Gary David O’Brien ^[1]  , Lingnan University

ORCID 0000-0002-8528-5724

Assigned DOI doi.org/10.3998/jpe.10747

1. Introduction

Birch’s ambitious paper attempts to provide a solution to one of the most difficult problems in animal ethics – the insect challenge. If insects are sentient, and if sentience is sufficient for the possession of robust rights not to be harmed, then much of our behaviour is seriously wrong since it harms insects on a vast scale. Finding available options in Western animal ethics unsatisfactory (p.4-6), Birch explores a possible solution drawn from Indian philosophy based on the idea of ahimsa or nonviolence. Traditional religious understandings of ahimsa are loaded with metaphysical commitments deeply at odds with a secular, naturalistic worldview. Birch therefore sees the need for a ‘bridge’ between ahimsa and secular western ethics, which he finds in Gandhi’s Progressive Ahimsaism (PA). For Gandhi there are two acceptable reasons for harming a sentient being: (1) to sustain one’s body and (2) to protect those under one’s care. There are also four conditions which must be met to justify harm for these purposes: the harm must be minimized, unavoidable, performed only after full and mature reflection, and having exhausted all nonviolent options.

Birch recognises an important problem for PA – it seems to make harm too easy to justify. A slaughterhouse owner for example could sincerely say that to provide for his family he must continue to slaughter animals. His social role commits him to inflicting harms to meet his duties of care. Birch argues that PA needn’t commit us to viewing all social roles and their attendant duties as legitimate. Rather, the guiding ideal of ahimsa can act as a criterion to distinguish legitimate social roles with binding duties of care from illegitimate ones which ought to be relinquished. Gandhi offers a moral ideal of the ascetic forest hermit, who wanders off into the forest, eats only fruits and nuts, and causes no harm to any being, even an insect (p.13). Though perfect realisation of this ideal will be impossible for most of us, Birch suggests that we can progressively restructure our lives over time to move ever closer to the ideal, and it is this path towards ahimsa that is the criterion to judge social roles. A role is legitimate and generates genuine duties of care only if it could be adopted by a person sincerely committed to moving towards ahimsa.

In this paper I will argue that PA is unsuited to answer the challenges of animal suffering. Our world is not only a ‘large sentient’ one – it is a tragic one. By this I mean two things. First, the default state for most sentient beings is to suffer. Gandhi and other thinkers in the Hindu or Buddhist traditions accept this on religious grounds, but it is also plausible scientifically. Evolution by natural selection is a grisly process, and life in the wild is characterized by starvation, predation, and disease. Consequently some animal ethicists have suggested that we develop the science and technology required to intervene in nature to reduce this suffering. ^[2] Second, insect populations are so vast that it is practically impossible for humans to engage in any large-scale activities without harming them either accidentally (e.g. by stepping on them) or as a necessary part of seemingly innocent activities like growing crops. In section two I will argue that the moral ideal proposed by PA is unsuited to a tragic world – though it emphasizes avoiding wrongdoing it makes it difficult to do positive good, tends towards antinatalism, and offers no pathway out of natural suffering. In section three I will argue that PA’s duty of care model is incompatible with large-scale beneficent action and precludes us from moving towards a genuinely harm-free world. Finally, I will conclude by briefly suggesting that we could solve these problems by seeing humanity as a collective agent with a moral duty to care for all sentient beings, and individual human actions as justified insofar as they are compatible with this mission.

2. A questionable ideal

The forest hermit is presented as the moral ideal towards which we should gradually move, and the criterion by which to judge the legitimacy of social roles. It is a remarkably one-sided ideal, however, concerned exclusively with avoiding inflicting harm at all costs. Undeniably the hermit does no harm, violates no rights, not even stepping on an insect. His harmlessness comes at a cost, though. The hermit can clear no ground, plant no crops, and construct no buildings, as to do so would certainly harm insects. With such severe restrictions on action, it seems very difficult for the hermit, or even a whole society of perfect ahimsa practitioners, to do much to create positive value in the world, or to reduce the natural harms that afflict people and animals. Human civilization is characterized by its unique ability to create great positive value through culture, technology, and the creation of knowledge, but over the long run it is hard to see how the continuation of these grand projects could be compatible with each of us striving to move towards the ideal of the forest hermit.

It is not even clear that someone committed to the ideal of ahimsa could have children. Those of us who already have children must continue to care for them, of course, as we already have duties of care towards them – we are “trapped in a web of commitments” (p.14). By creating a child however, one creates someone who will undoubtedly do some unintended harm to other beings during their lives. Even if we think it would be a great benefit to the child to create them, we cannot, on Birch’s framework, justify doing harm to some to benefit others unless we have a duty to care for those others, but we cannot have a duty of care to merely possible children. Creating children then (1) results in harm (2) which could have been avoided and (3) is not permitted by PA as it is neither necessary to sustain one’s body nor does it involve a duty of care. If we all strive to move along the path towards the ideal of the forest hermit, then we should not choose to spin new webs of commitment by creating new children. This is not only implausible in itself (a moral view which says we must pursue our own gradual extinction is prima facie hard to accept) but it is perverse in another important way. Our moral nature - our ability to reflect on our actions and to be responsible for them - pushes us towards removing from the universe the only creature that has this moral nature. Morality annihilates its own imperfect instantiations in the name of personal moral purity.

Finally, it is not as if our decision to practice the quietism of the forest hermit, or to facilitate our own extinction eliminates harm from the world (insects will still suffer and die in their quintillions) – it only removes wronging or rights violations from the world while allowing natural harms to continue indefinitely. The hermit makes the world neither better nor worse than it was when he found it. This is a purely negative vision of moral agency – the best we can hope for is that our existence makes no difference at all. The traditional religious version of ahimsa, with its metaphysical commitments, offers what we might call a spiritual solution to the problem of insect suffering, albeit one that secular westerners are unlikely to accept. By purging himself of the desire to harm, the monk may hope eventually to attain enlightenment and escape from Samsara. Some monks, bodhisattvas, vow to delay their own enlightenment so that they can help other sentient beings to achieve liberation. The end goal is that all beings are liberated and suffering abolished. PA, purged of its metaphysical content, offers no way out of suffering. Is there perhaps another solution? Optimistically we might think that a future, technologically mature human civilization, working over centuries, might manage to eliminate or seriously reduce the natural suffering in our biosphere. We can call this the technological solution. The technological solution however requires that human civilization reach technological maturity, and this would be impossible if we all tried to move ourselves towards the harmless ideal of the forest hermit. The moral ideal of PA, with its exclusive focus on avoiding the infliction of harm, neglects the value of doing good and of eliminating natural harms. By keeping our own hands clean we each individually avoid wronging any insects but also fail to promote positive value and lose the opportunity to truly liberate future insects, and all other animals, from suffering.

3. Duties of care don’t scale

PA allows one to inflict harm only to sustain oneself or to protect specific individuals under one’s care. Unfortunately, however, the kinds of small-scale harmful actions permitted by PA are extremely inefficient ways of doing good and reducing harm, and by scaling up such actions to become more efficient and less harmful, they become less permissible. Imagine a subsistence farmer growing crops to feed her family. According to PA she is completely justified in using insecticides to kill the insects which threaten her family’s food supply, since she has direct duties of care to her family. Scaling up slightly, let’s imagine that she is responsible for growing food for her whole village, while other villagers specialise in other forms of valuable work. It is still plausible that she has duties of care to her fellow villagers and that this justifies her in harming insects, although intuitively it seems as if her duties of care for her fellow villagers cannot be as strong as those she has for her children. Scaling up again, let’s imagine that our farmer lives in a highly labour-specialised society and she grows crops that feed thousands of people she will never meet. Does she still have a duty of care to all these strangers? Birch (p.18-19) suggests that such an extension of duties of care, perhaps to a duty of care to humanity itself, is plausible. It does seem to stretch the notion to breaking point however – what is the difference, now, between a general duty of impartial beneficence and a duty of care to humanity? Duties of care are generally thought to arise in the context of personal or professional relationships with individuals, but the large-scale farmer, the aid worker who helps distribute insecticide treated malaria nets etc. either don’t have any such relationships, or those relationships aren’t sufficient to justify harm-inflicting actions. So, it seems we must either say that they have no duty of care (and so the unavoidable harms involved in their work are impermissible) or we must say that duties of impartial beneficence are sufficient to justify deliberate harms though this might also justify things like animal testing to develop vaccines to promote human health.

If duties of care are restricted to those with whom we have significant personal relationships this has several unwelcome results. First, if this means that large-scale farming is impermissible then it seems that PA gives us reason to move towards a simpler, less specialised economy in which most families or villages are self-sufficient in food production. This would be highly undesirable, primarily because we would lose all the economic advantages of specialisation of labour on which our economy depends, and it would prevent us from developing the capacity to pursue the technological solution to natural suffering. Gandhi favoured this sort of village self-rule as an ideal, but it is hardly the kind of world most of us would wish to move towards. Secondly, if PA permits only such small-scale, individual level action, it seems to lock us into a situation in which, though there is less wrongdoing (in the sense of impermissible deliberate harms) there is much more harm globally. Let’s take farming and disease prevention as examples. Pesticide use in small-scale family/village farming is permissible, though it harms insects just as much as pesticide use on fewer, larger farms would. However, it is possible that large-scale specialised farming could be developed in directions that are significantly less harmful to insects than current farming systems. Milburn (2021, 2022) and Fischer and Lamey (2018) explore methods of growing crops that do not harm animals. One suggestion is that we move towards a system of vertical agriculture, i.e. agriculture that is conducted in controlled indoor environments over multiple levels, even in skyscrapers. Proponents of vertical agriculture laud its efficiency and lower environmental impact, but as the above authors point out, it could also eliminate the incidental harms to small animals crushed by harvesting machinery. Likewise, it seems that it would eliminate the need to use pesticides to kill insects, since it would be possible to control the indoor environment sufficiently well to keep insects out.

If such harm free forms of agriculture could be developed this would be the best-case scenario. Humanity could grow food efficiently and continue to enjoy the benefits of labour specialisation without harming insects or other animals in the process. It is clear, however, that small scale village farmers cannot hope to implement such systems as they do not have the requisite capital and technical know-how. The shift to vertical agriculture will require the large-scale coordinated efforts of governments and corporations. Small-scale village farming harms insects, but permissibly according to PA. Traditional large-scale agriculture both harms and wrongs insects, but it might be a necessary stepping stone on the way to an agricultural system that is both ‘wrongless’ and harmless. A similar dynamic is at play in other areas related to doing good or preventing harm. For example, individuals continually killing mosquitos to protect themselves and their families is permitted according to PA, while more effective, and in the long-term, much less harmful, strategies aren’t since they do not involve direct duties of care. An aid organization distributing insecticide treated malaria nets, a government draining the swamps in which the mosquitos breed, or a research group developing genetic modifications to render mosquitos sterile are all large-scale beneficent actions which are not plausibly described as involving direct duties of care to individuals. Such actions are the best way to protect humans while doing the least amount of harm possible to insects, yet they are the very kinds of actions that PA struggles to accommodate. Note that this is a separate problem from the one identified in section two. The moral ideal of the forest hermit endorses the principle that avoiding inflicting harm is more important than doing good or preventing natural harm. The issue with duties of care is a contingent one – it happens to be the case that in order to increase the efficiency and ultimately reduce the harmfulness of beneficent actions we must do some harm to insects in ways which are not permitted by the duty of care model. If only direct duties of care to individuals can permit harm to insects, then it seems that we are morally blocked from moving towards alternative large-scale solutions that promise to reduce or eliminate the harms we do to insects.

4. Humanity as a collective agent

I have argued that both the moral ideal of PA and its duty of care exception to ahimsa are flawed. The forest hermit ideal makes doing positive good difficult, tends towards antinatalism, and offers no solution to the problem of natural suffering. Duties of care to particular individuals allow only small-scale action and prevent humanity from moving towards harm-free alternatives in agriculture and public health. Birch’s proposal to extend the duty of care to humanity in general is both too expansive – how can an individual have positive duties to all of humanity? – and too restrictive – why should we have duties of care only to humans? In this section I tentatively suggest that we could solve these problems if we viewed humanity as a collective moral agent with duties to promote positive value, to minimize the harm resulting from its actions, and to care for all sentient beings on the planet. We should evaluate individual human actions partly in terms of how compatible they are with these overarching goals of the collective agent.

First, why should we think that humanity as a collective should have these goals? I base this claim on humanity’s collective capacity, its special status as the only intelligent and technological species, and the ongoing relationships our species has had with other animals on the planet. Unlike any other species, humanity is capable of creating vast amounts of positive value through culture, technology, and the acquisition of knowledge. It would be a great shame -a cosmic squandering of potential – if humanity failed to promote positive value and to reduce or eliminate the natural harms that occur on our planet. ^[3] No other species will do so. It is not just our capacity that makes us responsible for reducing natural harms on our planet. Humanity has morally entangled itself with other animals over millennia by dominating the planet, radically altering the landscape, driving some species to extinction and spreading others around the world (O’Brien, 2023). While an individual human being has no relationship with most wild animals, and very little capacity to help them, humanity as a collective has both, and this plausibly generates duties of care towards the animals with whom we share this planet. In a tragic world, humanity as a collective steward of sentient beings and promoter of positive value is a more fitting moral ideal than the forest hermit.

Seeing humanity as a collective agent also helps with the problem of scaling up beneficent action. As we saw, individual duties of care cannot justify large-scale action, and so we are blocked from moving towards more efficient and ultimately less harmful forms of agriculture and public health management. If we see humanity as a collective agent, then individual humans engaged in such activities needn’t have any duties of care towards those they help – they are sub-agents implementing the duties of care the collective has for all sentient beings. This doesn’t entail a collapse into consequentialism. Humanity’s duty of care to sentient beings is compatible with taking on significant costs to minimize harm to individuals such as investing significant sums into developing harm-free alternatives to currently harmful practices in agriculture, public health management, veterinary care, construction etc. even if this doesn’t produce the best consequences overall.

Acknowledgements

For helpful discussion and comments on this paper I would like to thank Beatrice Marchegiani, Paul Heller, and an anonymous reviewer for this journal.

References

Birch, J. (forthcoming). Ethics for a large sentient world: Insects, ahimsa, and Gandhi’s progressive ahimsaism. Journal of Practical Ethics.

Faria, C. (2023). Animal Ethics in the Wild: Wild Animal Suffering and Intervention in Nature. Cambridge University Press.

Fischer, B. and Lamey, A. (2018). Field deaths in plant agriculture. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 31, 409-428.

Horta, O. (2010). Debunking the idyllic view of natural processes: Population dynamics and suffering in the wild. Telos 17, 73-88.

Milburn, J. (2022). Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals. McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Milburn, J. (2021). Welcoming, wild animals, and obligations to assist. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 34(33). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-021-09873-0

Ng, Y. (1995). Towards welfare biology: Evolutionary economics of animal consciousness and suffering. Biology and Philosophy 10, 255-285.

O’Brien, G. D. (2023). On our moral entanglements with wild animals. Food Ethics, 8(15). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41055-023-00125-7.

O’Brien, G. D. (2025). The case for animal-inclusive longtermism. Journal of Moral Philosophy, 22(3-4), 336-359.

Ord, T. (2020). The Precipice. Hachette Books.

Footnotes

1. Department of Philosophy and Hong Kong Catastrophic Risk Centre, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Email: garyobrien@ln.edu.hk ↑

2. See Ng (1995), Horta (2010), and Faria (2023). ↑

3. See Ord (2020, p.46) on humanity as the only ‘upward force’ in the world. See O’Brien (2025, p.350) on the claim that human extinction would lock in wild animal suffering. ↑