[yboris]

You need to say more about why you don't find the driving parallel the author provides appropriate.

Your say:

> A more apt comparison ... doesn't appear to create any sort of moral imperative to change our willingness to drive.

How convenient. You choose something that we can't live in our modern world without (driving a car) and say "see, no need to change our behavior".

Meanwhile, farming bugs for food is not at all essential in the current world - we can easily feed everyone without subjecting ourselves to the possibility of doing something morally horrible.

Here's another parallel, you decide to start building sheds and burning them down. You now realize there is a 1% chance that the current shed has a child who decided to hide in it; do you burn it down because "1% is a low chance"? Of course not. And that's the point the author is making - when there is even a low percent chance of something very bad happening, and you're not doing anything that is essential or necessary, you ought not do it.

[xyzzy123]

It's a very modest proposal sort of paper. You can tell it's a utilitarian paradox paper in disguise because the author never distinguishes between death and suffering. If you could reasonably minimise or eliminate the insect suffering I don't see any ethical dilemma here. A black fly's natural lifespan is only a few weeks!

The author is subtly invoking a utilitarian trick where you multiply a tiny number by a very large number and arrive at a nonsensical result.

So for example, the tiny harm of killing 1 insect times trillions of insects = unspeakable abomination.

If we follow this a bit further we can reasonably conclude that one of the most important moral problems for the human race to address is insect welfare and life extension.

> when there is even a low percent chance of something very bad happening, and you're not doing anything that is essential or necessary, you ought not do it.

This position is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_utilitarianism and it's not one that makes sense for me, personally.

[yboris]

It's not a utilitarian "trick" to care about numbers. No one will disagree that 2 death is worse than 1.

And people who are insensitive to numbers, I think, just don't understand math. Breaking a bone is not as bad as a death, but 100 billion people experiencing broken bones is, I would say, worse than 1 death.

No negative utilitarianism needs to be invoked to make the argument that creating suffering is bad. The claim isn't that there is no possible benefit that we could have from farming bugs (even if they are sentient), but that the expected benefits are mediocre at best (just buttressing an already horrific status quo of farming animals).

The key phrase in my sentence you quoted is "essential or necessary". In order to counter my claim you would need to explain how the benefits of bug farming outweigh the potentially horrific state of torturing trillions of sentient beings.

ps - in principle, I am on board with "happy bug farms" where the needs of bugs are met, and they are happy. If we could guarantee this, I would be for it -- more happy sentient creatures the better. But you and I know that in fact, in our world, with profits being anti-correlated with taking care of the sentient beings at factory farms, starting bug factory farms shouldn't be embraced.