Jonathan Birch, The Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience, London School of Economics and Political Science

ORCID 0000-0001-7517-4759

Assigned DOI doi.org/10.3998/jpe.10749

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Abstract

The three commentaries on “Ethics for a large sentient world” raise several problems for a Gandhian approach to animal ethics. In my responses, I defend my position that granting robust rights to individual insects is untenable, pushing us to look harder at alternative options. I explain how Gandhi’s commitment to nonviolence allows him to avoid the unwelcome implications his principles might otherwise have. I consider his nuanced position on the interplay between general principles and embedded responses to particular situations. I explain why he should not be read as an antinatalist. That said, his framework undeniably presents an austere ascetic ideal that calls on us to rethink the meaning of “progress”. The framework condemns many aspects of modern industrialized economies, not just their treatment of non-human animals.

1. Introduction

I’m really grateful to Angie Pepper, Gary David O’Brien, Samantha Hurn and Alexander Badman-King for their commentaries on my target article, “Ethics for a large sentient world” (Birch 2026). It was a pleasure to read them!

I was led to write the article by a growing sense that the animal advocacy movement—including myself—has neglected insects, which are both extremely numerous and plausibly sentient. Perhaps a kinder term would be “confusion” rather than neglect. As Pepper points out, vegans (again, including myself) avoid honey, cochineal, silk and other insect products. Yet many of us combine this with a comparatively permissive attitude towards intensive monoculture, which, through the rampant use of lethal insecticides, is decimating insect populations. Sometimes we act like we care about insects; sometimes we act like we don’t. I asked myself: is there a consistent way through this ethical maze that helps us balance the reasons to care against the reasons not to care too much? This led me to Gandhi’s fascinating and distinctive framework.

The article is so outside the mainstream of practical ethics that I sent it off to the editors fearfully, expecting acerbic and even angry reactions. Instead, the three commentaries are exemplars of how to engage thoughtfully with the issue. I hope this whole exchange can serve as a model of how animal ethics can take insects more seriously than we have done up to now.

Since the challenge of how to live in a large sentient world is a topic of ongoing reflection for me, I don’t want to come across as an unequivocal supporter of the Gandhian “progressive ahimsaist” approach I put on the table. But I do think it can be defended against the criticisms presented by the commentators, as I'll explain.

I won’t respond to every point that the commentators have made. In particular, the target article’s presuppositions concerning the nature of sentience, why it matters, why insects but not plants are plausible candidates for having it, and how to think about variation in the forms of it are all better handled in my other work (especially Birch 2024; Birch et al. 2020), and it would not add anything to repeat points made there. Here I will concentrate on the Gandhian approach and its implications.

2. Still no robust rights for individual insects

I first need to clarify why I reject “Option 4”, the view that sentience implies robust rights. Pepper reconstructs my case like this: a robust right cannot be overridden by even a substantial human interest, like the interest in health or sustenance, so if insects have robust rights, much of what we do to them is unjustifiable. This, she replies, rests on a misconception of what it takes to have a robust right. Robust rights can come into conflict with each other, and sometimes a substantial human interest might carry the day.

But my case is not quite that. It is rather that a robust right cannot be overridden by a minor human interest (as all agree), and that, outside of exceptional cases, any single insect poses no more than a minor risk to the health or food security of any human. It is only in large numbers that they pose substantial risks. But an individual’s rights are not robust if their vital interests can be overridden by a human interest in controlling aggregations of minor risks.

We normally think of insects at the species level: we talk of the impact on crops of “the green peace aphid”, and so on. To talk of individuals at all in this context sounds very strange. But that is only because we don’t normally entertain the possibility that individual insects might be rights-bearers. When that possibility is under discussion, it becomes relevant that each individual insect imposes only tiny impacts and that we could easily bear these impacts were there not so many other insects doing the same things.

For us to be justified in killing an individual with a right to life, the risk posed to our vital interests by that individual needs to be at a sufficiently high level. If we allow that aggregated risks posed by entire species, considered collectively, may license indiscriminate lethal violence against all members of that species, we are no longer thinking of the individuals as rights bearers.

Since the thought of individual insects as rights bearers is so difficult to entertain, it might be easier to consider dogs. Some argue: when a population of dogs, taken collectively, poses an unacceptable risk of transmitting rabies, it is permissible to kill all of them. This appears to have been Gandhi’s position in 1926. This is clearly not a position that grants, to each individual dog, a robust right to life. If they have a robust right to life, one cannot simply consider aggregate risks, judge them unacceptable, and eliminate a population. One must argue that the risk posed by a single individual justifies harm to that individual. I don’t think it can be tenable to ascribe rights to insects in that sense, pushing us to look harder at the other areas of the option space.

3. Nonviolence as the centre of Gandhi’s position

A core feature of Gandhi’s view is the idea that a duty of care can override the duty not to harm. Such an override could be abused in horrible ways. Pepper brings this out in her commentary: “Consider, for instance, that such a view would permit me to kill five, a hundred, or even a million children to save my own, solely because I have a duty of care to my child that I do not owe to the others.”

Although there are many examples of people acting as though they endorse something like this principle, they are hardly moral exemplars. Given Gandhi’s overarching commitment to nonviolence, any such implication would be a good reason for him to reject the view, but he did not take it to have any such implication. As I read him, the structure of his view is this: because duties of care create such powerful obligations, they very probably will lead to horrifyingly violent consequences unless combined with a guiding ideal of ahimsa, as Arjuna learns to his cost in the Mahabharata. But when combined with a guiding ideal of ahimsa, they will not, because in adopting that ideal we commit to seeking a peaceful resolution to every conflict, resorting to violence only when we have shown it to be unavoidable.

With insects and rabid dogs we are genuinely left without nonviolent options much of the time, in Gandhi’s opinion; whereas, with other humans, the space of nonviolent options is so vast that we are unlikely to ever exhaust it. In all those situations where people in fact resort to killing hundreds of children, they have dismissed nonviolent options far too quickly.

That last part I strongly agree with, and my only qualm is about the first part. Is it true that, in our interactions with non-human animals, we are regularly left with only violent methods for honouring our duties of care? Gandhi had a wonderful ability to imagine possible peaceful resolutions to human conflict, but he did not deploy his imaginative powers in the same way to human-animal conflicts. He arguably jumped too quickly to the view that lethal violence was necessary. This can be illustrated by the case of stray dogs, where “Catch-Neuter-Vaccinate-Return” programs are now ongoing in many Indian cities (Smith et al. 2025). They still involve a kind of violence, but at least it is non-lethal violence.

4. Why it’s important to be able to justify the harm one causes

Hurn and Badman-King present the captivating example of Skanda Vale, a community in Wales that has been practising a form of ahimsa since 1973. They use this case to argue for a “more holistic approach to living nonviolently”.

They suggest in several places that there is a tension between reducing harm and developing ethical frameworks that can justify harm:

Maybe the solution lies not in navigating how to justify harms, but in finding ways to reduce them?

To navigate this conundrum ethically requires a willingness to be immersed in and face the lives and deaths involved, rather than seeking to obfuscate, justify, or distance oneself from those harms.

We suggest that solutions to the ‘insect challenge’ therefore need to refocus on how we should live with, rather than justify harm to, these beings, many of whom are integral to multispecies survival on our damaged planet (and therefore of significant moral concern).

As I see it, there is no tension between “living with…” and “justifying harm to…”, nor is there any tension between justifying some harms and reducing them until only justified harms remain. Justifying is not aptly grouped with “obsfuscate” or “distance oneself from”.

Even so, I agree that a question arises about the value of a framing the ethical debate in terms of how to justify harm. If everyone agrees there is an imperative to reduce the harm we cause as far as practically possible, why debate whether some harms are justifiable? Why not cut straight to practical suggestions for reducing harm?

The short answer is that whenever we say “as far as possible” or dismiss radical proposals as “impractical”, we rely on the idea that some reasons are weighty enough to outweigh the imperative to reduce harm, so it’s important to be clear about what these reasons are. Strictly speaking, it is possible for any of us to embark on a fast unto death, as some Jain mendicants do when they judge themselves close to the natural end of life (Chapple 1993). But most of us, in saying “as far as possible”, have a different set of limits in mind: the limits imposed by our other ethical commitments. So, we should try to articulate exactly what those other commitments are and how they are able to outweigh the duty not to harm. This is the project Gandhi undertook in 1926 with his characteristic seriousness and intensity.

The case of Skanda Vale exemplifies the unavoidability of these questions. Their website indicates various choices they have made. They have installed a large wind turbine to generate renewable energy. They maintain a tree plantation and use the wood for construction and as a further source of renewable energy. They maintain a herd of dairy cows and provide food that is vegetarian but not vegan. Hurn and Badman-King’s piece further reveals that, in the hospice, they serve meat on request. They mention too that the community routinely gives animals anthelmintics, medications known to be highly toxic to dung beetles and linked to their decline (Vokřál et al. 2023).

All these choices were surely made following careful deliberation about the reasons for and against, leading to a judgement that the “reasons for” were stronger on balance. So, this community has not found a way to avoid the business of justifying harms. They have collectively decided that the harms involved in the above activities can be justified. They may be right. I don’t need to take a side on this to make the point that they are involved in the business of justifying harms, like all of us.

They must also make judgements about what counts as harm. Hurn and Badman-King have described the ashram’s absolute opposition to veterinary euthanasia: the community favours palliative care even when animals are incurably ill. This led to a legal battle with the Welsh government when one of their cows contracted bovine tuberculosis (Hurn 2018; Hurn and Badman-King 2019). Gandhi argued for a different position: that euthanasia is not himsa (harm, violence) if performed for the sake of the animal whose life is taken (CWMG, Vol. 31, p. 516). The fundamental disagreement here is not about the meaning of a word, but about whether our moral reasons to avoid acts of euthanasia outweigh our moral reasons to avoid prolonging an animal’s suffering. Here too the Skanda Vale community has weighed the reasons and made a judgement.

Given that these judgements are unavoidable, there remains a question about the value of trying to articulate general, abstract principles for making them vs. the value of embedding oneself in particular situations and attempting to respond, without generalizing, to the local reasons those situations provide. In calling for “immersion” rather than “distancing oneself” and in emphasizing the value of long-term fieldwork, I take Hurn and Badman-King to be positioning themselves on the particularist side of the divide.

Although I probably made him sound like a “principles” person, it is not easy to place Gandhi in relation to this faultline. In 1926 he was in a “principles” frame of mind, engaging in a project of ethical system-building across eight essays. But in a 1936 address to the first conference of the Gandhi Seva Sangh (Gandhi Service Society), he remarked:

I have conceived no such thing as Gandhism. I am not an exponent of any sect. I never claimed to have originated any philosophy. … Without any elaborate scheme I have simply tried in my own way to apply the eternal principles of truth and non-violence to our daily life and problems. Like a child I did whatever occurred to me on the spur of the moment during the course of events. Then I realized that what I was doing were experiments in truth. In doing so I have sometimes erred and learnt by my errors. Life has thus become for me a series of experiments in truth. (CWMG, Vol. 62, pp. 223-224)

This should be read in context, and the context is that Gandhi is arguing that the new society should focus on practical community work, not on disseminating literature written by him (“Where is the need for books?” he goes on to say. “Tell the villagers that you are there in their midst to serve them with your wheels, your brooms and buckets.”) Even so, it suggests a distinctive position on the “principles vs. particularism” issue. In conceptualizing his whole life as a series of “experiments in truth”, Gandhi found a middle way: he formulated principles but regarded them merely as provisional hypotheses to be tested by attempting to live by them. They were not to be read as doctrines. One of the things we might learn from our experiments is that the principles work for some communities but not for others. ^[1]

In philosophy we talk of “reflective equilibrium”—Gandhi was seeking a kind of “lived equilibrium”, to be reached by establishing experimental communities that successfully enact a nonviolent way of life. I find this an appealing idea. It suggests there is a role for formulating general principles (my project here, and the project of much philosophical writing), but also an essential role for on-the-ground experiments such as Skanda Vale and for fieldwork studying those experiments.

Incidentally, the goal of relating less violently to other animals remained central to Gandhi’s “experiments” well into the 1930s, despite his increasing political prominence. After writing the target article, I read the autobiography of Madeleine Slade (Mirabehn), one of Gandhi’s closest aides, and I learned from it that Gandhi attempted to cut out milk from his diet on multiple occasions, not just the one occasion I originally described. Between 1926 and 1935, amid various world-historical achievements and jail sentences, he experimented with ground coconut, almond paste, peanut paste and soya beans as milk replacements, each time becoming ill and ending the experiment (Slade 1960). Since he was already vegetarian and avoided eggs, he was effectively vegan during these periods, some years before the emergence of the vegan movement. He did not want to declare a kind of harm “unavoidable” until he had tried every available way of avoiding it. Given everything else that was going on, I find his persistence quite moving.

5. The austerity of Gandhi’s ascetic ideal

One of the endlessly fascinating aspects of Gandhi is the way he combined unceasing political activism with apparent endorsement of an ascetic ideal that, in its ancient form, involves withdrawing from the world. One would naturally read one of the many colossal biographies of his life and assume his ideal of how to live was one of engaged worldly action, not withdrawal! Since many now point to his life as a kind of ideal, it is surprising to find him holding up a completely different kind of life and appearing to suggest we should work towards that as our model of perfection.

O’Brien questions whether the ascetic ideal is one we should endorse at all. He argues that the ascetic ideal forecloses the creation of positive value, leads to antinatalism, and, unless we buy into a supernatural framework, leaves no room for hope of any end to the world’s sufferings. These concerns echo Nietzsche’s complaint that the ascetic ideal involves “denying the world” and “hating life” (Nietzsche 1887/2017, §3.10-11).

On the “positive value” point, Gandhi is well known for being sceptical of industrialization. In warning of its likely devastating impacts on the natural world, he is often now seen as a forerunner of the modern environmental movement. In his alternative vision based on low-tech, village-centred self-reliance, exemplified by homespun cloth, “positive value” was conceived very differently. The thought was: what greater positive value could there be than a community of people living self-sufficiently and nonviolently, working to progressively reduce the harms they cause? There would indeed be much less “progress” as standardly conceived today, but there would be a different kind of progress.

This view was marginalized within Gandhi’s own lifetime and within his own party, the Congress. When one visits today’s India, it’s immediately apparent that the country went down a very different path. The closest match to Gandhi’s vision are the few small-scale intentional communities dotted around the world, including Skanda Vale discussed earlier, that prioritize nonviolent relationships over progress as conventionally measured. They provide some reason to question the “no room for hope” criticism. If we think nonviolent communal living has positive value, we can draw hope from the dream of the world gradually filling up with this value, even though much suffering will continue.

For any kind of community to sustain itself, there must be births. But doesn’t Gandhi’s framework make conceiving a child indefensible? His own views on the matter are complex. He took a vow of celibacy in his late thirties, despite already being the married father of four children. Two of his remarks are often quoted approvingly by antinatalists. Firstly:

I do not at all believe that procreation is a duty or that the world will come to grief without it. Suppose for a moment that all procreation stops, it will only mean that all destruction will cease. Moksha is nothing but release from the cycle of births and deaths. This alone is believed to be the highest bliss, and rightly. (CWMG, Vol. 23, p. 102).

The context is a 1922 letter from Sabarmati Jail to his son Manilal, urging him not to marry. It shows that, privately, Gandhi had come to see refraining from procreation as praiseworthy. But antinatalists should not cite it in support of their view, since it is merely denying a duty to procreate, not asserting a duty not to procreate. Secondly:

If destruction is violence, creation, too, is violence. Procreation, therefore, involves violence. The creation of what is bound to perish certainly involves violence. (CWMG, Vol. 32, p. 359)

This is from Gandhi’s transcribed remarks during morning prayers in 1926, the same year in which he wrote the “Is this humanity?” series. In fact, the remark was made just eight days after he published his principles of progressive ahimsaism in Young India (4 November vs. 12 November 1926). Gandhi, like us, was thinking roughly simultaneously about animal ethics and the ethics of creation.

The context is a confusing passage in which Gandhi argues that a brahmachari, who has taken a vow of celibacy, should not desire progeny. Nonetheless, he appears to allow an exception for “procreation for yajna”, by which he means, for the purpose of continuing nonviolent work for the benefit of others. I reconstruct his position as being that the desire for progeny is the real problem, not the act of procreation as such. Procreation could in principle be justified as a necessary means of sustaining a nonviolent community. Just as we owe it to each other to grow food, weave cloth, and so on, we may owe it to each other to create new community members who can take over the work when we become too old. This fits well with his position on other kinds of violence and harm. So here, too, antinatalists should be cautious about citing Gandhi in support of their view.

Where I think O’Brien is pretty much right is in his second main criticism, which is that one’s duties of care do not realistically scale beyond one’s personal and professional relationships with specific individuals. I suggested in the target article that, if they did scale up (e.g. to the whole of humanity), it would soften the austere edges of the Gandhian view and make it easier to reconcile with modern life. But it is undeniably a stretch to talk of all of humanity, or of the entire planet, being under one’s care, and this would change the character of the view considerably.

As far as the interpretation of Gandhi goes, I read him as holding that small-scale village life is morally the best form of life, because in a close-knit community bound by mutual duties of care, the violence involved in sustaining ourselves can be delimited and justified, whereas in a large-scale society characterised by economic transactions between anonymous strangers, it tends to spill far beyond what is justifiable. To help those in need, we should join their communities and work for their benefit rather than sending aid across the world. If alive today, he would surely have acknowledged the incompatibility between his framework and modern industrialized economies and would have seen this as demonstrating their moral bankruptcy. This is a bitter pill for all of us who live our lives embedded in such economies. I would like it to be false, but reasons to think it might be true seem discernible all around us.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Dennis Dalton for illuminating correspondence about Gandhi. Thanks again to the commentators and to Becky Brown, Tom Douglas and Rachel Gaminiratne for their work on this symposium. This research was supported by the Jeremy Coller Foundation.

References

Primary literature:

CWMG: Gandhi, M. K. (1956-1994). The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. The Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. https://www.gandhiserve.net/about-mahatma-gandhi/collected-works-of-mahatma-gandhi/

Other references:

Birch, J. (2024). The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/9780191966729.003.0002

Birch, J. (2026). Ethics for a large sentient world: Insects, ahimsa, and Gandhi’s progressive ahimsaism. Journal of Practical Ethics [add pagination in proof]

Birch, J., Schnell, A. K., & Clayton, N. S. (2020) Dimensions of animal consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(10), 789-801. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.07.007

Chapple, C. K. (1993) Nonviolence to Animals, Earth and Self in Asian Traditions. State University of New York Press.

Hurn, S. (2018). Exposing the harm in euthanasia: Ahimsa and an alternative view on animal welfare as expressed in the beliefs and practices of the Skanda Vale Ashram, West Wales. In The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Animal Ethics (pp. 264-273). Routledge.

Hurn, S., & Badman-King, A. (2019). Care as an alternative to euthanasia? Reconceptualizing veterinary palliative and end-of-life care. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 33(1), 138-155. https://doi-org.lse.idm.oclc.org/10.1111/maq.12494

Hurn, S., & Badman-King, A. (2026). The ‘insect challenge’ – a response to Birch. Journal of Practical Ethics [add pagination in proof]

Nietzsche, F. (1887/2017). “On the Genealogy of Morality” and Other Writings (K. Ansell-Pearson, Ed., & C. Dieth, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.

O’Brien, G. D. (2026). Ethics for a tragic world: Humanity, insects, and doing good. Journal of Practical Ethics [add pagination in proof]

Pepper, A. (2026). In defence of robust rights for all sentient creatures. Journal of Practical Ethics [add pagination in proof]

Slade, M. (1960). The Spirit’s Pilgrimage. Coward-McCann.

Sorabji, R. (2012). Gandhi and the Stoics: Modern Experiments on Ancient Values. Oxford University Press.

Smith, L. M., Kartal, T., Rawat, S., Chaudhari, A., Kumar, A., Pandey, R. K., et al. (2025) Changes in free-roaming dog population demographics and health associated with a catch-neuter-vaccinate-release program in Jamshedpur, India. PLoS One 20(10):

e0317636. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317636

Vokřál, I., Podlipná, R., Matoušková, P., & Skálová, L. (2023). Anthelmintics in the environment: Their occurrence, fate, and toxicity to non-target organisms. Chemosphere, 345, 140446.

Footnote

1. The idea that the precise content of one’s duty varies from person to person, leading to a concept of personalized duty or svadharma, is central to Sorabji’s (2012) reading of Gandhi.  ↑

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animal ethics animal rights animal sentience insects ahimsa Gandhi