Jonathan Birch ^[1] , 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.10745

---

Abstract

Positions that link rights to sentience face an insect challenge: insects are plausibly sentient, yet recognizing individual insects as rights-bearers would problematize public health, veterinary and agricultural benefits obtained by harming them. The most obvious responses seem inadequate. Indian animal ethics, which has always taken the idea of insect sentience seriously, is a promising place to look for further options. Of particular relevance is the idea of ahimsa (nonviolence, noninjury), but ahimsa in its ancient form has metaphysical commitments that secular animal ethics should not accept. More promising still is the progressive ahimsaism developed by Gandhi in the 1920s, on which duties of non-maleficence can be overridden by duties of care, provided the duty of care is adopted, interpreted and exercised in accordance with the guiding ideal of ahimsa. This article provides an exposition and analysis of the view and relates it to the insect challenge.

Keywords

animal ethics, animal rights, animal sentience, insects, ahimsa, Gandhi

---

1. The insect challenge

Human activity harms insects on a scale so vast it is very difficult to keep track. In an attempt to do so, ecologists have invented a measure called the “splat count”: the number of insects found dead on a car windscreen per mile travelled. They’ve found that the splat count of a typical UK car journey has fallen by around 75% in twenty years (Ball et al. 2024). Cars themselves account for only a small fraction of this devastation. Habitat destruction, plus the use of brutally efficient pesticides such as neonicotinoids, are the main culprits.

There are many reasons to worry about the collapse of wild insect populations even if the insects themselves feel nothing. But what if they do? In other words, what if they are sentient beings, capable of suffering? If we combine this with the idea that sentient beings have rights, it would seem to follow that all of us violate these rights constantly, with every car journey, perhaps even every time we eat a crop treated with pesticides.

We can think of this as the insect challenge. Sentience (defined as the capacity for experiences that feel good or feel bad, such as pleasure and pain) plausibly brings moral rights that are not easily overridden by trivial human interests ^[2] , and insects are plausibly sentient. Reconciling these views is not straightforward.

Scientists for a long time dismissed the idea that insects could feel pain, but recent evidence puts pressure on that attitude (Birch 2024, ch. 13; Love 2025). The old scepticism rested on observations that insects would carry on feeding or mating after catastrophic injury, such as total detachment of the abdomen. But it was always hasty to infer that, if they don’t show pain-related behaviours when fatally injured and moments from death, they don’t feel any pain at all. Signs of pain might still show up in healthier animals responding to milder stimuli—and this is exactly what researchers have found, using heat as the stimulus. Bees will selectively groom an antenna touched by a heat probe (Gibbons et al. 2021), and they will avoid standing on a heat pad to obtain food unless it is the only way to obtain a high-quality reward (Gibbons et al. 2024). These subtle centralized responses, combined with everything else we are learning about the remarkable mental lives of bees (Chittka 2022), point towards at least a realistic possibility of pain (Andrews et al. 2025).

Much of this new evidence of pain-related behaviour is from bees, which might lead one to suspect bees are special among insects. I doubt this, firstly because the brain region most likely to be supporting these behaviours, the central complex, is present in all adult insects (Turner-Evans and Jayaraman 2016); and secondly because of evidence from Drosophila fruit flies, which have much smaller brains and yet still display markers of pain (Fischer 2025). In a 2023 study, researchers edited the genes of flies to add capsaicin receptors to the mouth. Capsaicin is chilli heat: in our own case, if you have too much of it, it hurts. Researchers observed that, upon sipping capsaicin, the flies “abruptly displayed pain-related behaviours such as running away, scurrying around, rubbing vigorously and pulling at their mouth parts. When reared on capsaicin containing food, the animals died of starvation” (Jang et al. 2023), choosing not to eat rather than endure the experience of eating. ^[3]

This evidence, say the researchers, establishes Drosophila as a promising pain model: the responses are so strong and reliable, it is worth trying out potential analgesic drugs by seeing how they alter these responses. The focus of these researchers is on biomedical rather than ethical implications, but if we are to take fruit flies seriously as pain models apt for trying out new analgesics, we should also take them seriously as sentience candidates: beings in which there is a realistic possibility of sentience that it would be irresponsible to ignore, plus an evidence base rich enough to allow the design of precautions (Birch 2024, Ch. 6).

There is a tension between the idea that insects are sentience candidates and the ways in which humans routinely treat them. We kill and harm large numbers of insects for three main reasons. The first is public health. Malaria nets are coated with insecticides. Few have asked whether insecticides deal out quick or humane deaths, but some clearly do not. In 2022, researchers unveiled a new insecticide treatment that kills mosquitos by causing wing muscle cramps: unable to fly, they starve to death (Mosha et al. 2022). By killing mosquitos in protracted ways, we protect humans from a disease that kills hundreds of thousands each year, most of them children under five.

A second major reason is veterinary care for larger animals—a flea treatment for a dog may kill hundreds or thousands of fleas—and a third is improving the efficiency of agriculture. Over one trillion insects are killed each year in the emerging insect farming industry (Sebo and Schukraft 2021), but even greater numbers are killed in the growing of crops. While the demise of entire wild insect populations might be avoided by banning the worst pesticides, this would not eliminate harm to insects altogether, so the ethical quandary would remain. Even organic farming still uses pesticides, albeit on a smaller scale (Roche 2019). A small number of “veganic” farmers avoid all pesticide use (Monbiot 2022, ch. 4), but even the defenders of this approach admit that stopping all pesticide use would lead to diminished agricultural yields in the short term, with unpredictable ramifications for human food security.

Suffering and dying are distinct. While both suffering and dying could be harms, they are different kinds of harm. This leads to the thought: maybe death as such is no harm to an insect. Even if sentient, perhaps they live entirely in the present moment, lacking the sort of psychological connectedness over time that makes death a harm (McMahan 2021). However, I don’t myself find this plausible in relation to bees. I find it hard to believe that a honeybee, setting off to evaluate a potential nest site in accordance with directions decoded from a waggle dance (Seeley 2010), has no sense of the future, no plans. Bees, given two surfaces to build on that are at right angles to each other, will reportedly build a honeycomb that curves smoothly round the corner, as though having planned out the overall architectural vision (Chittka 2022). Such observations are not conclusive evidence of bees having plans, but they render it a realistic possibility. If bees do have plans, death interrupts those plans. These lines of evidence do not exist for other insects, so there is room for a position on which death harms bees but not other insects, but we should be wary of making such assumptions.

Although I will show sympathy for idea that death is a harm to an insect at several points in what follows, my arguments will not depend on it. Even if death itself is harmless, the process of dying induced by insecticides is a protracted one lasting from minutes to weeks, depending on the insecticide. This plausibly involves severe suffering, and this is already enough to pose an ethical problem (Howe 2019).

This tension between the emerging case for insect sentience and the way we treat insects is a challenge for all of us, regardless of our background ethical views. Of course, many would react to the tension by saying “sentience does not imply rights, then”. ^[4] A special problem arises for those of us who, like me, want to hold on to the position that sentience does imply rights of at least a minimal kind, including a right not to be harmed without adequate justification.

2. An initial option space

When trying to combine insect sentience with animal rights, we appear, on the face of it, to have four options. I say “on the face of it” because I ultimately want to explore a path that combines elements from different options, but this way of setting up the option space will be a useful starting point.

Option 1 is to say that robust rights (that is, rights not easily overridden by human interests) are dependent on size or on a property correlated with size. Larger animals have them, but insects do not. The moral irrelevance of size per se seems undeniable, but one might imagine that complex forms of sentience require large brains. Perhaps robust rights could be linked to these forms of sentience. Tom Regan’s (1983/2004) early position was of this type. ^[5] Regan tied robust rights to a “subject-of-a-life” criterion, defined as follows:

To be the subject-of-a-life […] involves more than merely being alive and more than merely being conscious. […] [I]ndividuals are subjects-of-a-life if they have beliefs and desires; perception, memory, a sense of the future, including their own future; an emotional life together with feelings of pleasure and pain; preference- and welfare-interests; the ability to initiate action in pursuit of their desires and goals; a psychophysical identity over time; and an individual welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares well or ill for them, logically independently of their utility for others and logically independently of their being the object of anyone else’s interests. (Regan 1983/2004, p. 243)

Several of these conditions are plausibly met by insects, but evidence of “a sense of the future, including their own future” (italics added) and “a psychophysical identity over time” is lacking. These abilities go beyond planning, for which there is some evidence in bees, noted earlier. In some larger animals, such as great apes, corvids and cephalopod molluscs, there is more evidence one could cite in favour of these more demanding properties but ascribing them would still be controversial (Birch et al. 2020).

Regan’s view shows us how robust rights might be contingently correlated with size, for they might be linked to advanced forms of self-consciousness and these might require large brains. A difficulty is that, the further we raise the bar, the more harm to sentient beings the view will permit—and the harder it will be for farmed animals such as chickens, cows and pigs to clear the bar. Evidence of a persisting self and a sense of one’s own future is lacking in these cases too. Yet a core intuition driving animal rights positions is that the exploitation of sentient farmed animals is wrong.

Option 2 is to say that robust rights are relational: they exist only when the rights-holder stands in a certain kind of relationship to moral agents. Insects targeted by our public health, veterinary and agricultural interventions fail to stand in the qualifying relation to us. Insects raised on farms or in apiaries might qualify, but most insects lack rights by virtue of being wild (or semi-wild) animals. The challenge then becomes one of giving an account of the qualifying relation that could make this true. Clare Palmer (2010) has defended a relational account of duties of assistance, but this account would not vindicate Option 2. At issue here are not duties of assistance but duties not to harm—duties of non-maleficence—and Palmer does not see these duties, and the corresponding rights, as relational. Wild insects even have a claim to our assistance, given how Palmer understands duties of assistance. Palmer argues that duties of assistance can arise when animals, by virtue of human transformations of their environment, end up exposed to hardships and risks they would not otherwise have faced, and this is exactly the plight of wild insects. ^[6]

Option 3 is to say that, while all sentient beings have a right not to be harmed, the right is not robust. It is easily overridden by human interests, including our interests in public health, efficient agriculture, and good veterinary care for our pets. This option risks becoming an animal rights position in name only, failing to respect the core intuitions that drive such views. If a herd of elephants tramples a farmer’s field in search of food, the idea that the farmer is entitled to shoot all the elephants dead is no “animal rights” position. But this closely parallels our treatment of insects that eat crops to feed themselves. One might think: what if there were so many elephants that human food security would be undermined by a policy of not shooting them? But the existence of many other elephants would not change the fact that each elephant considered individually poses a negligible threat to food security, and so it is with any individual insect. The principle that one can kill a rights-holder posing a negligible threat provided the total threat posed by all the rights-holders of that order of animals is non-negligible is hardly in the spirit of a rights theory. We would not accept this principle as applied to Homo sapiens.

Option 4 is to say that all sentient beings, including the insects targeted by public health, veterinary and agricultural interventions, have robust rights, including a right not to be harmed. What would follow, if we took this option? Major advances in public health, veterinary care and agricultural efficiency have been immorally obtained. It does not necessarily follow that we should row back all these advances. An alternative would be to find morally permissible ways of obtaining the same benefits. We could discontinue insecticide-treated malaria nets in tandem with rolling out malaria vaccines, for example. Yet, foreseeably, more human children will die in this scenario than in the scenario in which we deploy both vaccines and insecticide-treated nets. There is no getting away from this: the foregone benefits will be measured in child mortality.

In the case of agriculture, we can conceive of a future in which gene editing breakthroughs remove the need for insecticides. We are not yet in that future, though, so to discontinue their use now would have severe consequences. At the same time, their continued use seems incompatible with each individual insect having a robust right not to be harmed. As noted in the discussion of Option 2, in agriculture each individual insect poses a negligible threat to any human. It is only because human and insect populations are both so large that insects, considered collectively, pose any threat to our food security. It would be spurious to argue that a self-defence or other-defence justification obtains at the individual level. Yet this is the level at which the case must be made, if the individual insect has a robust right not to be harmed.

It is hard to see how any of these four options could be made to work without either jettisoning the core intuitions that drive animal rights positions or else withdrawing our support for progress in public health, veterinary care and food security that has come at insects’ expense. Some might say: time to revisit the idea that sentience implies rights. But it would be premature to stop there without first considering how the option space might be expanded or reshaped—and ideas from Indian philosophy give us one way of doing this.

3. The idea of ahimsa

Ahimsa, usually translated as nonviolence or noninjury to living or sentient beings, appears frequently in ancient Indian texts. ^[7] I am told a more literal translation from the Sanskrit is the “absence of the desire to kill or harm” (Chapple 1993, p. 10). It is not just intentional harm, though, that one dedicated to ahimsa must eliminate. Ahimsa is usually read as excluding unintentional harms resulting from our negligence and recklessness as well. There may be no perfect translation.

The idea is of profound importance in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. We are, according to all these religions, trapped in cyclic existence (samsara), and our propensity for himsa (harm, injury) is part of what keeps us trapped. Cultivating ahimsa is a step on the road to liberation.

This leaves room for a wide variety of views about what ahimsa demands (Heirman 2020). I witnessed this first-hand when talking to Tibetan Buddhist monks in India and Nepal. The monks of the Tsum Valley, Nepal, are strictly vegetarian and have for over a hundred years banned the slaughter of any sentient animal, wild or domesticated, in the valley. Most Tibetan monks, however, will eat meat donated by others, arguing that this is part of Tibetan culture and a necessary response to the plateau’s harsh climate (this is the Dalai Lama’s position). Both groups agree that insects are sentient beings, included in the scope of ahimsa, but they disagree about what follows. One influential vegetarian lama, Lama Zopa Rinpoche (who died in 2023), was noted for his compassion for insects. Zopa wrote that, to achieve “animal liberation” (by which he meant, to help animals on their path towards liberation from samsara) “the best thing to do is to circumambulate the animals around holy objects and to bless them with mantras and prayers” (Lama Zopa Rinpoche, 2004).

The demands of ahimsa are nowhere interpreted more stringently than in Jainism, where all living beings, not just all sentient beings, fall within its scope. Jain ascetics famously sweep the street as they walk to reduce the chance of stepping on an insect and wear mouth-cloths to prevent insects flying into their mouths (Figure 1). Ordinary Jains follow less strict vows, but the vast majority are vegetarian. Since, for Jains, plants too are part of samsara, ascetics try not to harm plants. They can neither prepare food nor have it prepared specifically for them, living instead on donations of surplus food. Some Jain ascetics, as they approach death, commence a fast unto death, a final attempt to realize ahimsa fully (Chapple 1993, Ch. 6). Jain ascetism is often an object of mockery in Western culture. I first encountered it in Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral (1997) in which conversion to Jainism is presented as a character’s nadir. We should not see it that way. It is a sincere attempt to respond to the ethical problems of a large sentient world.

^{Figure 1: Two Śvetāmbara Jain ascetics. A public domain watercolour from the Wellcome Collection by an unknown Indian artist.}

Moreover, we should not overstate the differences between some versions of ahimsa and some Western approaches to animal ethics. If we set out to abolish our propensity to harm other sentient beings, what new dispositions should we seek to cultivate? For Śāntideva, a Madhyamaka Buddhist scholar writing in the 8^th century CE, the answer appears to be: an attitude of impartial concern akin to classical act utilitarianism (Goodman 2014). A bodhisattva, according to Śāntideva, must stand ready to “bring about small pain and suffering as a way of preventing great pain and suffering” and to “abandon a small benefit in order to accomplish a greater benefit” (quoted in Goodman 2014, pp. 331-332). The convergence is striking. I have long wondered if there might be a path of influence from Śāntideva to Bentham but have not found one. ^[8]

Still, we should not understate the differences either. We cannot directly import the idea of ahimsa into secular Western animal ethics unaltered. The distance is significant. Part of the concept is that one abolishes the desire to kill or harm in service of achieving liberation from cyclic existence (Adamson 2023). This is not a secular idea, and it involves metaphysical commitments too controversial and too deeply at odds with a naturalistic worldview to provide an attractive answer to the insect challenge.

Although I do not share this metaphysical background, I see value in a millennia-long tradition of taking insects seriously and reflecting on what it might mean to co-exist peacefully with them. It’s just that we need bridges: theories that attempt to bring ahimsa into contact with the concepts of secular Western ethics. When I started researching whether anyone had attempted to build such a bridge, I was surprised to learn that Mahatma Gandhi, iconic political and spiritual leader and yet a rather neglected philosopher, once attempted exactly this.

4. Gandhi’s progressive ahimsaism

Gandhi was already a vegetarian on arriving in London as a law student in 1888. But, as he recounts in his autobiography, he initially avoided meat only to respect a vow made to his mother. It was after reading Henry Salt’s A Plea for Vegetarianism (1886) that his vegetarianism shifted from reluctant to enthusiastic. Never one to do things by halves, Gandhi joined the Vegetarian Society and was elected to its Executive Committee. In the vegetarian circles of that time, as now, health-based and ethical arguments were intertwined. Gandhi came to believe both that humans were naturally “frugivorous” (a dubious idea) and that (more plausibly) “man’s supremacy over the lower animals meant not that the former should prey upon the latter, but that the higher should protect the lower, and that there should be mutual aid between the two as between man and man” (CWMG Vol. 39, p. 51).

In the 1900s, in South Africa, he embarked on a fruitarian phase, subsisting on “raw groundnuts, bananas, dates, lemons and olive oil”, calling it “one of the greatest experiments of my life” (page ref missing). He also began to build the capacity for fasting that would become central to his political activism. During a period of illness in 1918, following his return to India, he was persuaded by his wife and doctor that his vow against milk need not extend to goat’s milk, having been made with cow’s milk in mind. He later lamented his turn to goat’s milk as a moment when “the will to live proved stronger than the devotion to truth” (CWMG, Vol. 39, p. 362). He asked the readers of his newspaper, Navajivan, to send suggestions of “a vegetable substitute for milk, which is equally nourishing and digestible” (CWMG, Vol. 39, p. 219), but he never found one.

We see from this that, while Gandhi prioritized other issues throughout his astonishing political career, matters of animal ethics were close to his heart. His animal ethics deserves greater scholarly attention. ^[9] While his experiments with diet may suggest a lack of any settled view, he had in fact, by 1926, worked out a sophisticated and original position that he labelled progressive ahimsaism.

He was prompted to explain his views to readers of Navajivan by a heated debate regarding the management of stray dogs. A local mill owner in Ahmedabad had come to Gandhi for advice. Around 60 stray dogs were living in his mill, some with symptomatic rabies. With no way to confidently separate the dogs with rabies from those without, would it be permissible to kill all 60? Gandhi answered that it would, provoking a backlash from the Ahmedabad Humanitarian League, which argued that this was a violation of the principles of ahimsa. Gandhi demurred, and in a series of eight articles (entitled “Is this humanity?”) he explained his position regarding the circumstances under which killing animals is permissible. Rabid dogs, he argued, could be killed to end their suffering. ^[10] Moreover, the state could permissibly pass a law making all stray dogs “liable to be shot” when posing a risk to humans. In his own ashram, he supported the killing of rabid dogs and the denial of food to stray dogs, excepting those with puppies.

In the fourth essay he spells out, as a numbered list of propositions, the conditions under which he thinks one may, compatibly with a commitment to ahimsa, permissibly kill a living being:

1. It is impossible to sustain one’s body without the destruction of other bodies to some extent.
   
   
2. All have to destroy some life
   1. for sustaining their own bodies;
   2. for protecting those under their care; or
   3. sometimes for the sake of those whose life is taken.
      
      
3. (a) and (b) in (2) mean himsa to a greater or less extent. (c) means no himsa, and is therefore ahimsa. Himsa in (a) and (b) is unavoidable.
   
   
4. A progressive ahimsaist will, therefore, commit the himsa contained in (a) and (b) as little as possible, only when it is unavoidable, and after full and mature deliberation and having exhausted all remedies to avoid it. (CWMG, Vol. 31, p. 516)

Gandhi deserves credit for laying out the structure of his position so clearly! He posits a general duty of non-maleficence (a duty against causing himsa, harm) that admits of three classes of exceptions. When an exception applies, one must exercise it in a way that satisfies four conditions: the harm is minimized, the harm done is unavoidable, the agent has deliberated fully and maturely, and all avenues to avoid the harm have been exhausted.

Gandhi had two sides: one side seeking self-realization through austere forms of renunciation, the other a skilful politician aiming to build a liberal, secular India. His approach to animal ethics has that same duality. On the one hand, our duties are broad in scope and strong in content, condemning all killing except that done for the being’s own sake. If all humans were to adopt this framework, the result would be radical personal and social transformation. On the other hand, the view recognizes that existing ways of life, and the duties of care they involve, create a diverse class of exceptions. “Unavoidable violence”, he writes “cannot be defined. For it changes with time, place and person. What is regarded as excusable at one time may be inexcusable at another” (CWMG, Vol. 31, p. 488). The mill owner’s violence is excused by the absence of non-lethal means of eliminating the risk to his workers.

5. Biocentrist and sentientist versions

My aim is to find the most defensible version of a broadly Gandhian position, not primarily to expound Gandhi’s own view. Accordingly, I want to focus on a version of the view in which the scope of the principles is restricted to plausibly sentient beings (that is, the “other bodies” in question are those of plausibly sentient beings). I also want to focus on a version in which the conditions concern harming, without prejudging the question of whether, and to which animals, death is a harm. But Gandhi’s own view is that to kill any living being, even a plant or a microbe, is himsa (“We recognize the duty of killing microbes by the use of disinfectants. It is violence and yet a duty”, CWMG, Vol. 31, p. 488). He is primarily a biocentrist, not a sentientist. That said, the difference collapses if one also holds that all living beings are plausibly sentient.

Indeed, Gandhi’s biocentrism bears a striking resemblance to that of Paul Taylor in Respect for Nature (1983). ^[11] Taylor also posits a duty of non-maleficence owed to all living beings and grants a wide-ranging set of exceptions. But Gandhi and Taylor have different conceptions of how the exceptions arise. In Taylor’s framework, human interests of many kinds can justify exceptions. For this reason, he does not describe non-human living beings as possessing rights. In Gandhi’s framework, by contrast, it is only duties of care or protection, owed to oneself and to other specific individuals, that can justify exceptions.

The two approaches part ways in two types of case. First, when a duty of care is owed by a human to a non-human animal, as with pet owners and their pets, an exception to the duty of non-maleficence may arise on Gandhi’s view even though no human interest is advanced. This is a plausible stance to take regarding the dog owner who treats their dog for a flea infestation even though they no longer want the dog (and so no interest of their own is promoted). Second, when an action serves a human interest without being covered by a duty of care owed by the agent to any specific individual, no exception arises on the Gandhian view.

Think here of scientific research, in which animals are harmed for the benefit of humanity in general. Gandhi was emphatically opposed to this, writing that “I abhor vivisection with my whole soul” (CWMG, Vol. 29, p. 325). Think too about commercial agriculture, in which living beings are killed on a vast scale to provide crops for a global supply chain, with a large fraction of the yield used for livestock feed. Gandhi advocated both vegetarianism and gram swaraj—village self-rule—and called for villages to become self-sufficient in food, the local community feeding the local community. He opposed the use of chemical fertilizers to generate agricultural surpluses (a case revisited in Section 9).

Taylor’s biocentrism has been criticised as impossibly demanding, partly because it calls for compensation even in cases of justified harm. Acts such as brushing one’s teeth, taking an antibiotic or cleaning a toilet should, according to the letter of the view, be followed by compensatory actions (Shrader-Frechette 1987). This overwhelming demand for compensation is absent from Gandhi’s view. But Gandhi’s biocentrism may also stand accused of basing strong demands on a counterintuitive view of moral status, a view that ties moral status to life itself rather than to sentience.

I agree with the critics that it would be a mistake to base a profound overhaul of our current ways of life on a perceived need to avoid harming non-sentient forms of life. Non-sentient beings cannot suffer, so that kind of harm simply does not arise for them. They can, of course, be killed. However, I regard the harm of death as consisting in depriving a sentient being of future experiences it might otherwise have enjoyed and in thwarting its plans and projects (Burri 2019). A non-sentient being has no prospect of any future experiences, and if it has no plans or projects either, there is nothing of intrinsic moral value that we take from it by killing it. Because I regard plants and microbes as very probably non-sentient and as lacking plans and projects, I do not think they can be harmed in any morally significant sense. I reject the biocentrist version of Gandhi’s view. By contrast, the version of the view that counts only harms to plausibly sentient beings as himsa is one I find well worth exploring.

6. Ahimsa as a guiding ideal

I see two main sources of unease with the Gandhian position even once the scope is restricted to plausibly sentient life. One is: does the position not make harm to sentient beings rather too easy to justify? Did the Ahmedabad Humanitarian League perhaps have a point?

Think, for example, of an abattoir owner who argues: I owe a duty of care to my employees and suppliers that requires me to slaughter animals. If I shut down the business, they will have no livelihood. Or imagine a pig farmer who argues: I owe a duty of care to my family that requires me to maintain the family business. If I have to use higher-welfare, more expensive methods, or shut down altogether, my family will go hungry. The abattoir owner and the pig farmer may argue that their moral position is no different from that of a mill owner who kills rabid dogs. Their social role and its associated duties of care commit them to harming some animals. Gandhi condemns the Western tendency to “commit violence of all kinds for the satisfaction of the palate” (CWMG, Vol. 32, p. 33), but his view seems to provide those involved with a loophole.

What can be said in response? We should start with what Gandhi himself says:

This line of reasoning is liable to be most mischievously used. But that is not because the reasoning is faulty, but because of the inherent frailty of man to catch at whatever pretexts he can get to deceive himself to satisfy his selfishness or egoism. But that danger may not excuse one from defining the true nature of ahimsa. (CWMG, Vol. 31, p. 545)

I do not see this as a sufficient response, because abattoir owners and pig farmers need not be driven by selfishness and egoism. The abattoir owner may deeply and sincerely believe that he owes his employees a livelihood; the pig farmer may deeply and sincerely believe that supporting his family must take priority over the pigs’ welfare.

Gandhi’s remarks do not adequately address the problem, but his series of essays gives us resources from which we can construct a more effective response. It is evident that, for Gandhi, social roles vary in their associated duties (their svadharma) and not all roles are equally legitimate. ^[12] Some create duties of care that are genuinely binding and can override the duty of non-maleficence. Others create spurious, illusory duties of care. Even if the person does not regard the role as a pretext for violence, that is the social function it serves. When in one of these roles, the right response to apparently necessary violence is to relinquish the role, not to honour the illusory duty. This is the predicament of the abattoir owner and the pig farmer.

By what criterion, though, are we to distinguish good social roles, with binding duties of care, from bad roles with spurious duties? For Gandhi, the guiding ideal of ahimsa is the criterion. He gives a vision of moral perfection: the ascetic who, finally renouncing everything, including all social roles, wanders off into the forest, eating fruit and nuts and causing absolutely no harm. Gandhi writes that “a recluse, who is living in a forest and is compassion incarnate, may not destroy [even] a rabid dog” (CWMG, Vol. 31, p. 488). Such characters feature prominently in the Upanisads, several of which endorse ascetism as the path to liberation; much the same ideal is endorsed in Jainism. Another influence may have been the poet Rabindranath Tagore, a contemporary of Gandhi, who often valorised the forest hermit (Guha 2025). There is a resemblance too to the bodhisattva ideal in Buddhism, though bodhisattvas typically remain engaged in the community, teaching others, rather than withdrawing. Given Gandhi’s own commitment to engagement, it is surprising that he portrays a recluse rather than an engaged teacher as “compassion incarnate”—this shows how strongly the Upanisadic ideal must have influenced him.

This perfect realization of ahimsa is unachievable for most of us. We are trapped in a web of commitments that bind us into a life very different from that of a forest hermit. By walking away and neglecting our duties of care, we would cause great harm, and so would very much fail to be “compassion incarnate” (cf. “a city-dweller who is responsible for the protection of lives under his care and who does not possess the virtues of the recluse, but is capable of destroying a rabid dog, is faced with a conflict of duties”, CWMG, Vol. 31, p. 488). As Richard Sorabji has noted, “Gandhi combines his counsel of perfection with a repeated stress on our imperfection” (Sorabji 2012, p. 89). Yet we can nonetheless attempt to inch towards perfection over time. We can, so to speak, walk the path of ahimsa. We can progressively restructure our lives to remove our commitments to violence, replacing them with new commitments to nonviolence whenever possible. We can disentangle ourselves, one thread at a time, from the web of commitments to violence in which we currently live. We will not become “compassion incarnate” but we may approximate the ideal increasingly well. ^[13]

The path of ahimsa provides a criterion against which we can test social roles. Some roles could be adopted by a person sincerely committed to that path, whereas others could not. So, we can ask: is my adoption of this social role consistent with a sincere commitment to the path of ahimsa? Is it a step forward along the path, for me? If it is, then it is permissible to adopt that role, and the duties of care associated with the role are binding. If not, they are non-binding, and I should relinquish the role. Gandhi does not put the view in exactly these terms, but it seems to me the best way to make sense of how he can combine a fierce moral rejection of Western norms with the idea that social roles of the right kind create overriding duties of care.

Which social roles are consistent with the path of ahimsa? There will be disagreement about this. I do not think there can be any algorithm for resolving the disagreement, nor does there need to be. Gandhi himself sees roles involving killing animals for food and vivisection as inconsistent with the path of ahimsa, while seeing the role of mill owner as consistent with it. It would certainly seem strange to accuse a mill owner who professed a commitment to ahimsa of rank hypocrisy, unless, perhaps, they had stepped back into that role from one that more fully realizes ahimsa, such as that of an ascetic. By contrast, the charge of hypocrisy would seem apt in relation to someone who professes a commitment to ahimsa and then takes on the role of an abattoir owner. From time to time the mill owner role may foreseeably require harming animals because of far-from-ideal background conditions, but harming animals is not a constitutive part of the role.

In short, if one reads Gandhi’s list of propositions in isolation, they seem to make harm too easy to justify. But they should be seen as part of a broader ethical vision, a vision that calls on us to adopt, interpret and exercise our duties of care in accordance with a guiding ideal of ahimsa. This provides additional constraints.

7. The Bhagavad Gita connection

The two core commitments of the Gandhian outlook, then, are that: (i) duties of care can override the duty of non-maleficence, sometimes justifying harm; (ii) the ideal of ahimsa should guide our adoption, interpretation and exercise of duties of care, obstructing their deployment as pretexts for frivolous harms. The package taken together is more attractive than either part in isolation. The first element creates a powerful override; the second limits its use. The ideal of ahimsa is vague without any specification of our duties, while our duties are too malleable without a guiding ideal to help us interpret them.

Here the second source of unease arises: what exactly justifies the position that duties of care (a kind of duty of beneficence) have overriding normative force? This is a position well outside the mainstream of Western deontological ethics, where duties of non-maleficence are generally taken to have greater force than duties of beneficence. As W. D. Ross put it, duties not to harm are “prima facie more binding. We should not in general consider it justifiable to kill one person in order to keep another alive, or to steal from one in order to give alms to another” (Ross 1930, pp. 22). Gandhi’s position, by taking legitimate duties of care to be more binding, rejects this plank of common Western morality.

We can ask two questions: what justifies, for Gandhi, the claim that our duties of care can override our duty of non-maleficence? And what, if anything, might justify this for us, as readers engaged in secular animal ethics, unwilling to defer to scriptural authority?

Gandhi’s own justification, I surmise, derives from his reading of the Bhagavad Gita, a text he loved so much he referred to it as his “mother” (CWMG, Vol. 58, p. 488). The text is usually read as opposing pacifism. Arjuna, dithering on the verge of battle, is persuaded by Krishna, the Lord in embodied form, that he must do his duty and fight, even though many will die. Gandhi drew a different lesson: the primary message, he argued, was about the value of detaching from the fruits of action and acting solely for the sake of duty. The violent nature of the duty, in Arjuna’s case, leads to tragic consequences, teaching us implicitly that he should have pursued a different path in life, a path in which his duties committed him to less violent actions. But Arjuna could not, at that late moment, have simply fled, allowing his own people to be slaughtered: he had, through a series of bad choices, reached a point at which his duties of care demanded violence.

The Gita, on Gandhi’s reading, teaches that a duty of care still takes priority even in these circumstances. The fact that the duty, because of your own missteps, now requires violence is no escape from it. One must instead try to restructure one’s life, over the long term, so that one’s duties of care can be satisfied, as far as possible, non-violently. Far from opposing an orientation towards peace and nonviolence, the Gita, on Gandhi’s creative reading, supports it, for duties of care have immense normative power and can bind us into appalling and self-destructive acts of violence unless chosen, interpreted and exercised in accordance with the ideal of ahimsa.

Ingenious as this is, secular animal ethicists cannot appeal to the authority of the Bhagavad Gita. We need different reasons. One good reason, I believe, is that Gandhi’s position provides an attractive response to the insect challenge. This is not a decisive reason, but it can enter into our ethical reflections alongside our reservations—in particular, our initial view that a duty of non-maleficence plausibly takes priority over a duty of care—and, if one takes the insect challenge extremely seriously, as I do, it may be a powerful enough reason to outweigh the downsides.

8. Revisiting the option space

What, then, does progressive ahimsaism (in its sentientist version) imply about the insect challenge? Recall the option space: is it that robust rights are dependent on a property correlated with size; that robust rights are relational; that the right not to be harmed is easily overridden by human interests; or that all sentient beings, even the smallest ones, have a robust right not to be harmed?

Gandhi’s framework elegantly combines elements of all four options. All plausibly sentient beings, including insects, have a right not to be harmed unless specified exceptions apply. These exceptions arise from duties of care (to oneself or others) taken on when adopting social roles compatible with a sincere commitment to the path of ahimsa. Even though virtually all of us will invoke the exceptions regularly, the list is still sufficiently circumscribed that current ways of life may need to change a great deal. While the right not to be harmed is not itself relational, duties of care (and corresponding rights to care) arise from our social relations with others, and, contingently, we tend not to form these relationships with insects. This difference arises partly from the size difference, so even Option 1 contains a grain of truth.

It seems to me that this hybrid position avoids the main pitfalls of our initial options. Option 1 faced the task of attempting to find intrinsic differences between larger and smaller sentient beings that could justify our differential treatment. By granting that all sentient beings are alike in intrinsic moral status, the Gandhian view avoids that project. Instead, the ethically central difference becomes that between the animals we take under our care and those we do not, and this is correlated with size, but contingently so.

Option 2 faced the charge of explaining why a sentient being’s right not to be harmed would depend on a social relation. The Gandhian view avoids this too, by granting to all sentient beings a right not to be harmed, regardless of their relationship to humans. But there are powerful overrides arising from duties of care, and these overrides do depend on social relations.

Meanwhile, Option 3—all sentient beings have rights but they are easily overridden by human interests—faces the charge of unjustifiably privileging the human. Gandhi’s position gives no special significance to human interests as such. It instead prioritizes the duties of care an agent owes to oneself and to specific others. Contingently, these duties are usually owed by humans to other humans. But sometimes they are owed by humans to other animals, as in the case of the duties of care created by pet ownership and farming. And they might even by owed in some cases by non-human animals to other non-human animals, if we think some non-human animals are capable of moral agency. Conceivably, the alpha pair of a wolf pack might owe a duty of care to the other members, a duty that excuses the violence they do to other animals. If humans are the only moral agents, only we possess duties of care, but the view does not assume this.

And Option 4—all sentient beings have a robust right not to be harmed—faces the charge of requiring us to forego or even reverse progress in public health, veterinary care and food security that comes at insects’ expense. Gandhi’s position does indeed challenge modern ways of life and the wanton destruction of nature on which they rest. But rather than blasting all harming of sentient beings as immoral, it offers a context-sensitive framework than can justify violence in many situations.

9. Justifying limited violence for the sake of public health

What does the view imply about the cases introduced in Section 1? Gandhi himself writes that “for health we destroy mosquitoes and the like by the use of disinfectants” (CWMG, Vol. 31, p. 544) regarding this as a clear case of justified violence. He would support the use of insecticide-treated malaria nets. One’s duty of care to oneself, or to one’s dependants, requires eliminating or at least minimizing as far as possible the risk of them acquiring malaria and other life-threatening mosquito-borne diseases. There is no need to balance the mosquito’s rights against those of your child; you should prioritize the child. Because a duty of care can be owed to a non-human animal, the same applies to cases in which we treat an animal under our care for a flea infestation. A striking aspect of the view is that numbers have no role. If an exception applies, then, beyond the injunction to harm “as little as possible”, there is no upper limit to the number of animals that may be killed. If we must kill a million insects to fulfil our duties of care, we may.

It is not that we regard a human or a dog as intrinsically of higher moral status than the unfortunate mosquito or flea. It is just that, contingently, specific humans and dogs tend to fall under our duties of care and insects do not. And—Gandhi is quite clear about this—the same duties would justify killing humans too, if they posed a similar risk. Gandhi gives the example of a man who “goes furiously about sword in hand”; this man could be justifiably killed (CWMG, Vol. 31, p. 544). An apparent implication (albeit not one explicitly spelled out by Gandhi) is that, when one owes a duty of care to a non-human animal, one could permissibly kill a human who, in a state of frenzy, threatened that animal. But he also holds that, in practice, human-on-human violence virtually always rests on a pretext: we tell ourselves that our enemies are akin to rabid dogs, beyond reason, when in fact nonviolent avenues are far from exhausted.

For all that, Gandhi would surely not have concluded that 60 people may permissibly be killed because one among them is wielding a sword, nor that 60 people may permissibly be killed on the grounds that some have symptomatic rabies. He would have advocated quarantine so that those without rabies could be spared. When dogs are treated so differently from humans, the sense of a double standard persists.

In Gandhi’s defence, his advice concerning the 60 dogs rested on the assumption that facilities to quarantine and rehome them did not exist, limiting the options. ^[14] The fact we live in a society that privileges the human to an enormous degree, especially in the domain of healthcare, narrows the range of actual circumstances under which we may permissibly harm a human while leaving a much wider range of circumstances in which we may permissibly harm non-human animals. This human bias, though glaring and troubling, is not the result of explicit speciesism. It arises contingently from the importance of assessing unavoidability relative to the context, plus our having organized our society in such a way as to give ourselves far more options when dealing with humans than when dealing with dogs or insects.

A further difficulty arises when a person facilitates a public health intervention without themselves owing a duty of care to a specific beneficiary. Consider an aid program that distributes insecticide-treated malaria nets. No duty of care applies. How, then, to defend the practice within the Gandhian framework? One option is to claim that no harm is done simply by distributing the net; the harm occurs only when it is put up over a bed. But this demand for proximal causation is apt to be misused: an arms dealer might claim they do no harm by selling arms, since only firing a weapon can harm. An alternative would be to acknowledge that the aid worker does indeed cause harm, but to argue that the harm is justified by a duty of care owed to humanity in general. We have seen already that Gandhi would have rejected that move in the context of animal experimentation, so he could not consistently use it here, but in the present case it seems very attractive.

10. Justifying limited violence in agriculture

The framework also makes limited room for justified violence in agriculture. Gandhi advocated the use of organic manure and felt that “chemical fertilizers will spell our ruin” (CWMG, Vol. 90, p. 480); he would obviously have opposed the use of synthetic pesticides. His grounds, however, had more to do with the health of the soil than harm to sentient beings. His framework makes room for lethal pest control if genuinely necessary to protect human food security. ^[15] Aldous Huxley once accused Gandhi of supporting the starvation of millions (quoted in Prasad 2001, p. 3721), but this crass remark rests on a false reading of Gandhi as an austere absolutist, overlooking his tolerant attitude to exceptions. The Gandhian ideal is one in which villages feed themselves through local, organic farming; the ideal population must, therefore, be reasonably small. But his ethical outlook in no way favours starvation of existing people as an acceptable means to any end. In non-ideal conditions, honouring one’s duties of care takes priority over marching to utopia by the shortest route. Farmers responsible for feeding a village must do what is necessary.

What is less clear is how duties of care arise in a modern, industrialized society in which farmers feed urban populations anonymously and at a distance. Can a farmer be said to have a duty of care towards a population rather than to any specific individual, and might this justify limited pesticide use in the interests of food security even if no one locally is at risk? If we say yes, the notion of a duty of care is admittedly being stretched once again (as it was when we considered the idea that aid agencies might owe a duty of care to humanity) in a way that may support substantial harms to insects and other animals. I find the stretch plausible, though I suspect Gandhi himself might have been uncomfortable with it, given the strong connection he saw between duties of care and small-scale village life. A similar stretch might be used to justify some forms of animal testing (e.g. in vaccine development), to which Gandhi was strongly opposed (see Section 5).

While some limited violence may be justified, farming animals for nutritionally unnecessary reasons could never be justified within the Gandhian framework, nor could the use of highly destructive pesticides far beyond necessity. This is what we see in the modern world, in which over 500 million hectares of agricultural land are used to grow feed to support the intensive farming of livestock (Ritchie 2021), piling suffering upon suffering. There is no doubt that progressive ahimsaism, for all its tolerance of exceptions, demands sweeping changes to agriculture, calling for a shift towards a model that puts sentient life before profit.

11. Conclusion

I see in Gandhi’s animal ethics an exciting fusion of Eastern and Western ideas. Ahimsa, India’s greatest contribution to ethics, remains central. But the language of duties and exceptions, arising when specific clauses are activated, is recognizably that of a London-trained lawyer. The idea of a duty of non-maleficence tempered by specific duties of care is one that can be developed in a biocentrist or a sentientist direction. When taken in the sentientist direction, the framework seems unusually ready for a large sentient world, saying sensible things about issues where better known frameworks struggle.

When we think through real-world cases, we soon come to another crucial decision: must the duties of care be owed to specific individuals and communities, or can there also be duties of care owed to humanity in general? Gandhi clearly had the former in mind: his framework fits with his advocacy of small-scale ashram life. The violence we do in the course of feeding and protecting each other is justified by the duties of care we owe to those with whom we live. If generalized to the “global village” of humanity, this idea would justify much larger scale harms, raising a concern that we may have made harm too easy to justify. Yet if we resist the generalization, the framework gives us no way to justify harms imposed for the sake of humans beyond the reach of our duties of care. Given the strong intuition that these harms sometimes can be justified, there is pressure to accept a wider class of exceptions than Gandhi’s framework allows.

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to Liam Kofi Bright, Rebecca Brown, Susanne Burri, Alasdair Cochrane, Kimberly Dill, Stefan Fischer, Doris Gerber, Richard Healey, Paul Heller, Dale Jamieson, Guy Kahane, Neil Levy, Pablo Magana, Loi Man Ho, Josh Milburn, Thomas Muller, Angie Pepper, Jonathan Pugh, Rafael Ruiz, Virginie Simoneau-Gilbert, Richard Sorabji, Rhys Southan, Nina van Rooy, two reviewers, and audiences in Konstanz, Sheffield and Oxford for their thoughts and questions. My special thanks to His Holiness the 14^th Dalai Lama for telling me his position on insects and to Konstantin Anokhin and Telo Tulku Rinpoche for bringing me into contact with Tibetan Buddhism. This research is part of a project that has received funding from the Jeremy Coller Foundation and from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Number 851145). My work in general is supported by The Jeremy Coller Foundation and the Good Ventures 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:

Adamson, P. (2023). Indian animal ethics. Think, 22(63), 47–52. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175622000227

Allen, M. (2020). Animal liberation from a Gandhian perspective: Political and spiritual freedom in the Purusharthas. Journal of East-West Thought, 1(10), 77-93.

Ball, L., Whitehouse, A., Bowen-Jones, E., Amor, M., Banfield, N., Hadaway, P., Hetherington, P. (2024). The Bugs Matter Citizen Science Survey. Buglife and Kent Wildlife Trust. https://cdn.buglife.org.uk/2024/04/Bugs-Matter-Technical-Report-2023.pdf

Bentham, J. (1789). An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. T. Payne and Son.

Birch, J. (2020). The place of animals in Kantian ethics. Biology and Philosophy, 35:8. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-019-9712-0

Birch, J. (2024). The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI. Oxford University Press.

Birch, J., Schnell, A. K., and 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

Burgat, F. (2004). Non-violence towards animals in the thinking of Gandhi: The problem of animal husbandry. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 17(3), 223-248.

Burri, S. (2019). How death is bad for us as agents. In Gamlund, E. and Solberg, C. T. (Eds.), Saving People from the Harm of Death. Oxford University Press.

Carruthers, P. (2007). Invertebrate minds: a challenge for ethical theory. Journal of Ethics, 11(3), 275–297. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-007-9015-6

Chandel, B. (2014). Gandhi on non-violence (ahimsa). Diogenes, 61(3-4), 135-142.

Chapple, C. K. (1993). Nonviolence to Animals, Earth, and Self in Asian traditions. SUNY Press.

Chittka, L. (2022), The Mind of a Bee. Princeton University Press.

Cochrane, A. (2018) Sentientist Politics: A Theory of Global Inter-Species Justice. Oxford University Press.

Donaldson, S., & Kymlicka, W. (2011). Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. Oxford University Press.

Ebert, R. (2017). Mohandas K. Gandhi and Tom Regan: Advocates for animal rights. Gandhi Marg Quarterly, 38(3&4), 395–410.

Fischer, B. (2025). The case for insect consciousness. Asterisk.

Gibbons, M., Versace, E., Crump, A., Baran, B., and Chittka, L. (2022). Motivational trade-offs and modulation of nociception in bumblebees. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 119(31), e2205821119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2205821119

Gibbons, M., Pasquini, E., Kowalewska, A., Read, E., Gibson, S., Crump, A., Solvi, C., Versace, E., Chittka, L. (2024). Noxious stimulation induces self-protective behavior in bumblebees. iScience, 27(8), 110440. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2024.110440

Goodman, C. (2014). Śāntideva’s impartialist ethics. In Ganeri, J. (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy, pp. 327-243. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199314621.013.23

Goodpaster, K. E. (1978). On being morally considerable. Journal of Philosophy, 75(6), 308-325. https://doi.org/10.2307/2025709

Gruen, L., & Jones, R. C. (2015). Veganism as an aspiration. In Bramble, B., & Fischer, B. (Eds.), The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat. Oxford University Press, pp. 153-171. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199353903.001.0001

Guha, R. (2018). Gandhi: 1914-1948, The Years That Changed the World. Penguin.

Guha, R. (2025). Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism. Yale University Press.

Healey, R., and Pepper, A. (2020). Interspecies justice: agency, self-determination, and assent. Philosophical Studies, 178(4):1223-1243.

Heirman, A. (2020). Protecting insects in Medieval Chinese Buddhism: Daoxuan’s Vinaya commentaries. Buddhist Studies Review 37(1), 27-52.

Howe, H. J. B. (2019). Improving Pest Management for Wild Insect Welfare. Wild Animal Initative. https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/library/humane-insecticides

Jalagania, B. (2021). Wild animals and duties of assistance. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 34, 9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-021-09854-3

Jang, W., Oh, M., Cho, E. H., Baek, M., & Kim, C. (2023). Drosophila pain sensitization and modulation unveiled by a novel pain model and analgesic drugs. PLoS ONE, 18(2), e0281874. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281874

Jena, N. P. (2017). “Gandhi’s perspective on non-violence and animals: Ethical theory and moral practice,” Journal of Global Ethics, 13(3), 398-416.

Joshi, D. (Ed.) (2003). Gandhiji on Environment. Mani Bhavan Gandhi Sangrahalaya. https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/gandhiji_on_environment.pdf

Korsgaard, C. M. (2018). Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals. Oxford University Press.

Kumar, A. (2014). Satyagraha and the place of the animal: Gandhi's distinctions. Social History, 39(3), 359-381.

Lama Zopa Rinpoche. (2004). How to Benefit Animals. Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition. https://fpmt.org/wp-content/uploads/teachers/zopa/advice/pdf/howtobenefitanimals.pdf

Love, S. (2025, January 5). Do insects feel pain? The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/do-insects-feel-pain

McLaughlin, R. P. (2012). Non-violence and nonhumans: Foundations for animal welfare in the thought of Mohandas Gandhi and Albert Schweitzer. Journal of Religious Ethics, 40(4), 678-704.

McMahan, J, (2021). Suffering and moral status. In Clarke, S., Zohny, H., and Savulescu, J. (Eds.), Rethinking Moral Status. Oxford University Press, pp. 23-29. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192894076.003.0002

Milburn, J. (2023). Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully. Oxford University Press.

Monbiot, G. (2022). Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet. Allen Lane.

Mosha, J. F., Kulkarni, M. A., Lukole, E., Matowo, N. S., Pitt, C., Messenger, L. A., Mallya, E., Jumanne, M., Aziz, T., Kaaya, R., Shirima, B. A., Isaya, G., Taljaard, M., Martin, J., Hashim, R., Thickstun, C., Manjurano, A., Kleinschmidt, I., Mosha, F. W., Rowland, M., & Protopopoff, N. (2022). Effectiveness and cost-effectiveness against malaria of three types of dual-active-ingredient long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs) compared with pyrethroid-only LLINs in Tanzania: a four-arm, cluster-randomised trial. The Lancet 399(10331), 1227–1241. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02499-5

Nussbaum, M. C. (2023). Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility. Simon and Schuster.

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

Palmer, C. (2010). Animal Ethics in Context. Columbia University Press.

Pope, A. (1713/1806). Against barbarity to animals. In Steele, R. (Ed.), The Guardian, pp. 362-371. Luke Hansard.

Prasad, S. (2001). Towards an understanding of Gandhi’s views on science. Economic and Political Weekly, 36(39), 3721–3732. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4411167

Primatt, H. (1776). A Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals. R. Hett.

Read, E., & Birch, J. (2023). Animal sentience and the Capabilities Approach to justice. Biology and Philosophy, 38, 26. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-023-09914-0

Regan, T. (1975) The moral basis of vegetarianism. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 5(2), 181-214.

Regan, T. (1983/2004). The Case for Animal Rights. University of California Press.

Regan, T. (2004). Empty Cages: Facing the Challenge of Animal Rights. Rowman & Littlefield.

Ritchie, H. (2021). If the world adopted a plant-based diet, we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

Roche, K. (2019). Pesticide use in organic farming. UK Organic. https://www.ukorganic.org/blog/articles/pesticide-use-in-organic-farming

Ross, W. D. (1930). The Right and the Good: Some Problems in Ethics. Clarendon Press.

Roth, P. (1997). American Pastoral. Houghton Mifflin.

Salt, H. S. (1886). A Plea for Vegetarianism, and Other Essays. The Vegetarian Society.

Sebo, J., & Schukraft, J. (2021, July 27). Don’t farm bugs. Aeon. https://aeon.co/essays/on-the-torment-of-insect-minds-and-our-moral-duty-not-to-farm-them

Seeley, T. D. (2010). Honeybee Democracy. Princeton University Press.

Shrader-Frechette, K. (1987). Review of Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics, by P. W. Taylor. Ecology Law Quarterly, 14(2), 389–392. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24112846

Singh, J. (2015). Gandhi’s animal experiments. In Nagai, K., Rooney, C., Landry, D, Sleigh, C., Jones, K. & Mattfeld, M. (Eds.), Cosmopolitan Animals. Macmillan, pp. 120-134.

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

Sorabji, R. (2017, November 22). Gandhi the philosopher. Aeon. https://aeon.co/essays/gandhi-was-a-subtle-surprising-philosopher-in-the-stoic-style

Taylor, P. W. (1983). Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics. Princeton University Press.

Turner-Evans, D. B., and Jayaraman, V. (2016). The insect central complex. Current Biology, 26(11), R453–R457. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2016.04.006

Footnotes

1. The Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience, London School of Economics and Political Science. Email: j.birch2@lse.ac.uk  ↑

2. A widely held view in animal ethics. Donaldson and Kymlicka (2011), Healey and Pepper (2021); Milburn (2023) and Cochrane (2018) are clear examples. Korsgaard’s (2018) position that we have a duty to treat sentient beings as ends-in-themselves (implying that they have a right to be thus treated) is in the same family. Nussbaum (2023) has a similar position but favours the language of “entitlements”. I have been critical of the arguments advanced by Korsgaard (see Birch 2020) and Nussbaum (see Read and Birch 2023) but sympathize with the view.  ↑

3. Thanks to Bob Fischer for pointing me to this example.  ↑

4. Carruthers (2007, p. 296) regards the idea of rights for insects as a reductio of an animal rights position, lambasting it as a “serious moral perversion”. Birch (2024, Ch. 14) considers this.  ↑

5. In later work, Regan (2004) dials back the requirements, apparently regarding sentience as sufficient for rights.  ↑

6. Other relational accounts of duties of assistance lead to similar results. Jalagania (2021) argues that if we benefit from wild animals in some way, we may have moral reasons to share that benefit with them, and we undoubtedly benefit from wild pollinators. O’Brien (2023) argues that when we become “morally entangled” with wild animals through a long history interaction, duties of assistance may arise, and wild insects clear that bar too. ↑

7. The Sanskrit word can be rendered with diacritical marks as “ahiṃsā”, but Gandhi’s Collected Works eschews these marks. ↑

8. Bentham (1789) probably read Humphrey Primatt (1776), who cites an essay against animal cruelty by Alexander Pope (1713) that quotes Abdullah Ibn al-Muqaffa, who was probably exposed to Buddhist texts. This chain deserves further study! At face value, though, I can see no transmission of consequentialist ideas through it.  ↑

9. Regan (1975) remarks, as an aside, that he first became interested in animal ethics through reading Gandhi, yet Gandhi’s influence on his work would otherwise be hard to discern. I have found several existing discussions useful for background: Allen 2020; Burgat 2004; Chandel 2014; Ebert 2017; Guha 2018 (which first pointed me to “Is this humanity?”); Jena 2017; Joshi 2003; Kumar 2014; McLaughlin 2012; Prasad 2001; Singh 2015; Sorabji 2017. Sorabji (2012, Ch. 4) is especially relevant. In this article I engage directly with the primary text rather than with these commentaries.  ↑

10. To aid scholarship I have compiled the essays into a single document (https://philpapers.org/rec/GANITH). Page references are to the Collected Works (CWMG).  ↑

11. Thanks to Alistair Cochrane for pointing this out. Taylor seems to have been unaware of the precedent; Gandhi is neither cited nor mentioned in Respect for Nature. This is puzzling because Taylor discussed these matters extensively with Regan, who wrote that he himself became interested in animal ethics after reading Gandhi (see footnote 8). There is also a resemblance to Kenneth Goodpaster’s (1978) biocentrism.  ↑

12. An aspect of Gandhi’s outlook discussed by Sorabji (2012, pp. 91-92).  ↑

13. This finds an echo in Goodpaster’s (1978) distinction between “regulative” and “operative” moral consideration, with the “regulative” kind serving as an ideal that the “operative” kind can gradually approach. It finds a more recent echo in Lori Gruen and Robert Jones’ (2015) description of veganism as an “aspiration”. They argue that one cannot avoid causing harm to sentient animals while living in an industrialized society, chiefly because “industrialized agriculture harms and kills a large number of sentient field animals in the production of fruits, vegetables, and grains produced for human (not livestock) consumption” (Gruen and Jones 2016, p. 157). One can only aspire to the ideal of causing no harm and do one’s best to approach it. ↑

14. In modern India, the problem of rabies still exists, but the number and quality of dog shelters has greatly increased, as has the number of sterilization programmes (both due largely to People for Animals, founded in 1992, and the Blue Cross of India, founded in 1964), so it is doubtful Gandhi, had he lived a hundred years later, would have given the same advice.  ↑

15. Twenty years after “Is this humanity?”, in 1946, he wrote that “that to do away with monkeys where they have become a menace to the well-being of man is pardonable. Such killing becomes a duty” lamenting that they “ruin the crops, they even kidnap children, carry away articles, and eat up fruit” (CWMG, Vol. 84, p. 62, italics added). He added that “True ahimsa demands that if we must save the society as well as ourselves from the mischief of monkeys and the like, we have to kill them.” (p. 392). In the background is an assumption that the harm is unavoidable—that we cannot, for example, sterilize them. This is now the approach taken towards stray dogs by the People for Animals and Blue Cross (see note 13).  ↑

Tags  

animal ethics animal rights animal sentience insects ahimsa Gandhi