Growing up, most of the stories I heard about animals featured charismatic megafauna—“flagship species,” as they were called. Elephants and tigers were the main attraction in zoos; dolphin shows were the primary draw at aquariums; and nonprofit organizations like the World Wildlife Fund celebrated pandas. In the news, the biggest stories about animals featured species like gorillas, lions, and orcas. This is largely still true today, and in a way it makes sense. These animals, with their sheer size, enigmatic behavior, and endangered status, can captivate the human imagination and command attention like few other creatures can, eliciting deep emotional responses from people around the world.
Yet the past decade has seen increasing pushback against this idea of prioritizing the welfare of megafauna while ignoring less charismatic creatures. The view that we should extend our moral concern to more than just animals with faces is becoming more mainstream. But if we stop simply prioritizing the welfare of animals that are “majestic” or “cute,” how should we prioritize species? Should we be concerned about the welfare of fish, bivalves, or insects? What about microorganisms? If meat is murder, does that mean antibacterial soap is, too?
Most people can agree that all humans are part of the moral circle. That is, they fall within the imaginary boundary we draw around those we deem worthy of respect and consideration. Many vegetarians and vegans believe that animals—at least farmed land and aquatic animals—are too. But people often fail to consider the idea that insects, microbes, and even some future forms of artificial intelligence may deserve as much consideration as human beings because they might also have conscious experiences, like happiness and suffering. And if they can suffer, as Jeff Sebo, a philosophy professor at NYU, argues in a prescient new paper, we should probably try to prevent that pain.
Sebo considers these matters through the lens of utilitarianism—a moral theory that prioritizes doing “the greatest good for the greatest number”—and what philosopher Derek Parfit called the “repugnant conclusion.” Parfit argued that if we had to choose between (a) a small population where everyone has the potential for very high welfare and (b) a large population where everyone has a very low potential for welfare, we should choose the one with the greatest total amount of welfare.
Counterintuitive or “repugnant” as it may seem, the better option may well be the larger population whose members have more happiness in total, even if they have less on average. Sebo follows Parfit’s reasoning to its logical conclusion: The planet’s incredibly large population of smaller life forms, like bugs, may actually have more welfare to consider than its much smaller human population.
Not long ago, the idea that any nonhuman animal deserved moral concern would have seemed very strange. The 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas believed that only humans matter because only they have “immortal souls” and the ability to reason. If it’s wrong to torture an animal, he thought, that’s only because it may cause harm to another human’s property. Enlightenment thinker René Descartes famously popularized the view that nonhuman animals are automata, capable of responding to stimuli but not of thought or feeling. This thinking only started to change in the West after generations of ethical philosophers began to parse the meaning of a now-famous quote by utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham: “The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”
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