Insects in ethics concerns ethical views about the moral status and treatment of insects, including whether humans have obligations to avoid harming or killing them. The topic is discussed in religious teachings about non-violence and compassion, historical writing on attitudes towards harming insects, and modern debates in animal ethics and animal welfare about insect sentience, pain and consciousness. Some traditions, including Jainism and Buddhism, describe practices intended to reduce accidental harm to insects. In contemporary ethical discussion, writers disagree about what can be known about insect subjective experience and how moral duties, if any, should apply in practice, including in scientific experimentation, pest control, insecticide use, and products that involve killing insects, such as silk. The subject also appears in literature and idiom, including claims of sympathy for insects in early modern drama and poetry, and expressions such as "wouldn't hurt a fly" and "wouldn't hurt a flea".
Religious views
Jainism
Jain monks take precautions to avoid harming living beings, including insects, even unintentionally. In Jain ethics, breaches of the principle of Ahimsa (non-violence) are held to have negative effects on karma, especially when life is destroyed through carelessness. Violence against insects is generally treated as less karmically serious than violence against "five-sensed" beings, reflecting a hierarchy of beings classified by the number of senses they are considered to possess. Within this scheme, insects may be assigned different numbers of senses; for example, worms are described as having two senses, ants three, and flies four, with corresponding differences in the karmic consequences of harming them.
Buddhism In Buddhist ethics, insects are treated as sentient beings and are therefore not to be harmed or killed. The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism describes a tradition in which the Buddha instructed monks to suspend their travels during the monsoon season in order to avoid killing worms and insects on muddy roads. Buddhist monastic practice has also been described as including the use of strainers when drinking water to avoid killing small animals.
Taoist and Chinese moral texts In The Extended Circle, Jon Wynne-Tyson cites the Tai-shang kan-ying p'ien as instructing readers to maintain compassion towards all creatures, including insects. Wynne-Tyson also attributes to Wen Ch'ang, in the Yin-chih-wen, an instruction to watch one's step for ants and insects and to avoid building outdoor fires so as not to kill them.
Judaism The Sefer Hasidim, a medieval Hebrew work, has been described as instructing against inflicting pain on animals, including insects, and as discouraging the killing of wasps or flies.
Christianity In the 18th century, the English MP and writer Soame Jenyns argued that people should not "wantonly" take life from even "the meanest insect" without sufficient reason, since all creatures receive life from the same divine source and therefore have a right to enjoy it. William Ellery Channing wrote in a letter that he would not kill an insect, and argued that insects had been granted a right to life by God and that killing them would spoil God's creation. According to Rod Preece, the children's book Insects and their Habitations: A Book for Children, published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in 1833, taught that unnecessarily harming insects was a sin against God and that children should assist insects they encountered in distress rather than harming them.
Historical writing
al-Ma'arri The 11th-century Arab poet and philosopher al-Ma'arri described releasing a flea from his hand as an act of compassion, and wrote that it was kinder than giving money to a human in need. He compared the flea and the human as both taking precautions against death and seeking to continue living.
Lewis Gompertz Lewis Gompertz has been described as an early animal rights activist and a vegan. In Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes (1824), Gompertz discussed silk production in dialogue form. One speaker objects to depriving living silkworm grubs of their silk and criticises the common practice of killing them during processing, describing "the usual mode of baking them to death in an oven". The same passage acknowledges that some silkworms die naturally while enclosed in their silk and states that using silk may be permissible when it comes from those deaths, while still objecting to deliberate killing for production. When another speaker suggests that breeding silkworms brings more insects into existence than would otherwise exist, Gompertz responds that humans are not authorised to destroy or prevent life, but argues that life is not so desirable that it should be produced solely for that purpose.
Modern ethical debate
Sentience, pain and moral status
The entomologist Jeffrey A. Lockwood argues that empirical evidence supports the view that insects can feel pain and are conscious of their sensations. He writes that, if insects experience pain, they have an interest in avoiding it, and that killing insects can frustrate their immediate goals as conscious beings. Lockwood therefore proposes a "minimum ethic" in which people should avoid actions that are reasonably expected to kill insects or cause non-trivial pain where doing so has no, or only trivial, costs to human welfare. Philosopher Peter Singer contends that, because there is still uncertainty about whether insects are capable of subjective experience, campaigning for "insect rights" is premature.
Justifications for killing insects
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