As someone who has been concerned about insects as an area for years, I think the aspect that stops animal-focused people I speak to from engaging with insects as a cause area is not really to do with scale or neglectedness. Many vegans do not eat honey; suggesting a concern for the bees creating it, and SWP (https://www.shrimpwelfareproject.org/) has gotten quite a lot of support from the animal movement. The issue is pretty directly tied to tractability and concrete actions that can be taken. If the current inventions focused on insects are research-orientated with unclear pathways for how insects do in fact get helped, that will be a blocking factor for many EA animal advocates. I think in many cases right now, people see insect welfare much like wild animal suffering; as an interesting, high scale area with no clear significant actions that can be taken.

TL;DR - Thanks for an interesting and accessible post! With the caveat that I've done no research and have only anecdotes to back this up, I wonder if you may underestimate people's intuitive ability to feel empathy for insects. Perhaps the more daunting obstacle to social concern for insect welfare overlaps with our indifference toward wild animal welfare in general?

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When I was about 7, one of my young neighbors used to pin large mosquitoes against his playset slide and slowly tear off one limb at a time.* My siblings, parents, and I universally found this repulsive, long before we knew anything about EA. As Brian Tomasik documents in some of his videos, many insects writhe as they die in ways that humans typically associate with pain.

They also attempt to escape death in ways we understand as fear. I used to live in a place with lots of American cockroaches, which are large enough to be gross and startling. I probably squashed 50 - 100 of them over the years. Each time, I couldn't help but feel conflicted chasing them, then applying enough force to feel them burst under a wadded paper towel as they frantically scurried to escape. "If the Jains are right," I joked to a friend, "I'm going to hell."

My reflection from these biased and highly unscientific anecdotes is that even if we do not intuitively feel a moral obligation to protect or care for insects, ensure they live flourishing lives, or even refrain from killing them when they annoy us (or legitimately threaten our health/hygiene), we do at least dimly suspect they are capable of pain and negative emotions and feel an obligation not to gratuitously intensify that suffering. We kill bugs, but we prefer to give them a quick death. That's arguably similar to our moral intuitions for other animals. Most people object to dogfighting much more than they object to putting down unwanted strays in a shelter, for example.

For this reason, I do think "don't boil silkworms alive" could eventually catch on as a mainstream cause. So could "don't farm insects in stressful conditions" and "ensure pesticides kill only the desired insects, as quickly as possible." We can be convinced to mitigate whatever unnecessary suffering we are directly responsible for, especially when the required sacrifices are minor. I'd be glad to see EA get involved in this work.

On the other hand, these intuitions will not reach the overwhelming majority of those 10 quintillion insects, and I suspect you'll struggle to convince most people to go further than that. My hunch is that this is for the same reason people are skeptical of wild animal welfare in general. Most people's moral intuitions have at least some deontological streak, so they feel much more responsible for animals that suffer at human hands than they do for those that suffer from natural predation, starvation, infection, etc. When we watch one animal eat another in a nature documentary, we may feel some compassion (admittedly proportional to how cute the eaten animal was). But we do not feel guilt or responsibility to change our own behavior in the same way we might if we were to have personally hunted or eaten the animal.

So my theory is that even though insects are uniquely small, weird, or scary, we can empathize with them in similar circumstances to our empathy for other animals. Nonetheless, this empathy isn't enough to reach most suffering insects. 

If this theory is true, it has implications for what strategies are likeliest to succeed in improving insect welfare, as well as how we should categorize insect welfare among other EA causes. Whereas factory-farmed chickens represent the overwhelming majority of overall chickens on Earth, farmed insects are a tiny minority of overall insects, and seem likely to remain so. In this way, insect welfare could be seen as a speculative but high-stakes subset of wild animal welfare, the tractability of which may depend on similar advocacy approaches.

Thank you for your post. You present a well-reasoned and fascinating case for extending our moral circle to include insects. 

I am an enormous insect lover and I have become hugely preoccupied with learning more about their subjective experiences and to what degree insects experience suffering. A couple of years ago I researched how the human consumption of insects–entomophagy, could support resilient diets. Initially, I was so enamored by the favorable land/water use of insect farming that I could largely overlook the ethical concerns behind entomophagy, but I have updated since then and grown increasingly more concerned about the ethics. 

Here is an article I published about entomophagy largely extolling the environmental and nutritional upsides of insect consumption. 

Here is a section on ethics that didn't make it into this version of the rticle, but that I am looking to expand and revisit:

Ethics of Entomophagy 

The ethics of eating animals is a question that provokes perennial philosophical interest. The eating of insects should be met with as much moral and ethical discussion as would surround the eating of any other living creature. According to Rozin & Ruby (2019), “the general lack of moral objection to raising insects for food is predicated on the belief that they do not suffer in the process; if this is untrue, then raising insects for food rather than larger invertebrates may actually increase overall suffering, given the much larger number of insects required to make one kilogram of food” (p. 161). Given the enormous quantity of insects that widespread entomophagy would require, it seems necessary to investigate further into insect suffering. 

In 2005, Author David Foster Wallace wrote an article on the eating of lobsters that continues to perturb and inspire ethicists and laypeople today. Beginning as a review of the Main Lobster Festival, the article quickly evolves into a provocative philosophical analysis of the ethics of eating lobsters and how human beings consider, or more often don’t bother to consider, animals’ pain when it’s up against gustatory pleasure. Foster Wallace posits that when considering animal pain “...everything gets progressively more abstract and convolved as we move farther and farther out from the higher-type mammals into cattle and swine and dogs and cats and rodents, and then birds and fish, and finally invertebrates...” (p. 62). An investigation into the ethics of eating invertebrates such as insects will be difficult, but how insects are raised, harvested, and ultimately consumed is inextricably linked to how sustainable and moral the practice of entomophagy can be.

Final thoughts:

I would absolutely love to talk about this further. I think that insect farming will proliferate in the next few years and that there may be significant environmental benefits to this. However, I fear that the downsides will far outstrip the positives, especially if the following are true. 

1. If insect-derived animal feed replaces/supplements soy-based feed and cheapens or enables the expansion of factory farming.
2. If insects suffer tremendously or if the cumulative suffering is staggeringly high. 
   
   Please reach out to me to talk more about this. I would also be extremely curious to get involved with research about this or other projects involving insect suffering/humane insect farming/entomophagy.

Thank you for a well written post. The fact that there are 10 quintillion insects makes it hard to care about insect welfare. At some point, when deciding whether it is effective to improve insect welfare, we have to compare to the effectiveness of other interventions, like improving human welfare. How many insect lives are worth one human life?

This is just estimating, but if the answer is one billion or less, then I should care more about insect life than human life, which doesn’t seem right. If the answer is a quadrillion or more, it seems like any intervention will not have sufficient impact. Therefore this only makes sense with an ethical theory that places one human life between a billion and a quadrillion insects.

I’m not sure what the right answer here is but it seems like something that needs a good answer in order to claim effectiveness.

This post is well-intentioned and the bee story is sweet but beyond avoiding pulling wings off flies I don't see what more we can do.

Assigning anything above the tiniest value to the welfare of insects leads to absurd conclusions because of their sheer number .eg.:

• Should we stop using pesticides and increase food prices/slow development because of insect welfare?

• Should we start killing whales, birds, fish because the number of krill/insects they eat?

• Do we need more rather than fewer locust plagues?

• Should I let termites eat my house actually?

Widening our moral circle out this far is impractical.