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Insects have no animal rights?
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 Insects have no animal rights? | |
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Purist
Initiate Usergroup: Members Joined: Jan 13, 2008 Total Topics: 1 Total Posts: 15 |
 #1
Subject: Insects have no animal rights? I have thought about this on and off for a while now, and there seems to be some hypocrisy here. Why is it that dogs, cats and similar creatures (what we normally mean when we refer to animals) are afforded rights and are protected under the law, yet insects and arachnids are not? At least, I am not aware of any such laws if indeed they do exist. Moreover, with the exception of perhaps monks, people in general have no moral issue at all with killing a fly, mosquito, cockroach, etc. Even as I write this, if a mosquito were to bother me, I would have no problem killing it and would indeed lose no sleep over the matter. Is it because we are evolutionary closer to vertebrate mammals that we feel morally obligated towards them? Perhaps an animosity towards insects was important for survival for early mammals. There would seem to be some sense in this hypothesis since it is not impossible to suggest that insects were responsible for spreading disease in the past (as indeed they are now in some cases, malaria for example) and a creature with a tendency to avoid or kill insects might have a survival edge over its opponents. I know that there are certain people who do not even share a respect for mammals (hunters, etc.) but I speak here in a broader sense. The average person would find it very reprehensible and disgusting to kill a puppy, for example. Why? |
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Incision
Dust in the wind  Usergroup: Administrators Joined: Jan 04, 2008 Location: The endless sea Total Topics: 25 Total Posts: 1391 |
#2
Very interesting question. You may be right that preferring larger animals to insects is just a product of relying unreflectively on our instincts. Another possible evolutionary explanation is that liking large animals is an epiphenomenon of other tendencies. It's beneficial for people to take care of their children, and so a tendency might evolve to find things cute that are relatively small, but have big heads, hands and eyes, which would make it difficult to hurt puppies. Is there any way to justify treating creatures differently? Suppose you are allergic to bee stings, and you stumble across a hive. Due to your allergies, you always carry a can of poison, which kills bees slowly. The only way to save yourself would be to spray the hive and kill all the bees. On the one hand, since you are allergic and might be stung many times, your suffering would be great if you chose to die. But if you kill the hive, a smaller amount of suffering is inflicted upon maybe 50,000 bees, which strongly suggests that the total amount of suffering would be less if you saved the hive instead of yourself. A guess a Benthamite utilitarian would have to save the hive. Mill, though, thought that there were different qualities of pain and pleasure that had to be taken into account. Maybe he would say that a self-conscious creature's fear of death is suffering of such a high order that it outweighs the lower sufferings of insects. Another strategy might be looking at the long-term consequences. If you are a good person, you might go on to live a life that is happy itself and contributes more to other's happiness than it detracts; the bees, perhaps, will not do even themselves much good, so the greatest good would be served by your living. Of course, if you are a bad person. . . . But I think all these are just examples of utilitarianism's basic problems. If we also let ourselves think in terms of rights, maybe the bees do not have a right to live because of their unprovoked attack. Or, maybe rights derive from an implicit social contract made by intelligent beings acting in self-interest. In this case, bees are too stupid to have rights. I guess I don't have a definite answer for you, but I hope this stirs some thought. The only leaf it drops goes wide, Your name not written on either side. — Robert Frost, "On Going Unnoticed"
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Purist
Initiate Usergroup: Members Joined: Jan 13, 2008 Total Topics: 1 Total Posts: 15 |
#3
Thanks for you thoughts incision. You mention the bee allergy scenario. I think this particular case is not too difficult since justifiable homicide is morally acceptable and legal in most countries. If for example a woman is walking home just after she happened to buy a .38 caliber pistol for her husband (he is an avid gun collector, say). On her way home she is attacked by three men. In a panic she frantically shoots at them, fatally wounding all three. However, the shots are not instantly fatal, instead the men suffer for a few moments before dying. I think the woman's actions here are fully justified, and a judge would probably see it that way as well. And since a human life is worth at least as much as a bee's life, our allergic person in your example - in my view - should kill the bees without hesitation. I think if we are to get at the core of the issue we should not place a human life in harms way - the action of self defense is almost always justified and make the arguments trivial. What I really want to explore is the reason for our affinity towards "similar" (meant here in a biological sense) creatures and conversely our lack thereof for dissimilar creatures. Is evolution really all there is to the story? Moreover, supposing that evolution is the culprit, should we accept our current moral position towards insects (again I refer to the majority of people) and say, "Well, we evolved this way so screw the bugs" or are we forced to acknowledge the hypocrisy and change? Is it really ok to crush an ant that walks merrily along ones desktop on its way outside? |
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Floyd
Cool  Usergroup: Sponsors Joined: Dec 16, 2003 Total Topics: 31 Total Posts: 1963 Last Blog: Deadbeat Parents and Poverty |
#4
We can sympathize and relate more with more advanced and more human-like creatures. From most people's perspective, insects are less sentient than higher life forms. -Floyd Short and to the point. | Online Philosophy Club | Book & Reading Forums | My Philosophy Articles "Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness." ~Immanuel Kant |
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Purist
Initiate Usergroup: Members Joined: Jan 13, 2008 Total Topics: 1 Total Posts: 15 |
#5
Floyd wrote: insects are less sentient than higher life forms. -Floyd Is sentience quantizable? I thought you either were sentient, or you weren't. |
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dvy001
Aspirant Usergroup: Members Joined: Jan 16, 2008 Total Topics: 2 Total Posts: 35 |
#6
I would like to add that the bee example may have a possible flaw. How do you know that a bee or any insect for that matter "suffers"? They may or may not "feel" pain, but I do not equate pain with suffering. When I get a blood test, I feel a very slight pain when the needle goes in, but I definitely do not suffer. An insect may "feel" some sort of pain like warning (as evidenced by the fact that they may avoid certain stimulus), but how can one know if it "hurts". It may be just instinctual reaction. For example, does a bee flying over a hot barbeque make a fast exit because it "hurts", or do the hot air molecules simply trigger an instinctual muscular or nervous behavior and make the wings beat faster? For example, I recently had conductive tests on my ulnar nerve and forearm muscles. When they turned the electricity on, it did not hurt, but my muscles started twitching in a reaction to the stimulus (the electricity). |
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Floyd
Cool Usergroup: Sponsors Joined: Dec 16, 2003 Total Topics: 31 Total Posts: 1963 Last Blog: Deadbeat Parents and Poverty |
#7
By more sentient, I mean 'more conscious, and more able to feel with more sophisticated feelings.' In other words, a "more sentient" creature thinks and feels more than a less sentient one. Surely, we can see that the sentience of the typical adult human is on a whole other level than that of an insect, and that the insects' sentience is on a whole other level than that of a plant. Additionally, humans are more able to more easily recognize the sentience in more similar creatures. A human can better relate to another human than it can to a non-human creature. A human can better relate to human-like creatures (such as many other mammals) than it can to less human-like creatures (such as an insect). In some ways, I do feel as though my desktop computer is more sentient than many insects. But neither are very comparable to the human mind, in my opinion. -Floyd Short and to the point. | Online Philosophy Club | Book & Reading Forums | My Philosophy Articles "Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness." ~Immanuel Kant |
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Wowbagger
Goal achiever Usergroup: Members Joined: Jul 16, 2007 Total Topics: 7 Total Posts: 243 |
#8
We should attribute a value to all forms of life. We exist only because during the early phase of our evolution, an arrogant species like us didn't exterminate us. Species are vary different, and not all species require the same rights, as not all species have the same interests. All species should however have general and global right to exist and not not have their chances to evolve impaired by us. |
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dvy001
Aspirant Usergroup: Members Joined: Jan 16, 2008 Total Topics: 2 Total Posts: 35 |
#9
To Wowbagger: Why do you think that humans impairing (I'm not talking about deliberately exterminating here) the ability of other species to evolve is not actually a normal and possibly even required part of evolution? A concrete example of this is the dinosaurs. What gave them the right to impair the evolutionary chances of mammals? It wasn't until the asteriod came that mammals were allowed to evolve to their full potential from small furry rodents to the diversity we see today (including humans). Also, how do we know that we are not actually increasing the chances of a species to evolve by wiping out another (by accident or deliberate)? We wipe out virus with antibiotics, but guess what? We have speeded up the evolution of many of them. Ditto for insects. By attempting to wipe out locusts we have just made them evolve faster into insecticide resistant strains. Not only that we have allowed the plants that locusts feed on to have a shot to evolve too. |
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Wowbagger
Goal achiever Usergroup: Members Joined: Jul 16, 2007 Total Topics: 7 Total Posts: 243 |
#10
Because resources are limited, and because living organisms require resources to exist, competition is a inherent and normal part of life. Through this competition, species have the ability to evolve. Evolution however follow certain rules for most species, as for them it happen only biologically through changes in the inherited traits.This is where it start being unfair for us, as we play a different game. Our cultural evolution through applied scientific knowledge gives us an advantage life has never seen before. Among the problematic advantages, there is the time frame by which we develop new abilities to help us survive and replicate. The nature of these changes is also different, as they're not biological, so they don't not have the same potential. Because of these advantages, we're able to emancipate ourself from ecosystems without causing detrimental effects. In example, a virus could develop really effective adaptations to kill humans, but if the virus kill all of us, it'll be detrimental to their own population, as they'll lack human beings to replicate themselves. However, if a species start to synthesize their food resources from inorganic matter, they become independent from the existence of other species. There's no objective rules that say we can't kill all species, or restrain our impact on other species. There's no utilitarian purpose to do so either if killing all species isn't detrimental to us. I believe however that there's an logical reason to do so, as we give our existence as a species an ethical value, and that the existence of other species are part of a same category of entity, to which that ethical value should be transposed to. |
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