiring.

All that said, I still try to be nice to all animals, and will continue to do so until I find the next mishmash set of rules to figure out why I believe what I believe.

EDIT: relevant: http://wondermark.com/c/2015-06-25-1135earn.png

[greenshackle2]

> So if you care about starving children, and apply the same rules you apply to children to insects, you'd be donating a lot to charity, basically.

To insect charity yeah. Or spending a lot of time doing insect advocacy or something.

Instead I donate for anti-malaria bed nets for kids and argue about animal ethics on the internet.

> if I adhered to my own system I suppose I would have to silently watch a child get mauled by a coyote

Right. Obviously no one but psychopaths act like that. I think what you call 'non-interference' ties in with the difference between the moral weight of action vs inaction. Most people's moral intuition draw a distinction between the two, and think action matters more. The interesting thing is that you can construct scenarios where that intuition changes.

Don't know if that comic was aimed at me I can sympathize with black hat guy though I know he's supposed to be the annoying dick in the comic.

I think it's interesting to take propositions to their logical extremes, but you have to hedge the results with common sense because when you take things to their extremes a small error in reasoning could lead you far astray.

[red75prime]

Would it be more or less ethical if researchers killed caterpillars infected by parasitic wasps, preventing them from being eaten alive?

[semi-extrinsic]

The utilitarian in me chooses to attach value to insects according to how I perceive their value in the ecosystem. Bees, bumblebees, spiders etc. are useful, so I don't kill those. Houseflies, gnats, ticks, mosquitoes on the other hand, I have zero problems killing when they annoy me.

[Zancarius]

Same here. I avoid killing certain invertebrates on a pragmatic basis rather than one of morality. I'll happily ignore or relocate certain species of spiders simply because they'll keep the things I don't like in check while killing others that present a danger to myself or pets around the house (black widows). On the other hand, if you live in an area that's bordered by vast swaths of forest, it quickly becomes impractical to avoid having the occasional creepy-crawly get inside somewhere, and you soon learn that it's best to live and let live. That's how I was taught, at any rate.

Now, humorously, having had "pet" mantids before is a great way to eliminate nuisance insects around the house somewhat autonomously. Although it doesn't always quite work the way you may intend (they'll self-relocate or sometimes lose interest in prey items). ;)

[ajross]

Going further: if a few dead dogs were the price of some significant increase in human welfare (something more than bag recycling, I guess), I think most people would be OK with that. This is exactly the trade we make in the pharmaceutical industry every day (not with so many dogs per se, but with organisms at least as complex, cute and fuzzy).

I don't see much evidence for a "shaky belief system". Or maybe you're making a specific point about dogs, given that they were bred specifically to "feel like people" to us? Meh. I'm a cat guy.

[Falling3]

Humans are not rational. It takes a lot of thought and discipline to attempt to come up with a coherent belief system and align your actions with it.

[killin_dan]

Hey whatup cl-async guy!

I'd liked to add that there are aspects of mutualism underlying how much we value dogs. We used to hunt alongside dogs, there exists a special bond between man and dog that does not exist between any other species, to my knowledge. They know our emotions, our smells, our noises, our physiological needs, they are even aware of fragility of our bodies compared to other animals.

Dogs are pretty amazing

[orthecreedence]

I agree, I love dogs. You wouldn't know it from my comments, but I actually like them more than flies ;).

I think you're right, dogs' historical utility along with their near human-like qualities have brought them much further along on the scale of "things that are not ok to kill" (towards humans). So perhaps there's a point when an animal becomes similar enough to us that we start viewing it as "one of us." This isn't just cultural, as you point out, but a sort of shared viewpoint of the world.

I'm also curious if size in general has something to do with it. Small animals have less value because we're perceiving killing "less of" something. Most people wouldn't think twice about killing a fly (myself included if it's a deer/horse fly) but would feel bad if they killed a bear that was attacking them, or even stepped on a lizard by accident.

So maybe dogs are a bad example (granted, I inherited the argument from a post up the tree from me), but I still think there's a cultural worth put on various animals.

Funny enough, I was in a catholic school when I was in third grade (9 years old?). I'm not catholic, and wasn't then, so I was always a bit suspicious. One of the teachers was talking about how there's a hierarchy to life. Rocks are at the bottom, then come plants, then animals, then humans, and angels/god on top. I remember, even then, thinking "without rocks, none of this would exist. without plants, no animals/humans could live, and without animals humans would die out." In other words, although we put ourselves at the top of the pyramid (of physical beings), the rest of the world would be just fine if humans disappeared tomorrow. Our existence has no meaning beyond our ability to evolve into better life forms. The point being, we have these odd social ratings for the value of other animals' lives, yet in many respects, our lives are almost worthless with respect the rest of the life on the planet. Our lives have value to us, but in essence we live in a bit of a bubble of self-importance.

[alwaysdoit]

Does the animal's lifespan matter? Intuitively it seems like killing something that will only live for a few days or weeks at most matters less. So I'm not sure it's all due to "cultural worth" (though I don't disagree that's part of it).

[orthecreedence]

Yeah, I've thought about that too, actually. And certainly, I feel better about killing any animal that I perceived to have had a "full life" (dogs included).

I tend to think that lifetimes are measured in lifetimes (relative scale) by various animals. So where a fly might live four of our weeks, to that fly, perhaps it was perceived as a good 60 years time if it was on our scale.

So to me, lifespan doesn't factor into it too much, although perhaps you're right that that is another piece of data used by people to measure an animal's "worth."

[greenshackle2]

Do you eat animal products?

I find it much stranger that violence towards farm animals is ok but not pets.

At least there are principled reasons to care less about insects (much less complex nervous system), I can find no principled reason to care more for dogs than pigs.

[komali2]

To be fair, that's a cheap strike to go straight for hypocrisy as a means to win this argument.

Whether or not the person posting the argument "animal testing is bad" eats meat doesn't change the question - "should we fatally test on animals."

I'm a bit disappointed that nobody is really engaging this non-sarcastically. A couple are talking about "drawing a line" somewhere but nobody is being allowed to say "all life should fall on the safe side of the line." I think there are interesting arguments for this position but right now HN is being aggressively hostile to that position.

[greenshackle2]

I can see how it comes across that way but I'm fascinated that OP does not kill flies, I was genuinely curious if it extended to farm animals too. I would have bet they are vegetarian.

The question is worth considering, I wrote up a detailed answer on why I don't care about insects in a sibling thread.

EDIT: I'm not well placed to argue from hypocrisy, I'm like 90% vegetarian but I still eat meat. Meateaters love taking me down a notch for that one time per week or whatever I eat meat.

[animal531]

That's because there's no such thing as 90% vegetarian, it's a binary option which you've re-purposed into a scale.

I eat meat at every opportunity, but if I were to calculate a number such as yours then I'd be say "65% vegetarian" just due to the volume difference between meat and the rest.

People taking a swing at you is most likely just because you describe yourself as a vegetarian to them even though you're still eating meat (regularly) while in their presence.

[greenshackle2]

What I mean is that I eat 90% less meat than I used to as an average omnivore. A can of sardines or tuna per week and beef once in a long while is far from 10% of my diet, in terms of calories or mass or whatever metric you choose.

> I eat meat at every opportunity, but if I were to calculate a number such as yours then I'd be say "65% vegetarian" just due to the volume difference between meat and the rest.

Most people, who don't try to take my words in the least charitable way possible as you are here, understand just fine what 'mostly vegetarian' means.

I don't describe myself as vegetarian (without qualifiers).

> That's because there's no such thing as 90% vegetarian, it's a binary option which you've re-purposed into a scale.

Words are meant for communicating. Arguing by definition is a losers' game.

Note that meateaters give me more crap than full on vegetarians/vegans. If the issue was really that I'm coopting the word, you'd think it'd be the opposite.

My experience is that, at least among my circles, vegetarians can appreciate that reduced meat consumption = reduced animal suffering and environmental impact, even if you're not 100% pure; it's meateaters, who feel you are trying to take a moral high ground, who will try to take you down.

Actually my problem is probably that I did use to be strictly vegetarian, vegan at one point, for a few years, and slipped back for various reasons. I don't claim it anymore but it's not like I made a public announcement that I am no longer strictly vegetarian.

[chrisweekly]

Non-sarcastic question about "all life": don't you _have_ to draw the line somewhere? Bacteria? Vegetables?

[usrusr]

I'd even want to put particularly nicely shaped rocks on the "don't" side of the line. Kill a plant to save a rock? It's called building maintenance. Kill a short-lived animal to protect a mighty old tree that has seen entire cultures come and go? Sure! There might even be some rocks that I would hesitate to destroy if it saved a human life, maybe not even excluding my own. The beautiful thing about life is that in the grand scheme of things, only avoiding extinction matters.

[mirimir]

Well, if "all life should fall on the safe side of the line", what would you eat? Perhaps only organisms that have died without human intervention. Scavenging, I mean. But that wouldn't support very large populations.

[harperlee]

> But that wouldn't support very large populations.

Well I don't agree at all! Apart from the fact that large populations can live without meat, I can easily envision a "scavenging farm" where animals are liked after until they die, and only then processed. It wouldn't be as efficient as our farms, but completely possible.

[mirimir]

I suspect that you're pushing plants over the line.

[chongli]

Dead bodies, unless mummified or otherwise desiccated into jerky, are teeming with bacterial life.

There's simply no way to survive without destroying other life. Even plants kill other living things in self defense (and many plants prey on animals).

[mirimir]

Yeah, pretty much. Especially if you're an animal.

Eventually, maybe we'll become effectively plants, creating our food from sunlight, CO2 and minerals. But what about our microbiota?

[chongli]

I find it much stranger that violence towards farm animals is ok but not pets.

For the same reason people are more disturbed by terrorists beheading one person whose name and picture accompany the story than they are of a statistic where hundreds of civilians are killed by a dictator's bombing attack.

People are motivated by empathy which only works with identifiable beings. We just can't empathize with statistics or abstractions, as horrifying as that sounds.

[coldtea]

>I find it much stranger that violence towards farm animals is ok but not pets.

Pets are a recent phenomenon (last 100 or so years, and urban). [edit: recent, not common phenomenon]

In rural places animals like cats and dogs where actually useful: guarding, helping with the sheep, killing mice and snakes, and such.

The bonding came from having them around (and having them be useful), not because there was some bizarro artificial distinction between e.g. cows and sheep and cats and dogs.

And in many cultures and/or periods things we now call pets were/are eaten as casually as we eat cows or kale.

[PerfectElement]

This doesn't address the fact that pigs are no less capable of experiencing pain and distress than dogs and cats. And most people in western cultures would not be okay with killing dogs and cats that are not being useful to them. So even though the cognitive dissonance and the framework that sustains it is well understood (look up carnism), it's still pretty strange when you stop to think about it.

[coldtea]

>This doesn't address the fact that pigs are no less capable of experiencing pain and distress than dogs and cats.

No but it addresses the fact that there's no underlying grand principle beyond it all.

Some animals we grew to like more, because they were useful, and we kept them around. That's all.

It's no more strange than caring for some people because they are relatives, and not caring as much (or at all) for other people.

[jonnybgood]

The principled reason to care more for dogs from my understanding is mutualism. Dogs are dogs because of humans. Same for cats.

[greenshackle2]

It's the same for farm animals though, isn't it? Modern broiler chickens, egg-layers, dairy cows and beef cattle, turkeys, etc. are very different from their wild ancestors.

Farmed turkeys can't have sex, they have to be artificially inseminated, I don't know who made them that way if not humans.

[chc]

AFAIK the prevailing theory is that humans did not domesticate cats, and instead cats just learned to coexist with us because we attracted lots of tasty pests.

[betenoire]

Do you _really_ find it strange? Or just rationally inconsistent?

It seems pretty normal and not strange at all that I develop stronger feelings for animals I personally bond with.

[coldtea]

>It's a bit strange that violence toward insects is fine, but violence towards dogs is not.

I don't find it strange at all. I find it strange that the notion of "violence toward insects" is even a thing.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Well, some insects represent a genuine threat to food supplies and the spread of disease.

I don't really follow where you're going with the dog example. What kind of comparison is that supposed to be?

Edit to add: Even ants produce antibiotics that they groom on to their bodies to prevent the growth of bacteria and fungus on themselves and inside their nests. So I'm going to continue to swat flies and not lose any sleep over it.

[sillysaurus3]

Probably a bad one. I agree that killing insects is fine if there's a reason. But I was reacting to "I kill things because they annoy me." Which is valid, but always frustrating.

My parents used to flip out and kill caterpillars, spiders, etc whenever they saw them. More than once I'd notice one and corral them outside while my parents weren't looking. There's just no point in killing something because it simply exists.

None of this probably matters though.

[nh2]

Killing things only when you have to is objectively the safer choice when it comes to not feeling bad about yourself in the future.

[notpresident]

At home it was my Dad who told me to be nice to spiders. :-)

[jschwartzi]

Mine too! He would tell me that the spiders are helpful because they kill other bugs, and to leave them alone or put them outside. The more I think about these things, the more connected even the small things in our world are.

[red75prime]

Sure, they are good at killing flies and you don't have to feel sorry killing flies yourself. Win-win.