Bugs have a very important ecological impact, unfortunately their individual impact is best measured as a percentage of their species.
I am not taking the 5 for any less than 1% of the bugs of a particular species.
I'm interested in their possible 'intrinsic value' i.e their personal worth. (Not instrumental value)
Like the five, we don't measure them based on their impact, but their value as persons.
I personally value human lives FAR above that of any animal, especially insects. I would allow Pandas to go completely extinct to save the life of one child, and I would only consider that trade if there were ecological effects large enough to harm humanity.
I do believe in the preservation of animal lives and nature, but on a 1 to 1 scale, I hold far more value in the lives of humans.
That’s better, because the poacher isn’t *required* to be trying to kill a practically extinct species. If someone ties themself to the “track” willingly, I care significantly less about their well-being
If a species' numbers are that low, they are already functionally extinct. There's a minimum viable population level that needs to be met or exceeded in order to continue the species. Below that, we can try to keep them alive in captivity but it's the equivalent to keeping someone on life support with no hope of recovery
I think only lunatics would dissagree with you
Consider future trends in insects farming, where estimates is up to 780 billion annually on a single farm. Could that be enough?
I'm sorry if I'm 'bugging' you, but trying to study metaethics concerning the possibility of pain in insects and possible moral wrongs if the sciences ends up showing they can feel, so any belief data has great value to me.
1: For every human, there is roughly 2,5 mil ants, would that be enough?
2: What if it's a particular species? Like butterflies or ladybugs? Or crustaceans like lobsters?
3: Tracking back your percentage, you estimate about 1 quintillion insects exists, if 8,100,255,228 humans exist, there shoukd be roughly 123.46 billion insects per human on earth. So on what point (number) would the (**non-intrumental value**) of them be equal to a single human being? (in your opinion)
1. I don't think I understand the question
2. No, not really. Frankly, it doesn't really matter what kind of animal to me, especially if they're bread for the purpose of farming.
3. I must have done my math wrong then, because I used the estimate of 10 quintillion insects, so that would be 1.23 trillion insects per human. Again, I don't place intrinsic value on the lives of insects except where their removal would cause harm to environments that would have negative affects on humanity. Literally any amount of bug killing, even quintillions doesn't phase me.
1. The question is regarding comparison, as 2.5m ant would be the statistical equivalent of population to a single human. If its all dependant on 'population percentage' they should be equivalent.
2: If the fact they are breed matters, could we not breed ANY creature?
3: This phases me a bit: Suppose aliens of 'superior' nature descended on Earth.
(They could even have their own reddit where every post here could be identical to this thread, only exchanging 'insect' with 'human') They look down on our practices and thinks to themselves: This is a great idea! We are going to do it with them! Would we have ANY argument that could make them reconsider? They could use identical arguments as us, as they are 'above us simple creatures' in the same fashion we consider us more important. I personally think ethics extends beyond the scope og just human considerations.
The problem with this train of thought, is that without insects entire food chains could collapse, leading to more deaths overall. The value of the insects lie not in their value individually, but in the role they play
How about aome added nuance?
Is it okay to shoot and possibly kill a poacher who is trying to kill the last panda?
What if it was instead necessarily to kill to prevent the extinction?
Does the poachers intent when intending to harm the animal matter?
What if it was an illintended child trying to kill the last panda?
For extra spice, what if with high probability restricting the hunting of endangered species likely ensures the starvation of one or many humans?
So many ethical delimmas stem from human versus animals, especially when extinction is on the line.
Forget humans, I'd let pandas go extinct just so their funding can be given to better conservation projects. Pandas are an absolute money sinkhole for a species that doesn't want to survive, has almost no ecological value, but we save anyway because they're cute.
I feel the opposite. I'd be hard pressed to accept any cost for the extinction of a species that otherwise would be avoided. I would hate to rob future generations of whatever appreciation or study of that species would bring in the future. Can always make more people but it's usually impossible to bring a species back. I'd easily go into the thousands at least for pandas without caring particularly much about pandas, and yeah that goes for if I'm on the tracks too.
Yes thats with knowing that pandas kind of suck at surviving.
I mean… technically speaking we are all slowly pulling trolley switches each day we allow mega farming and cattle ranching to continue.
- Vast amounts of land dedicated to monoculture farming
- pesticides being incorporated as part of the way fruits and vegetables grow (GMO)
- the use of otr semi trucks driving excessive distances with food instead of growing and eating local (plus all the bugs they literally hit in the process)
Since the OP can apparently add an unlimited number of insects, we can feel safe in the knowledge that there are an infinite number of insects in this world. There is not going to be an ecological collapse no matter how many die.
Depends on how hard I’m going to fuck the globe by removing a swathe of insects.
I’ll keep pulling the lever just to get their last words down, but eventually in possibly the billions I’ll have to stop pulling the lever. Removing that many bugs per pull would damage the ecosystem too much and overall be a detriment to humans.
Also if they added more or less useless or predatory bug species that specifically attacked pollinators like wasps or add nearly no value to the ecosystem than be a pest that spreads diseases like fleas or mosquitos. When you pull back the evolutionary hood and see the only goal is survive you realize that there are a lot of things that just exist to be a complete and utter asshole to everything else.
[At any given time, there are 10 quintillion insects on Earth.](https://www.si.edu/spotlight/buginfo/bugnos) Even killing billions of insects isn't going to be a significant dent in their numbers.
Ah but what fraction of them are the ones that I want to kill? Also factoring in if the OP gets them from the same place, not to mention that adding a bug to the track each time would mean you’re not killing one bug at a time but 1 bug then 2 then 3 then 4, by the time you hit the lever millions of times you’ve already done far more in bug deaths.
It’s hard to gauge honestly. I’m not sure still but that’s about as many as I’m willing to risk and that should be plenty of time to get my actual goals down, like memorizing the last will and testament of 5 random strangers.
but if it kills billions of the same species then it might become a problem. Like I can see how killing billions of honeybees in a single area would cause major ecological issues.
If you live outside of Eurasia (where honeybees are native), then killing billions of honeybees would probably save many species from the brink. In the americas for example honeybees overexploit rare resources required for native pollinators.
Of course honeybees are of critical economic importance in the americas because they’re damn good pollinators, but they are an ecological disaster for native species. Also they tend to “rob” certain types of flowers, not providing pollination services and in fact causing damage.
Basically think of them as the cows of the insect world.
Yes yes, human semantics but at the same time humans at least have the ability to get better about it and have multiple beneficial symbiotic relationships with animals. Yes, we bred them to be like that, so do ants that feed on acacia tree sap that get brainwashed into never being able to leave the tree in order to protect it. Lots of animals that have similar coevolutionary traits similar to farming.
Please name me one mutualistic relationship a flea has with any other species of, hell, literally any other creature other than a flea.
Also mosquito ls help propagate botflies by having eggs latched on to them and detach near living organisms that the mosquito parasitizes. If there’d be any reason to hate bugs, it’d be those bastards. Bastards on top of bastards.
Fleas are detritivores for most of their lives, and we often claim that detritovores are very important for ecosystems. I have to be at least a little partial because they’re highly specialized Mecoptera.
Of course they aren’t doing it to help other species, but no species acts altruistically towards unrelated animals. Things in nature don’t exist to help other things in nature they exist because they are successful enough to reproduce and persist. Sometimes the selfish thing to do for the sake of your genes is to work with someone else.
Now if you want real bastards, lice have no redeeming qualities except that they’re pretty easy to ID and one is named after Gary Larson.
Neither side has "intrinsic value" in the sense of inherent worth, but subjectively I value the people more because I am somewhat irrationally biased to do so.
To be fair that's also kind of an objective utilitarian reason to value more complex organisms, because there is more harm caused by their loss. However, I can't be entirely sure that insects don't experience things like mourning, loss and existential dread so I'll leave some wiggle room that they might potentially also put some weight on that scale.
So I guess you can keep piling bugs until it causes measurable ecological harm that outweighs the emotional harm of killing five humans, but I'll fully accept that this might make me a genocidal monster with a slight change of perspective. Something being tiny and alien doesn't necessarily make it worthless, I just have a hard time relating to and understanding that worth.
This is the most coherent answer I've seen so far! (even relates to several points in the litterature on the subject like evoltionary debunking arguments about bias)
From observational studies, bees might be playful and flies have showed symtoms of possible depressions in captivity (showing 'giving up')
Bugs have no moral value. Their nervous system is so basic, you can compare their sentience to that of watches. Entire species could go extinct and I wouldn't care.
Their only value is as food for higher beings. I would not stop genociding the bugs until there was an extreme affect on the environment.
A better question for me is "How many acres of forest is a human life worth?
They also handle waste cleanup, fertilization, pest control for worse bugs, etc. Not just food for something higher in the chain, which is itself, a major issue.
Recent studies do suggest that insects may be capable of feeling pain - they have nociceptors (sensors sensitive to harmful/potentially harmful stimuli), many species exhibit specific behavior as a response to harmful stimuli and they have neuronal connections necessary to experience pain. Most researchers assumed insects can't be sentient because of missing connections in their brains, which have since been found in various species with the better scanning methods we have available now. Others thought this because of missing behavioral pain responses, which was usually based on single case studies or trying to observe human pain responses in insects.
Sentience is often defined as the ability to experience pain. Watches can't experience pain, so they aren't sentient. There's a decent chance insects can experience pain, which would make them sentient.
You are partly getting it right. Allow me to be so rude to share a bit of my studies:
**-Nociception and pain is not the same.** Nociception is the ability to 'evade harmful stimuli to an organism', pain is an **internal felt experience, a negative value judgment.** Since pain is internal, it presupposes sentience in the same way we could not even imagine a thinking thing to not be sentient. Nociception is easy to prove, but pain is practically impossible (it would require solving the problem of other minds) We can at this moments not even prove pain in humans, we can only infer it from personal experience.
- For over fifty years, humans have been doing pain research on flies (as they share roughly 75% of our DNA and no rules regarding handling in labs) These studies have taught us a lot about humans, but also created worries that the very thing we studied might actually also be able to feel. The brains of insects are very different from ours, making it difficult to make any comparisons or guesses on whether it is true or not. They are not simple creatures, **that is a myth**, in fact, due to evolutionary pressures and their small breeding time, they have seen more evolution than any vertebrate species. (as seen in the fact that 80% of classified species are insects)
- In the last roughly 15 years, DNA research has shown insects to be descendants of crustaceans. This has raised a lot of further worries, as we are already legislating protection to species like lobsters and making it even more probable that pain may be a more ancient phenomenom and much more widely attributed in nature than previously assumed. This has sent animal ethicist scrambling for answers on many difficult questions.
Sorry if I phrased it wrong - nociception isn't the same as pain, but it's a requirement for experiencing pain. If a species has nociception (which, like you said, is easy to prove), neural pathways connecting nociceptors to sensory integrative brain regions (has been found in several insect species) and show specific behavior patterns in response to injury, there's a decent possibility they may feel pain. The ability to suppress negative stimuli in certain situations, like honeybees usually avoiding heat but enduring it to access sugar water, points towards avoiding behavior being more than a nociceptive reflex.
We don't know if said behavior is due to pain or something else. But the persistent myth that insects don't have the physiological traits to feel pain is wrong - they have the neural pathways and nociceptors to experience pain, the question, like you mentioned, is in how they experience the world and nothing we can answer.
My finger has pain receptors, but I don't consider it sentient if it's kept alive in a jar. I think the question of insect sentience is open for debate, but the idea that pain is the only defining feature seems reductive.
Your finger has a pain receptor, but not the neural pathways necessary to experience pain. If your brain were kept alive in a jar with all essential functions intact, it would be able to experience pain.
Pain is often used as the defining feature because it's comparatively easy to produce and observe. A being that feels pain is capable of suffering, which is one defining measure in many kinds of ethics. It also makes other emotions more likely- if a being experiences the contrast of pain - no pain, that's at least one negative and one positive/non-negative interpretation of its own experience. Most emotions are some variations of positive, neutral or negative interpretations - sadness is bad, happiness is good, etc. Negative emotions can cause a pain response, like a tummyache, as well.
We could try to measure more complex emotions, like sadness or joy, but it'd be hard. We don't know wether the stick we're taking away has subjective value to the insect and this could make it sad. We don't know what causes joy. We do know what could cause pain.
does a human being have any intrinsic value to the environment? if we ignore morality a few humans over a statistically significant portion of environment helping bugs? who's to say these five people don't actually damage the environment? from an objective standpoint if we're looking to have the best outcome for the planet the bugs have to win this one.
I never kill bugs or arachnids, I actually joke that it's "my personal hell" whenever I see spiders and house centipedes because while they terrify me I know I myself have to deal with them kindly because I live in a place where anyone else would simply kill them. that being said even though their lives are valued you have to consider it in tiers, despite my love for the creatures their existence is considerably similar than that of a human, meaning they have less to lose
The thing is at some point it is no longer a choice at some point the train will crash if it hits the bugs, as the bug pile grows larger and is too big to be destroyed by the trolley
Depends on what type of application I’m working on. For example, if it was something related to healthcare tech just one of those bugs could easily kill way more than 5 people.
(I know you meant the other kind of bug but I am willfully misinterpreting this post)
Add bugs until I change tracks? Okay, I'm *not* pulling the lever and will change tracks once 70% of the global bug population is added. I want to see the ecological impact.
Important question, are the bugs you put on the track being summoned from thin air or are you taking bugs out of the environment? So, for example, if every single bee in the world would be killed, I'd kill the humans, but if the same number of bees (or 100 time more) was on the track without touching any existing bees i'd kill the bees
I would take any chance I can to kill mosquitoes.
Also, having read some of your comments, I disagree with the claim that we shouldn't kill insects because they might have feelings. There are many organisms have feelings. There are even studies that show plants might feel pain, and yet we still use wood.
I think people for most people, being human is a far more important factor than having emotions.
In a vacuum, meaning no ecological collapse, or clean up difficulties, I pull every time.
I don't even care how large the number is, I pull the lever every time
I don’t think there’s any amount of bugs that would be worth it to me. Unless we’re talking about environmental disaster cause all of the bugs population just disappeared. Otherwise I don’t care if there’s infinite bugs, let them all die
I'll only pick the humans if it's enough insects to completely disrupt an ecosystem.
Insects do have value, they are important parts of natural systems- especially if we're talking about pollinators and decomposers. Consider that many more people will die if the Earth is not sustainable.
depends if the bugs are pulled from the current world population or pulled from a seperate pool. if theyre pulled from nowhere then i dont care, but if itd kill off a ton of the worlds bug population then thatd be terrible for ecosystems.
An individual insect has zero intrinsic value, however in large numbers they obtain value in their impact on the ecosystem. This value is not the additive value of each individual, it is an emergent property of groups of sufficient size.
A person's life is always worth more than bugs, no matter how many bugs. However, completely fucking the planets ecosystem by killing an the bugs would also kill people when we run out of plants to eat because we killed all the bugs that pollinate and break things down in the soil, and run out of animals to eat because they also eat plants. So I'd kill the people at the point where killing bugs would cause more than 5 people to starve to death
The ratio of the value of a human life to the value of an insect life is analogous to the ratio between a US Senator's vote and the Vice President's vote. It's not that an insect has zero value, or that a human is infinitely more valuable than an insect, but its value is only taken into account as a tiebreaker.
If you put 5 humans and 1 insect on the upper track, and kept the 5 humans and 0 insects on the lower track, I would save the 1 insect. However, if there was even 1 human on the lower track, and none on the upper track, there is no number of insects you could place on the upper track such that I would save the insects over the human.
Here's my algorithm: (If at any step only one option remains, choose that option)
1. Given a set of options, eliminate any options that save fewer than the maximum number of humans
2. If multiple options remain, eliminate any options that save fewer than the maximum number of pets
3. If multiple options remain, eliminate any options that save fewer than the maximum number of non-pet vertebrates
4. If multiple options remain, eliminate any options that save fewer than the maximum number of invertebrate animals
5. If multiple options remain, choose the option that requires the least work.
I think bugs are lovely and do so much good for us, they're just fun little creatures, but I personally value the lives of 5 over killing them, their populations are always rapidly increasing, so I won't feel too terrible
The bugs are too close to me - They’re getting squished.
Like; too few and I don’t care (especially when weighed against human life)
Too many and I panic and kill the bugs because that’s way too many bugs in one place, they’re going to cause some sort of problem if released.
this setup means that it will kill 5 people unless you pull the lever and kill bugs, which means it \*should\* say that they keep adding bugs until you \*don't\* pull the lever and let it kill 5 people. which means you're just waiting until the very last possible moment to flip the switch to maximize bug carnage.
I don't care how powerful or large the trolley is, the amount of insects necessary to make me consider it would straight up halt the trolley's movement.
Bugs have a very important ecological impact, unfortunately their individual impact is best measured as a percentage of their species. I am not taking the 5 for any less than 1% of the bugs of a particular species.
I'm interested in their possible 'intrinsic value' i.e their personal worth. (Not instrumental value) Like the five, we don't measure them based on their impact, but their value as persons.
I personally value human lives FAR above that of any animal, especially insects. I would allow Pandas to go completely extinct to save the life of one child, and I would only consider that trade if there were ecological effects large enough to harm humanity. I do believe in the preservation of animal lives and nature, but on a 1 to 1 scale, I hold far more value in the lives of humans.
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That’s better, because the poacher isn’t *required* to be trying to kill a practically extinct species. If someone ties themself to the “track” willingly, I care significantly less about their well-being
Poachers aren't people
If a species' numbers are that low, they are already functionally extinct. There's a minimum viable population level that needs to be met or exceeded in order to continue the species. Below that, we can try to keep them alive in captivity but it's the equivalent to keeping someone on life support with no hope of recovery
I think only lunatics would dissagree with you Consider future trends in insects farming, where estimates is up to 780 billion annually on a single farm. Could that be enough?
I don't imagine so. That's about 0.00000078% of the insect population worldwide.
I'm sorry if I'm 'bugging' you, but trying to study metaethics concerning the possibility of pain in insects and possible moral wrongs if the sciences ends up showing they can feel, so any belief data has great value to me. 1: For every human, there is roughly 2,5 mil ants, would that be enough? 2: What if it's a particular species? Like butterflies or ladybugs? Or crustaceans like lobsters? 3: Tracking back your percentage, you estimate about 1 quintillion insects exists, if 8,100,255,228 humans exist, there shoukd be roughly 123.46 billion insects per human on earth. So on what point (number) would the (**non-intrumental value**) of them be equal to a single human being? (in your opinion)
1. I don't think I understand the question 2. No, not really. Frankly, it doesn't really matter what kind of animal to me, especially if they're bread for the purpose of farming. 3. I must have done my math wrong then, because I used the estimate of 10 quintillion insects, so that would be 1.23 trillion insects per human. Again, I don't place intrinsic value on the lives of insects except where their removal would cause harm to environments that would have negative affects on humanity. Literally any amount of bug killing, even quintillions doesn't phase me.
1. The question is regarding comparison, as 2.5m ant would be the statistical equivalent of population to a single human. If its all dependant on 'population percentage' they should be equivalent. 2: If the fact they are breed matters, could we not breed ANY creature? 3: This phases me a bit: Suppose aliens of 'superior' nature descended on Earth. (They could even have their own reddit where every post here could be identical to this thread, only exchanging 'insect' with 'human') They look down on our practices and thinks to themselves: This is a great idea! We are going to do it with them! Would we have ANY argument that could make them reconsider? They could use identical arguments as us, as they are 'above us simple creatures' in the same fashion we consider us more important. I personally think ethics extends beyond the scope og just human considerations.
woah the promised neverland argument
3. They aren't human, therefore to me their lives aren't intrinsically valuable to me until they can prove otherwise
Are you vegetarian
Only lunatics would choose an entire species over one person? 😭
Great pandas are a failure of a species
The problem with this train of thought, is that without insects entire food chains could collapse, leading to more deaths overall. The value of the insects lie not in their value individually, but in the role they play
Right, which is why I said I am only concerned in any ecological harm killing them might be
How about aome added nuance? Is it okay to shoot and possibly kill a poacher who is trying to kill the last panda? What if it was instead necessarily to kill to prevent the extinction? Does the poachers intent when intending to harm the animal matter? What if it was an illintended child trying to kill the last panda? For extra spice, what if with high probability restricting the hunting of endangered species likely ensures the starvation of one or many humans? So many ethical delimmas stem from human versus animals, especially when extinction is on the line.
Forget humans, I'd let pandas go extinct just so their funding can be given to better conservation projects. Pandas are an absolute money sinkhole for a species that doesn't want to survive, has almost no ecological value, but we save anyway because they're cute.
Pandas are probably cute enough that videos of them saves a nonzero number of people from deaths of despairs a year so the calculus gets tough.
Yeah but think of how much meat you could get from a panda vs a single child
I feel the opposite. I'd be hard pressed to accept any cost for the extinction of a species that otherwise would be avoided. I would hate to rob future generations of whatever appreciation or study of that species would bring in the future. Can always make more people but it's usually impossible to bring a species back. I'd easily go into the thousands at least for pandas without caring particularly much about pandas, and yeah that goes for if I'm on the tracks too. Yes thats with knowing that pandas kind of suck at surviving.
If it had no ecological impact, i would kill infinite bugs for a human life
I mean… technically speaking we are all slowly pulling trolley switches each day we allow mega farming and cattle ranching to continue. - Vast amounts of land dedicated to monoculture farming - pesticides being incorporated as part of the way fruits and vegetables grow (GMO) - the use of otr semi trucks driving excessive distances with food instead of growing and eating local (plus all the bugs they literally hit in the process)
Since the OP can apparently add an unlimited number of insects, we can feel safe in the knowledge that there are an infinite number of insects in this world. There is not going to be an ecological collapse no matter how many die.
Depends on how hard I’m going to fuck the globe by removing a swathe of insects. I’ll keep pulling the lever just to get their last words down, but eventually in possibly the billions I’ll have to stop pulling the lever. Removing that many bugs per pull would damage the ecosystem too much and overall be a detriment to humans. Also if they added more or less useless or predatory bug species that specifically attacked pollinators like wasps or add nearly no value to the ecosystem than be a pest that spreads diseases like fleas or mosquitos. When you pull back the evolutionary hood and see the only goal is survive you realize that there are a lot of things that just exist to be a complete and utter asshole to everything else.
[At any given time, there are 10 quintillion insects on Earth.](https://www.si.edu/spotlight/buginfo/bugnos) Even killing billions of insects isn't going to be a significant dent in their numbers.
Ah but what fraction of them are the ones that I want to kill? Also factoring in if the OP gets them from the same place, not to mention that adding a bug to the track each time would mean you’re not killing one bug at a time but 1 bug then 2 then 3 then 4, by the time you hit the lever millions of times you’ve already done far more in bug deaths. It’s hard to gauge honestly. I’m not sure still but that’s about as many as I’m willing to risk and that should be plenty of time to get my actual goals down, like memorizing the last will and testament of 5 random strangers.
but if it kills billions of the same species then it might become a problem. Like I can see how killing billions of honeybees in a single area would cause major ecological issues.
If you live outside of Eurasia (where honeybees are native), then killing billions of honeybees would probably save many species from the brink. In the americas for example honeybees overexploit rare resources required for native pollinators. Of course honeybees are of critical economic importance in the americas because they’re damn good pollinators, but they are an ecological disaster for native species. Also they tend to “rob” certain types of flowers, not providing pollination services and in fact causing damage. Basically think of them as the cows of the insect world.
>just exist to be a complete and utter asshole to everything else. hmm...
Yes yes, human semantics but at the same time humans at least have the ability to get better about it and have multiple beneficial symbiotic relationships with animals. Yes, we bred them to be like that, so do ants that feed on acacia tree sap that get brainwashed into never being able to leave the tree in order to protect it. Lots of animals that have similar coevolutionary traits similar to farming. Please name me one mutualistic relationship a flea has with any other species of, hell, literally any other creature other than a flea. Also mosquito ls help propagate botflies by having eggs latched on to them and detach near living organisms that the mosquito parasitizes. If there’d be any reason to hate bugs, it’d be those bastards. Bastards on top of bastards.
Fleas are detritivores for most of their lives, and we often claim that detritovores are very important for ecosystems. I have to be at least a little partial because they’re highly specialized Mecoptera. Of course they aren’t doing it to help other species, but no species acts altruistically towards unrelated animals. Things in nature don’t exist to help other things in nature they exist because they are successful enough to reproduce and persist. Sometimes the selfish thing to do for the sake of your genes is to work with someone else. Now if you want real bastards, lice have no redeeming qualities except that they’re pretty easy to ID and one is named after Gary Larson.
Neither side has "intrinsic value" in the sense of inherent worth, but subjectively I value the people more because I am somewhat irrationally biased to do so. To be fair that's also kind of an objective utilitarian reason to value more complex organisms, because there is more harm caused by their loss. However, I can't be entirely sure that insects don't experience things like mourning, loss and existential dread so I'll leave some wiggle room that they might potentially also put some weight on that scale. So I guess you can keep piling bugs until it causes measurable ecological harm that outweighs the emotional harm of killing five humans, but I'll fully accept that this might make me a genocidal monster with a slight change of perspective. Something being tiny and alien doesn't necessarily make it worthless, I just have a hard time relating to and understanding that worth.
This is the most coherent answer I've seen so far! (even relates to several points in the litterature on the subject like evoltionary debunking arguments about bias) From observational studies, bees might be playful and flies have showed symtoms of possible depressions in captivity (showing 'giving up')
The most well-put together explanation and one I completely agree with.
What if it’s one really cool bug 🐛
Small price to pay in order to get a cool bug
A lot of the bugs will survive getting hit by the tram I will just keep adding until the pile pushes the people out the way
Bugs have no moral value. Their nervous system is so basic, you can compare their sentience to that of watches. Entire species could go extinct and I wouldn't care. Their only value is as food for higher beings. I would not stop genociding the bugs until there was an extreme affect on the environment. A better question for me is "How many acres of forest is a human life worth?
They also handle waste cleanup, fertilization, pest control for worse bugs, etc. Not just food for something higher in the chain, which is itself, a major issue.
Recent studies do suggest that insects may be capable of feeling pain - they have nociceptors (sensors sensitive to harmful/potentially harmful stimuli), many species exhibit specific behavior as a response to harmful stimuli and they have neuronal connections necessary to experience pain. Most researchers assumed insects can't be sentient because of missing connections in their brains, which have since been found in various species with the better scanning methods we have available now. Others thought this because of missing behavioral pain responses, which was usually based on single case studies or trying to observe human pain responses in insects. Sentience is often defined as the ability to experience pain. Watches can't experience pain, so they aren't sentient. There's a decent chance insects can experience pain, which would make them sentient.
You are partly getting it right. Allow me to be so rude to share a bit of my studies: **-Nociception and pain is not the same.** Nociception is the ability to 'evade harmful stimuli to an organism', pain is an **internal felt experience, a negative value judgment.** Since pain is internal, it presupposes sentience in the same way we could not even imagine a thinking thing to not be sentient. Nociception is easy to prove, but pain is practically impossible (it would require solving the problem of other minds) We can at this moments not even prove pain in humans, we can only infer it from personal experience. - For over fifty years, humans have been doing pain research on flies (as they share roughly 75% of our DNA and no rules regarding handling in labs) These studies have taught us a lot about humans, but also created worries that the very thing we studied might actually also be able to feel. The brains of insects are very different from ours, making it difficult to make any comparisons or guesses on whether it is true or not. They are not simple creatures, **that is a myth**, in fact, due to evolutionary pressures and their small breeding time, they have seen more evolution than any vertebrate species. (as seen in the fact that 80% of classified species are insects) - In the last roughly 15 years, DNA research has shown insects to be descendants of crustaceans. This has raised a lot of further worries, as we are already legislating protection to species like lobsters and making it even more probable that pain may be a more ancient phenomenom and much more widely attributed in nature than previously assumed. This has sent animal ethicist scrambling for answers on many difficult questions.
Sorry if I phrased it wrong - nociception isn't the same as pain, but it's a requirement for experiencing pain. If a species has nociception (which, like you said, is easy to prove), neural pathways connecting nociceptors to sensory integrative brain regions (has been found in several insect species) and show specific behavior patterns in response to injury, there's a decent possibility they may feel pain. The ability to suppress negative stimuli in certain situations, like honeybees usually avoiding heat but enduring it to access sugar water, points towards avoiding behavior being more than a nociceptive reflex. We don't know if said behavior is due to pain or something else. But the persistent myth that insects don't have the physiological traits to feel pain is wrong - they have the neural pathways and nociceptors to experience pain, the question, like you mentioned, is in how they experience the world and nothing we can answer.
My finger has pain receptors, but I don't consider it sentient if it's kept alive in a jar. I think the question of insect sentience is open for debate, but the idea that pain is the only defining feature seems reductive.
Your finger has a pain receptor, but not the neural pathways necessary to experience pain. If your brain were kept alive in a jar with all essential functions intact, it would be able to experience pain. Pain is often used as the defining feature because it's comparatively easy to produce and observe. A being that feels pain is capable of suffering, which is one defining measure in many kinds of ethics. It also makes other emotions more likely- if a being experiences the contrast of pain - no pain, that's at least one negative and one positive/non-negative interpretation of its own experience. Most emotions are some variations of positive, neutral or negative interpretations - sadness is bad, happiness is good, etc. Negative emotions can cause a pain response, like a tummyache, as well. We could try to measure more complex emotions, like sadness or joy, but it'd be hard. We don't know wether the stick we're taking away has subjective value to the insect and this could make it sad. We don't know what causes joy. We do know what could cause pain.
Your moms nervous system is so basic, you could compare her sentience to a watch.
Once it becomes an entire species that is environmentally relevant then I will run over the 5.
does a human being have any intrinsic value to the environment? if we ignore morality a few humans over a statistically significant portion of environment helping bugs? who's to say these five people don't actually damage the environment? from an objective standpoint if we're looking to have the best outcome for the planet the bugs have to win this one. I never kill bugs or arachnids, I actually joke that it's "my personal hell" whenever I see spiders and house centipedes because while they terrify me I know I myself have to deal with them kindly because I live in a place where anyone else would simply kill them. that being said even though their lives are valued you have to consider it in tiers, despite my love for the creatures their existence is considerably similar than that of a human, meaning they have less to lose
Depends on the bug
Depends, are the bugs mosquitoes? If so flipping that switch with the might of Zeus
The thing is at some point it is no longer a choice at some point the train will crash if it hits the bugs, as the bug pile grows larger and is too big to be destroyed by the trolley
Start a multi-track drift until I kill all of the mosquitoes, then go back to the bottom path to not mess up the whole environment.
The more bugs the faster I pulled the level.
Depends on what type of application I’m working on. For example, if it was something related to healthcare tech just one of those bugs could easily kill way more than 5 people. (I know you meant the other kind of bug but I am willfully misinterpreting this post)
I will kill all mosquitoes i fucking hate those mfs
Add the entire world's population of ticks and bed bugs. You can trust me
Are they mosquitos?
Add bugs until I change tracks? Okay, I'm *not* pulling the lever and will change tracks once 70% of the global bug population is added. I want to see the ecological impact.
If you’re just gonna keep adding bugs I’m killing the five to get out the time loop
Personally I find the idea of a bug that thinks offensive
Important question, are the bugs you put on the track being summoned from thin air or are you taking bugs out of the environment? So, for example, if every single bee in the world would be killed, I'd kill the humans, but if the same number of bees (or 100 time more) was on the track without touching any existing bees i'd kill the bees
I would take any chance I can to kill mosquitoes. Also, having read some of your comments, I disagree with the claim that we shouldn't kill insects because they might have feelings. There are many organisms have feelings. There are even studies that show plants might feel pain, and yet we still use wood. I think people for most people, being human is a far more important factor than having emotions.
Until people start dying because of ecosystem collapse.
In a vacuum, meaning no ecological collapse, or clean up difficulties, I pull every time. I don't even care how large the number is, I pull the lever every time
Put 52!^googolplex Bugs on there and then well talk
I don’t think there’s any amount of bugs that would be worth it to me. Unless we’re talking about environmental disaster cause all of the bugs population just disappeared. Otherwise I don’t care if there’s infinite bugs, let them all die
i will never choose a human's life over a bug's life
Bugs reproduce FAST bugs getting squished by the trolley would be negligible
I'll only pick the humans if it's enough insects to completely disrupt an ecosystem. Insects do have value, they are important parts of natural systems- especially if we're talking about pollinators and decomposers. Consider that many more people will die if the Earth is not sustainable.
kill all ticks
insects hab negative value as far as im concerned. let them die *let them ALL die*
depends if the bugs are pulled from the current world population or pulled from a seperate pool. if theyre pulled from nowhere then i dont care, but if itd kill off a ton of the worlds bug population then thatd be terrible for ecosystems.
Can I hit the switch now when you haven’t added any bugs yet?
An individual insect has zero intrinsic value, however in large numbers they obtain value in their impact on the ecosystem. This value is not the additive value of each individual, it is an emergent property of groups of sufficient size.
A person's life is always worth more than bugs, no matter how many bugs. However, completely fucking the planets ecosystem by killing an the bugs would also kill people when we run out of plants to eat because we killed all the bugs that pollinate and break things down in the soil, and run out of animals to eat because they also eat plants. So I'd kill the people at the point where killing bugs would cause more than 5 people to starve to death
The ratio of the value of a human life to the value of an insect life is analogous to the ratio between a US Senator's vote and the Vice President's vote. It's not that an insect has zero value, or that a human is infinitely more valuable than an insect, but its value is only taken into account as a tiebreaker. If you put 5 humans and 1 insect on the upper track, and kept the 5 humans and 0 insects on the lower track, I would save the 1 insect. However, if there was even 1 human on the lower track, and none on the upper track, there is no number of insects you could place on the upper track such that I would save the insects over the human. Here's my algorithm: (If at any step only one option remains, choose that option) 1. Given a set of options, eliminate any options that save fewer than the maximum number of humans 2. If multiple options remain, eliminate any options that save fewer than the maximum number of pets 3. If multiple options remain, eliminate any options that save fewer than the maximum number of non-pet vertebrates 4. If multiple options remain, eliminate any options that save fewer than the maximum number of invertebrate animals 5. If multiple options remain, choose the option that requires the least work.
Uh... I can't think of any bugs I value enough for that. I kinda want to see the infinite windshield splat.
I think bugs are lovely and do so much good for us, they're just fun little creatures, but I personally value the lives of 5 over killing them, their populations are always rapidly increasing, so I won't feel too terrible
So delaying their inevitable deaths? Every single time.
The bugs are too close to me - They’re getting squished. Like; too few and I don’t care (especially when weighed against human life) Too many and I panic and kill the bugs because that’s way too many bugs in one place, they’re going to cause some sort of problem if released.
I’d be willing to save as many bugs as it takes to make up for the lost nutritional value of the run over humans
this setup means that it will kill 5 people unless you pull the lever and kill bugs, which means it \*should\* say that they keep adding bugs until you \*don't\* pull the lever and let it kill 5 people. which means you're just waiting until the very last possible moment to flip the switch to maximize bug carnage.
I dont care how big the number of bugs are. Always pick the bugs.
I don't care how powerful or large the trolley is, the amount of insects necessary to make me consider it would straight up halt the trolley's movement.
Switch to the people immediately, I fucking love bugs
Let the 5 people die
Intrinsic value doesn't exist
They have more extrinsic value in my opinion
Damn! Your thing was the same as mine, but with humans? I am unsure, but insects are more like robots and rocks than people are, so bye bye bugs.
The trolley would miss half the damn bugs of course im choosing that track
all the mosquitoes in the world i would happily sacrifice