I've been pushing a moral dilemma to one side in my mind for a few months now. After Killing the ants and Killing the moths, here's the third installment in the unofficial "invertebrate trilogy."
One of the bedrooms in my flat keeps getting wasps in. I think they're crawling through gaps in our old English windows.
They arrive low-energy. Some fly around briefly, but mostly they just crawl up and down the glass (or along the floor) and slowly die. Sometimes I gather them up in a cup and release them outside. But given it's getting colder, I'm not sure that's much better. Is it better to slowly die in my flat or out in the cold?
We also had mice recently. For them, we found a humane trap and released them outside [1].
Wasps are scary too.
It's easy to have sympathy for them when they're crawling around slowly. But when the higher-energy ones get in, it's easy to lose that sympathy (which then makes me feel bad).
It's also easy to worry about how much of my attention this is taking up. I could be helping way more invertebrates by focusing on my job. But instead I'm on Reddit threads learning about insecticides, and putting little spoons of honey and water out for the wasps [2], and writing this post...
I know I probably care about these wasps more than most people would. To most, this isn't even a dilemma, it's just pest control. But to me it feels like a big deal, and I can't quite shake that.
Our landlord came around for a flat inspection and we told him about the wasp problem. He said he could probably fly a drone and spread insecticide to deal with the nest.
I think this is a good thing? There's probably a more humane way of doing it, but it's probably best to kill the nest?
A few weeks later, we got an email from our landlord with some bullet points, one of which was:
Wasps - After investigation we believe they are in the hollow part of the sash window frame. We're looking at a way of sealing it up.
The strange thing is: I do think killing the nest is probably the right call. But I'm deeply uncomfortable with that conclusion. Which feels absurd, given that my work is literally to help kill animals better. And yet here I am, agonising over wasps.
These wasps have been buzzing in my ear -- literally and figuratively -- for weeks, occupying way more of my attention than they probably should. I could be helping orders of magnitude more invertebrates by just focusing on my actual work. But I can't seem to let it go.
I wanted to write this post to alleviate some guilt and close the loop in my mind.
I don't have a clean resolution here. I think killing the nest is probably right. I'm also uncomfortable with that reality. And I'm bothered by how much headspace this has taken up.
But I suppose the point is: these trade-offs are messy, the 'right' answer isn't obvious, and sometimes all we can do is sit with the discomfort rather than pretend it doesn't exist.
- ^
But again, is this good? Leaving a mouse to fend for themself in the cold? I just couldn't bring myself to buy a lethal trap. Which is strange, fundamentally, given my job is to get animals killed humanely (in contexts where they'd otherwise die slowly).
- ^
Which is probably also bad? It's my partner's honey, but still...
Just commenting to state some obvious things that you already know, but I hope it doesn't hurt to hear them from someone else.
Bypassing guilt and rumination is far easier said than done, but the following framing helps me. You're on a great path, doing great and wonderful things for the world. Excessive focus on these less important (relative to the rest of your impact) decisions doesn't seem to contribute to that path. As you alluded to, it actively detracts from it. For me, conceptualising things like that really does help me bypass a lot of rumination; just stay the course, knowing that your path is a good one. If you were a terrible person, outputting 0 good in the world, then maybe it's worth ruminating more on these small things; but you are the polar opposite, and the invertebrates need you in good mental shape!
I doubt any of this helps, but at least I hope it doesn't make things worse!
Keep up the great work.
I really appreciate the kind of sensitivity and rigor that goes into this kind of post.
I also feel roughly that, since thinking about a few animals a little bit tends to create a few of these kind of moral gridlocks, thinking about all of them maximally (in order to avoid infinities-of-bad) would probably make human existence impossible, which also seems infinity-bad. The phenomenology of an insect is likely less sophisticated in terms of both agency and likely valence than a human in its faintest dream, within which distress seems possible but is sensibly regarded as on an incomparable scale to awake-human-suffering. I know this is a lot of short-handing of the underlying maths, but it helps me to see these questions from multiple angles of handwaviness. While compelling to think about bugs being lovely little guys I have to for my own sanity consider such exercises to be more like overprojecting theory-of-mind mixed with a little hyperscrupulosity-schizophrenia and mistaken for empathy.
During the summer, I purchased a juice container and, at midnight, dressed in protective gear, captured the entire nest, and drove to the country where I placed the nest in a tree. I don't recommend this technique for everyone but, like you, I just couldn't kill them simply because they were a nuisance to my way of life. But they had to go as they were posing a threat to family, neighbours, pets, etc.
I feel this. Even with my personal almost negligible probability of bee sentience, it felt horrible spraying a nest the other day, but there's no like insect removal services here in Uganda. Fortunately the swarm vacated and we killed only hundreds not tens of thousands of bees
All the best with the decision.
Out of curiosity, why so low?
straight after a short spray, the bees vacated the roof. There might have been s lot more due later though but they looked not bad.
I meant why the low probability of bee sentience.
Obviously I'm the opposite of an expert here but here are my reasons, roughly from most important to least important
1. I think the best assessment we have of Animal sentience seems biased towards animals for at least 4 reasons as I outlined here. So I take RP numbers and downward multiply them by something like 10x - 1,000x depending on the animal. IMO the most important bias here was selecting a pro animal-welfare research team with zero animal welfare skeptics.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/E9NnR9cJMM7m5G2r4/is-rp-s-moral-weights-project-too-animal-friendly-four
2. I've been generally unimpressed by responses to criticisms of animal sentience. I've rarely seen an animal welfare advocate make an even small concession. This makes me even more skeptical about the neutrality of thought processes and research done by animal welfare folks.
3. I don't believe that response-to-stimuli is a very useful proxy for sentience, yet this is what sentience percentages are usually based on. Every organism responds to stimuli, including bacteria. They have to in order to survive, in increasingly complex ways as organism complexity increases. I doubt that strong noxious stimuli response = meaningful pain. I think response-to-stimuli is the go-to because we just don't have a good alternative, but that doesn't mean the "best" option is a good one.
I think that brains need a "special" set of conditions to be sentient (see point 4), and to feel pain in a meaningful way. Bees are wildly intelligent and have capabilities way beyond humans in some areas, but I don't think probability of sentience increases roughly linearly with increased complexity of behaviour.
4. I think we should base our priors more on what we are more sure of, which is our understanding of human sentience. I don't think humans are actually "sentient" until we are quite old (see Peter Singer's old work). I have zero memories before age like 3 or 4? Whether a form of sentience is there in the womb or some time after birth, the human brain is way more complex than animals before sentience kicks in. Brain EEGs only show meaningful stimulation at 30 weeks of gestation, and likely it kicks in sometime after that. I think this is an underrated data point, because we have far more confidence in it than any of our pretty wild assertions about animals. To be clear I'm not a pure utilitarian and think humans AND animals have inherent worth outside of sentience and pain.
I'll note that even despite all this I still think Animal Welfare work is hugely important, and even on debate week I voted that marginal money would be slightly better going there than to GHD. Even if my sentience estimate is 1,000x less than yours the work is still likely super important and cost effective.
Knowing Matt, I’d wager he’s asking why your p(bee sentience) is so low