What if plants also might be sentient? I’m reminded also of this piece: Consider the Oyster. What if all life might be sentient? Is it the moral duty of all life forms that eat other life forms to...
What if all life might be sentient? Is it the moral duty of all life forms that eat other life forms to consider the plight of their food? Is hunting more moral than farming? (I don’t have good answers to these questions.)
I think under purely rational moral frameworks, we have to accept that simply living in human society is immoral, and determining some acceptable level of moral failing on an objective scale is too difficult based on our current understanding of physics and biology. I admit that eating farmed animals, or products from farmed animals is likely immoral. But, the amount of work it would take to shed my hypocrisy on these accounts would be so burdensome as to relegate myself to a hunter-gatherer life. Ultimately, I think arguments about sustainability matter much more than strict morality—we can start to worry about the finer points of sentience after we figure out how not to burn the planet up. And, the arguments in the OP about how large-scale insect farming could lead to expansion of other kinds of animal farming that are bad for the climate is the most worrisome point raised.
This reminds me somewhat of the codependency game. The identified patient/scapegoat role is shamed for their “bad” behavior, and yet encouraged to engage in it at every practical turn.
This reminds me somewhat of the codependency game. The identified patient/scapegoat role is shamed for their “bad” behavior, and yet encouraged to engage in it at every practical turn.
From your Oyster article: That's my view as a vegetarian who eats mostly vegan, but doesn't freak out if there happens to be an unknown ingredient in something that I ate. That said, there's no...
From your Oyster article:
Eating ethically is not a purity pissing contest, and the more vegans or vegetarians pretend that it is, the more their diets start to resemble mere fashion—and thus risk being dismissed as such. Emerson wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
That's my view as a vegetarian who eats mostly vegan, but doesn't freak out if there happens to be an unknown ingredient in something that I ate. That said, there's no way that you'd get me to eat an oyster, unless it's an oyster mushroom -- the aquatic version is disgusting! :)
This is a very interesting article. I agree with a lot of the major principles in it, but the interesting thing is when the author makes a lot of what to me are very strange, counter-intuitive or...
This is a very interesting article. I agree with a lot of the major principles in it, but the interesting thing is when the author makes a lot of what to me are very strange, counter-intuitive or straight up nonsensical arguments.
Essentially, if we look at insects in isolation, yes there are very clear reasons as to why we should treat insects (and everything else better), but the reality is that humans as a species treat obviously sentient animals way, way worse in existing food production.
Shouldn't we minimize harm and pain where we KNOW it exists among highly intelligent animals like pigs, cows etc. and probably intelligent animals like many types of fish even though that goes at the expense of possibly less sentient insects?
How realistic is it that people consider the welfare of insects, when people still eat bacon even though pigs are smarter than pet dogs, and live abhorrent lives?
The main argument, and many interesting examples make this an interesting read, even though some of the arguments and comparisons are way out there.
The question, rather, is how to minimise unnecessary harm. This is a hard question to answer. But, as a starting point, we can consider animal welfare, global health and environmental impacts holistically when building future food systems, and we can consider the possibility of insect suffering as one important factor among many.
This is very important indeed, even though most other factors are way more important. Global warming and food production ruining habitat and biological diversity are existential threats. Insect welfare is way higher up in a theoretical "Maslow's hierarchy of needs" for what we need to consider for food production systems and their overall sustainability.
One major problem in the argument is that he keeps using the expression "non negligible" without ever defining what this really means. Non negligible according to what? Should I worry about moving...
One major problem in the argument is that he keeps using the expression "non negligible" without ever defining what this really means. Non negligible according to what? Should I worry about moving too much and killing the bedbugs in my bed? Should I not kill an NPC in a game because there's a non negligible chance that it is conscious (or will be)? Should I not clean the sweat in my forehead because there's a non negligible chance that the bacteria I'm killing can feel pain?
I was also bugged (heh.) by that. By that measure, isn't the chance that fish, seafood, birds and other more complex creatures used as food are sentient approaching 100%? Shouldn't they then be...
I was also bugged (heh.) by that.
For whatever it might be worth, our current view is that insects are about 20-40 per cent likely to be sentient, given the evidence available. But for our purposes here, we will simply assume that there is a non-negligible chance that insects are sentient, by which we mean that insects are at least 1 per cent likely to be sentient.
By that measure, isn't the chance that fish, seafood, birds and other more complex creatures used as food are sentient approaching 100%?
Shouldn't they then be treated way differently in life and not in the least when they're killed? That'd take precedence over insects though right? If so, how many insect lives should be weighted against that of, say, a pig?
Again, a very interesting submission indeed as the arguments and concerns to balance are so different.
It's weird that he uses numbers when he clearly don't have any math to support them. But I don't think the argument is an either or -- you can save both pigs and insects. I don't think he stated...
It's weird that he uses numbers when he clearly don't have any math to support them. But I don't think the argument is an either or -- you can save both pigs and insects. I don't think he stated this particular contradiction.
It really is interesting, and the author could probably have made a more compelling case by simply removing some of the weaker stuff and maybe aiming at a less cathegorical conclusion. There's a better article hidden inside this one, That's why it's worth reading I think.
Defending bugs is a hard task. Most people don't give them much thought. It is said that Buddha once told monks to avoid travels during spring to avoid killing insects. I must confess that, even...
Insect farming bakes, boils and shreds animals by the trillion. It’s immoral, risky and won’t resolve the climate crisis
Defending bugs is a hard task. Most people don't give them much thought. It is said that Buddha once told monks to avoid travels during spring to avoid killing insects. I must confess that, even though I'm kinda Buddhist, I kill insects routinely without any guilt, and it's hard for me to empathize with the author. I get the impression that he's doing all he can to achieve a predetermined conclusion, and to get there he goes through some weak passages. Flawed as it is, the argument is worth considering nevertheless.
I don't think bugs merely being alive, conscious, or able to learn or feel pain grants them moral worth or means we shouldn't eat them or means we should care about their welfare. I think moral...
I don't think bugs merely being alive, conscious, or able to learn or feel pain grants them moral worth or means we shouldn't eat them or means we should care about their welfare. I think moral worth comes from the potential to follow the social contract and/or contribute to society. I think our morals evolved to make us work together and make societies work, so extending them to creatures that have no potential to understand us and choose to work together with us is overextending the concept. I think most other common lists of qualities for deciding what creatures have moral weight are at risk of including plants, algae, bacteria, particularly advanced thermostats, some common adaptive but non-intelligent software processes, etc.
If one says it's morally wrong when animals are killed to be our food, is it wrong because their welfare in general is important? Then is it wrong when animals die to other predators in the wild? I don't think it makes sense to say something is wrong when we're involved, but it's okay when it happens without us even if we could change the situation.
If we had the technology to spare to re-engineer wildlife ecosystems so animals never died to predators while all the animals still get to keep their way of life (say we can make bio-robots that are just as satisfying for predators to hunt and eat instead, and that we can re-engineer prey animals to not over-reproduce now that the pressure of predation is gone, and we've got the AI equivalent of a thousand obsessed Einsteins watching over the situation to make sure the newly-engineered environment stays stable, accurate, and moral), would we have the moral obligation to do that? I'm skeptical of the idea that we have that obligation, but I can imagine being convinced that we have that obligation once we have the resources to spare. But I think it's contradictory to believe we don't have that obligation but we personally have an obligation to not eat animals.
This does have some interesting implications. Do severely disabled people not have moral worth for instance? If not, is it ok to eat them? What about children? They could be viewed as at least...
moral worth comes from the potential to follow the social contract and/or contribute to society.
This does have some interesting implications. Do severely disabled people not have moral worth for instance? If not, is it ok to eat them? What about children? They could be viewed as at least currently incapable of contributing and following the social contract (you did add the "potential" there so maybe the kids are safe ;) ).
Do people who don't want to follow the social contract nor contribute have moral worth? What if I loose my ability to contribute do I then loose my moral worth despite having contributed before? How much must I contribute? What if I do something thinking I am contributing when in fact I am just detrimental to society (like being a mime, which all reasonable people agree that it is ok to eat).
The problem I think boils down to it being hard/impossible to come up with a set of criteria where it is impossible to come up with somewhat morally dubious implications. Being conscious is in my view the best one. But even that is difficult to nail down (especially if you view consciousness as a continuous scale rather than a binary yes or no)...
I don't think it makes sense to say something is wrong for us to do it, but it's okay for others to do it even if we could stop them or change the situation.
It could be that despite an action being wrong you don't necessarily have an obligation to stop it. You aren't under any obligation to take a bullet for someone for instance even if that person is a saint and you know that the person shooting them is acting in an immoral way. Perhaps if there was less at stake for you might have more responsibility. Like if just saying "Nah" would prevent the killing without any further complications for you, then it becomes a bit harder to argue... Especially if you consider that inactivity is also a decision...
Human brains are extremely adaptable and our understanding of disability is very incomplete, so I think it's rare in reality for us to ever accurately determine beyond a doubt that a human is...
This does have some interesting implications. Do severely disabled people not have moral worth for instance? If not, is it ok to eat them? What about children? They could be viewed as at least currently incapable of contributing and following the social contract (you did add the "potential" there so maybe the kids are safe ;) ).
Human brains are extremely adaptable and our understanding of disability is very incomplete, so I think it's rare in reality for us to ever accurately determine beyond a doubt that a human is incapable of being or becoming a moral agent. Even in the cases where someone is basically comatose, there's often the possibility of them recovering or a new technology being created that can help them. I think the only case where you could judge beyond a doubt that a human isn't a moral agent is when they're literally born without a brain, which happens sometimes.
Do people who don't want to follow the social contract nor contribute have moral worth?
If they don't follow it in the sense that they demonstrate a willingness to commit crimes like murder, then society already decides that their welfare is less important than others. (Ideally just until they're reformed enough to fit into society but that's a separate issue.)
Generally I don't think what I'm describing is a new position; I think my position is what most people follow already, even if the specific logic or the value of it isn't always visibly spelled out in people's heads. Even among people who say that eating meat is immoral, very few people actually treat the farming or the sheer amount of natural predation of animals in wildlife as ongoing holocausts. I think for many people (including many vegetarians to a partial degree), the idea that eating meat is murder is just a belief-in-belief rather than something directly believed. It seems like a popular sentiment that people should upgrade that to a direct belief and act on it, but I'm skeptical of the value of that.
As a vegetarian, I disagree with this assessment for a few reasons. Unlike human beings, animals are generally believed to lack moral agency. If someone murders someone else, we might be inclined...
Even among people who say that eating meat is immoral, very few people actually treat [...] the sheer amount of natural predation of animals in wildlife as ongoing holocausts.
As a vegetarian, I disagree with this assessment for a few reasons.
Unlike human beings, animals are generally believed to lack moral agency. If someone murders someone else, we might be inclined to call the murderer evil. If a bears maul someone, we probably wouldn't label the bear evil -- it simply acted in accordance to its nature. A bear, unlike a person, lacks a framework for understand right and wrong.
Similarly, that lack of agency precludes animal predation from being an "ongoing holocaust" for the same reason that the COVID-19 pandemic is not an ongoing holocaust.
Even if we were to assume that animals did have moral agency, animal predation wouldn't necessarily be immoral. Carnivores don't choose to be carnivores, they are carnivores. Eating anything other than meat could lead to their untimely death. I like to think of this as the "vampire trolly problem": if an unwitting vampire needs blood to live, are they acting immorally when they kill to survive? Or to put it another way: is it moral to demand that vampires must starve themselves to death so that other people can live?
What differentiates human beings from carnivores is that we don't need meat, and therefore none of these arguments apply to us.
I think human society recognizes some kind of moral obligation to prevent a human from dying from a preventable cause, whether the cause is a human murderer killing them, an accident from...
I think human society recognizes some kind of moral obligation to prevent a human from dying from a preventable cause, whether the cause is a human murderer killing them, an accident from unthinking human-created machinery, a natural rock slide, or a wild animal doing it, because the welfare of the victim is important. The important part isn't specifically in stopping people with moral agency from doing bad things, it's to stop bad things from happening to people with moral value; the former goal is only valuable in service of the latter goal. The moral agency of the killer doesn't factor in when it's a human victim. I think the idea that it may factor in when it's an animal victim implies that we care for animals in a very different way from humans, and that it's a contradiction of the simplest idea that we should care about animals like humans because we're both alive or sentient.
if an unwitting vampire needs blood to live, are they acting immorally when they kill to survive? Or to put it another way: is it moral to demand that vampires must starve themselves to death so that other people can live?
If someone needs a human organ transplant, then they're out of luck if no one volunteers a donation, and society generally plans to punish them if they try to take matters in their own hands by taking it from another human. We would treat them very differently than an animal killing another animal, though I don't think we treat the cases differently because the killer had moral agency, but because the victim had moral value and we can prevent the situation from claiming more human victims.
Just to be clear, I'm mainly trying to argue against the extreme position of {it's immoral to farm bugs because they're alive}. I think there's room for standards against animal cruelty and animal farming, but I think it comes from a very different logic than {we should treat animals just like humans because we're both alive or sentient} which might lead us to nonsense places. I think laws against forms of animal cruelty can come from logic like {we should discourage humans needlessly hurting animals not in pursuit of a goal like food because people who do that tend to become comfortable hurting humans too} or {we should discourage humans choosing to hurt animals that are treated as pets by many because it's very stressful to others that have bonded with that kind of animal}. Maybe in an increasingly-sympathetic society, animal cruelty laws would grow to cover most mammals and other large animals that have recognizable emotions or reactions, but never go as far as encompassing bugs, or at least the standards would quickly scale down as it covers less sympathetic creatures. Unlike some others, I don't see it as a mistake that the progress of animal cruelty standards have prioritized animals that are seen as cute and relatable; I think this happening is a revealed preference in society for this logic.
It's "Consider the Lobster" on a large scope. It's an interesting idea to consider that if we start raising insects for food, we're just doing the same thing we currently do, but to a different...
It's "Consider the Lobster" on a large scope.
It's an interesting idea to consider that if we start raising insects for food, we're just doing the same thing we currently do, but to a different animal. Some of the imagery is striking: Enough larva to go to the moon and back 25 times. What's more interesting is insects aren't mainstream food yet, and we're already pulling these numbers.
I don't see sentience as a reason to not eat something on its own (though one of many reasons I, despite still eating meat, occasionally feel guilty). I see it as a reason to treat your food humanely, which would also be a potential failure on our part, much like it already is for many crustaceans, where our primary solution is to physically incapacitate them so they don't splash around too much when we boil them alive.
I think I agree with the greater point, assuming I've got the right takeaway: Bugs aren't our savior, we'll be forcing the same set of problems onto another group of animals, one that'll be even easier to mistreat.
If sentience is "the ability to experience sensations" then I don't think there is any doubt what so ever that insects are sentient. They do react to stimuli and seem capable of at least having...
If sentience is "the ability to experience sensations" then I don't think there is any doubt what so ever that insects are sentient. They do react to stimuli and seem capable of at least having some internal representation of the world around them. They react in a non-automatic way so it isn't all hard wired reflexes. Also as noted in the article they are capable of some learning. Sentience is not the same as consciousness though which in my view would make a much stronger case in favour of avoiding killing insects. Consciousness is more of a sliding scale than sentience...
All that however is the weak argument of the text. The part about insect farming just feeding into the current industrial animal farming complex is a much stronger argument. We know that animal farming in its current form is unsustainable so we need to stop doing it. Feeding animals insect protein might be better than feeding then fish protein (from an environmental pov), but ultimately we need to shift our food source away from animal farming.
What if plants also might be sentient?
I’m reminded also of this piece: Consider the Oyster.
What if all life might be sentient? Is it the moral duty of all life forms that eat other life forms to consider the plight of their food? Is hunting more moral than farming? (I don’t have good answers to these questions.)
I think under purely rational moral frameworks, we have to accept that simply living in human society is immoral, and determining some acceptable level of moral failing on an objective scale is too difficult based on our current understanding of physics and biology. I admit that eating farmed animals, or products from farmed animals is likely immoral. But, the amount of work it would take to shed my hypocrisy on these accounts would be so burdensome as to relegate myself to a hunter-gatherer life. Ultimately, I think arguments about sustainability matter much more than strict morality—we can start to worry about the finer points of sentience after we figure out how not to burn the planet up. And, the arguments in the OP about how large-scale insect farming could lead to expansion of other kinds of animal farming that are bad for the climate is the most worrisome point raised.
This reminds me somewhat of the codependency game. The identified patient/scapegoat role is shamed for their “bad” behavior, and yet encouraged to engage in it at every practical turn.
From your Oyster article:
That's my view as a vegetarian who eats mostly vegan, but doesn't freak out if there happens to be an unknown ingredient in something that I ate. That said, there's no way that you'd get me to eat an oyster, unless it's an oyster mushroom -- the aquatic version is disgusting! :)
This is a very interesting article. I agree with a lot of the major principles in it, but the interesting thing is when the author makes a lot of what to me are very strange, counter-intuitive or straight up nonsensical arguments.
Essentially, if we look at insects in isolation, yes there are very clear reasons as to why we should treat insects (and everything else better), but the reality is that humans as a species treat obviously sentient animals way, way worse in existing food production.
Shouldn't we minimize harm and pain where we KNOW it exists among highly intelligent animals like pigs, cows etc. and probably intelligent animals like many types of fish even though that goes at the expense of possibly less sentient insects?
How realistic is it that people consider the welfare of insects, when people still eat bacon even though pigs are smarter than pet dogs, and live abhorrent lives?
The main argument, and many interesting examples make this an interesting read, even though some of the arguments and comparisons are way out there.
This is very important indeed, even though most other factors are way more important. Global warming and food production ruining habitat and biological diversity are existential threats. Insect welfare is way higher up in a theoretical "Maslow's hierarchy of needs" for what we need to consider for food production systems and their overall sustainability.
One major problem in the argument is that he keeps using the expression "non negligible" without ever defining what this really means. Non negligible according to what? Should I worry about moving too much and killing the bedbugs in my bed? Should I not kill an NPC in a game because there's a non negligible chance that it is conscious (or will be)? Should I not clean the sweat in my forehead because there's a non negligible chance that the bacteria I'm killing can feel pain?
I was also bugged (heh.) by that.
By that measure, isn't the chance that fish, seafood, birds and other more complex creatures used as food are sentient approaching 100%?
Shouldn't they then be treated way differently in life and not in the least when they're killed? That'd take precedence over insects though right? If so, how many insect lives should be weighted against that of, say, a pig?
Again, a very interesting submission indeed as the arguments and concerns to balance are so different.
It's weird that he uses numbers when he clearly don't have any math to support them. But I don't think the argument is an either or -- you can save both pigs and insects. I don't think he stated this particular contradiction.
It really is interesting, and the author could probably have made a more compelling case by simply removing some of the weaker stuff and maybe aiming at a less cathegorical conclusion. There's a better article hidden inside this one, That's why it's worth reading I think.
Defending bugs is a hard task. Most people don't give them much thought. It is said that Buddha once told monks to avoid travels during spring to avoid killing insects. I must confess that, even though I'm kinda Buddhist, I kill insects routinely without any guilt, and it's hard for me to empathize with the author. I get the impression that he's doing all he can to achieve a predetermined conclusion, and to get there he goes through some weak passages. Flawed as it is, the argument is worth considering nevertheless.
I don't think bugs merely being alive, conscious, or able to learn or feel pain grants them moral worth or means we shouldn't eat them or means we should care about their welfare. I think moral worth comes from the potential to follow the social contract and/or contribute to society. I think our morals evolved to make us work together and make societies work, so extending them to creatures that have no potential to understand us and choose to work together with us is overextending the concept. I think most other common lists of qualities for deciding what creatures have moral weight are at risk of including plants, algae, bacteria, particularly advanced thermostats, some common adaptive but non-intelligent software processes, etc.
If one says it's morally wrong when animals are killed to be our food, is it wrong because their welfare in general is important? Then is it wrong when animals die to other predators in the wild? I don't think it makes sense to say something is wrong when we're involved, but it's okay when it happens without us even if we could change the situation.
If we had the technology to spare to re-engineer wildlife ecosystems so animals never died to predators while all the animals still get to keep their way of life (say we can make bio-robots that are just as satisfying for predators to hunt and eat instead, and that we can re-engineer prey animals to not over-reproduce now that the pressure of predation is gone, and we've got the AI equivalent of a thousand obsessed Einsteins watching over the situation to make sure the newly-engineered environment stays stable, accurate, and moral), would we have the moral obligation to do that? I'm skeptical of the idea that we have that obligation, but I can imagine being convinced that we have that obligation once we have the resources to spare. But I think it's contradictory to believe we don't have that obligation but we personally have an obligation to not eat animals.
This does have some interesting implications. Do severely disabled people not have moral worth for instance? If not, is it ok to eat them? What about children? They could be viewed as at least currently incapable of contributing and following the social contract (you did add the "potential" there so maybe the kids are safe ;) ).
Do people who don't want to follow the social contract nor contribute have moral worth? What if I loose my ability to contribute do I then loose my moral worth despite having contributed before? How much must I contribute? What if I do something thinking I am contributing when in fact I am just detrimental to society (like being a mime, which all reasonable people agree that it is ok to eat).
The problem I think boils down to it being hard/impossible to come up with a set of criteria where it is impossible to come up with somewhat morally dubious implications. Being conscious is in my view the best one. But even that is difficult to nail down (especially if you view consciousness as a continuous scale rather than a binary yes or no)...
It could be that despite an action being wrong you don't necessarily have an obligation to stop it. You aren't under any obligation to take a bullet for someone for instance even if that person is a saint and you know that the person shooting them is acting in an immoral way. Perhaps if there was less at stake for you might have more responsibility. Like if just saying "Nah" would prevent the killing without any further complications for you, then it becomes a bit harder to argue... Especially if you consider that inactivity is also a decision...
Human brains are extremely adaptable and our understanding of disability is very incomplete, so I think it's rare in reality for us to ever accurately determine beyond a doubt that a human is incapable of being or becoming a moral agent. Even in the cases where someone is basically comatose, there's often the possibility of them recovering or a new technology being created that can help them. I think the only case where you could judge beyond a doubt that a human isn't a moral agent is when they're literally born without a brain, which happens sometimes.
If they don't follow it in the sense that they demonstrate a willingness to commit crimes like murder, then society already decides that their welfare is less important than others. (Ideally just until they're reformed enough to fit into society but that's a separate issue.)
Generally I don't think what I'm describing is a new position; I think my position is what most people follow already, even if the specific logic or the value of it isn't always visibly spelled out in people's heads. Even among people who say that eating meat is immoral, very few people actually treat the farming or the sheer amount of natural predation of animals in wildlife as ongoing holocausts. I think for many people (including many vegetarians to a partial degree), the idea that eating meat is murder is just a belief-in-belief rather than something directly believed. It seems like a popular sentiment that people should upgrade that to a direct belief and act on it, but I'm skeptical of the value of that.
As a vegetarian, I disagree with this assessment for a few reasons.
Unlike human beings, animals are generally believed to lack moral agency. If someone murders someone else, we might be inclined to call the murderer evil. If a bears maul someone, we probably wouldn't label the bear evil -- it simply acted in accordance to its nature. A bear, unlike a person, lacks a framework for understand right and wrong.
Similarly, that lack of agency precludes animal predation from being an "ongoing holocaust" for the same reason that the COVID-19 pandemic is not an ongoing holocaust.
Even if we were to assume that animals did have moral agency, animal predation wouldn't necessarily be immoral. Carnivores don't choose to be carnivores, they are carnivores. Eating anything other than meat could lead to their untimely death. I like to think of this as the "vampire trolly problem": if an unwitting vampire needs blood to live, are they acting immorally when they kill to survive? Or to put it another way: is it moral to demand that vampires must starve themselves to death so that other people can live?
What differentiates human beings from carnivores is that we don't need meat, and therefore none of these arguments apply to us.
I think human society recognizes some kind of moral obligation to prevent a human from dying from a preventable cause, whether the cause is a human murderer killing them, an accident from unthinking human-created machinery, a natural rock slide, or a wild animal doing it, because the welfare of the victim is important. The important part isn't specifically in stopping people with moral agency from doing bad things, it's to stop bad things from happening to people with moral value; the former goal is only valuable in service of the latter goal. The moral agency of the killer doesn't factor in when it's a human victim. I think the idea that it may factor in when it's an animal victim implies that we care for animals in a very different way from humans, and that it's a contradiction of the simplest idea that we should care about animals like humans because we're both alive or sentient.
If someone needs a human organ transplant, then they're out of luck if no one volunteers a donation, and society generally plans to punish them if they try to take matters in their own hands by taking it from another human. We would treat them very differently than an animal killing another animal, though I don't think we treat the cases differently because the killer had moral agency, but because the victim had moral value and we can prevent the situation from claiming more human victims.
Just to be clear, I'm mainly trying to argue against the extreme position of {it's immoral to farm bugs because they're alive}. I think there's room for standards against animal cruelty and animal farming, but I think it comes from a very different logic than {we should treat animals just like humans because we're both alive or sentient} which might lead us to nonsense places. I think laws against forms of animal cruelty can come from logic like {we should discourage humans needlessly hurting animals not in pursuit of a goal like food because people who do that tend to become comfortable hurting humans too} or {we should discourage humans choosing to hurt animals that are treated as pets by many because it's very stressful to others that have bonded with that kind of animal}. Maybe in an increasingly-sympathetic society, animal cruelty laws would grow to cover most mammals and other large animals that have recognizable emotions or reactions, but never go as far as encompassing bugs, or at least the standards would quickly scale down as it covers less sympathetic creatures. Unlike some others, I don't see it as a mistake that the progress of animal cruelty standards have prioritized animals that are seen as cute and relatable; I think this happening is a revealed preference in society for this logic.
It's "Consider the Lobster" on a large scope.
It's an interesting idea to consider that if we start raising insects for food, we're just doing the same thing we currently do, but to a different animal. Some of the imagery is striking: Enough larva to go to the moon and back 25 times. What's more interesting is insects aren't mainstream food yet, and we're already pulling these numbers.
I don't see sentience as a reason to not eat something on its own (though one of many reasons I, despite still eating meat, occasionally feel guilty). I see it as a reason to treat your food humanely, which would also be a potential failure on our part, much like it already is for many crustaceans, where our primary solution is to physically incapacitate them so they don't splash around too much when we boil them alive.
I think I agree with the greater point, assuming I've got the right takeaway: Bugs aren't our savior, we'll be forcing the same set of problems onto another group of animals, one that'll be even easier to mistreat.
If sentience is "the ability to experience sensations" then I don't think there is any doubt what so ever that insects are sentient. They do react to stimuli and seem capable of at least having some internal representation of the world around them. They react in a non-automatic way so it isn't all hard wired reflexes. Also as noted in the article they are capable of some learning. Sentience is not the same as consciousness though which in my view would make a much stronger case in favour of avoiding killing insects. Consciousness is more of a sliding scale than sentience...
All that however is the weak argument of the text. The part about insect farming just feeding into the current industrial animal farming complex is a much stronger argument. We know that animal farming in its current form is unsustainable so we need to stop doing it. Feeding animals insect protein might be better than feeding then fish protein (from an environmental pov), but ultimately we need to shift our food source away from animal farming.