Contra Caplan on Bug Rights
They don't disprove animal rights
Bryan Caplan has a famous argument against animal rights. He thinks that bugs clearly do not have rights. The arguments in favor of animal rights imply that bugs also have rights, so if bugs don’t have rights, then animals must not have rights either.
I think that sounds like motivated reasoning, and I can speak with some authority on this since I, like Caplan am a libertarian ideologue. Animal rights don’t really fit into libertarianism. Libertarian ethics are about voluntary agreements between rational individuals, and property rights. Since animals are not capable of entering into agreements and don’t have any concept of property, they cannot have moral importance on the Libertarian view. For the same reason, Libertarianism also doesn’t have a great way of dealing with children.
Here are four counterpoints to Caplan’s argument:
1. Caplan refers to hundreds of bug deaths from driving, but most of them are probably painless
The death of a bug that’s hit by your car is probably painless. You wouldn’t feel any pain if you were hit by a spaceship traveling at 1000 mph. Under the common view that it is wrong to torture animals but not wrong to kill them painlessly, driving would not be wrong even if you hit thousands of insects, killing them painlessly.
2. The argument proves too much
Caplan says:
By this logic: If even morally scrupulous animal rights activists don’t sincerely believe that killing bugs is wrong, it’s probably not wrong. And once you proverbially throw bugs under the bus, why not other pests like mice and rats? And once you abandon mammalian pests, why not cows and pigs?
But why stop at cows and pigs? The Hottentot (Khoisan) tribes in Southern Africa have an average IQ around 68. What would Caplan think if I hunted Hottentots for sport and said “it isn’t wrong to kill bugs so it probably isn’t wrong to kill Hottentots either”?
3. The situations in which we kill bugs are similar to situations in which it would be justified to kill some humans.
Suppose that Earth is invaded by 1 trillion superheroes from another planet. These superheroes can teleport through walls, they have laser eyes, they can leap tall buildings at a single bound. There’s just one catch: all these superheroes are severely mentally retarded.
The superheroes wander around the world. They are an extreme nuisance. All car traffic has to stop because they keep wandering onto the roads. They burn things with their laser eyes. You cannot even have privacy in your own home because the mentally retarded superheroes keep teleporting through your walls. You are in your bed at night when *pop!* one of them teleports into your bedroom. We try to explain to them that they can’t go in other people’s houses but they don’t really get it.
The superheroes have only one weakness: kryptonite. If you install kryptonite in your home’s walls, whenever a superhero tries to teleport through that wall he will die a swift and moderately painful death. Do you have the right to use kryptonite to defend your home against the onslaught of mentally retarded superheroes?
I think the answer is yes. I think if the only way for civilization to continue and the only way for you to have a private home is to defend your property with deadly force, you have the right to do so. You had an obligation to ask the superheroes to stop trespassing, but if they are not capable of understanding that request, then kryptonite is justified. Also, if there were some reasonably practical nonfatal method of dealing with them, you would be obligated to use that method rather than kryptonite.
Caplan says:
And if someone killed hundreds of humans with his car on a cross-country trip, no one would accept the excuse, “It was necessary to cross the country.” If your only mode of transportation kills innocent human beings, you’re obliged to stay put.
But this is wrong. If we were suddenly unable to transport goods across the country, millions of people would starve. If the only way to continue to transport food across the country were to plow through hundreds mentally retarded superheroes on the highway, that would be a grisly but necessary action. And the roads are our property. The mentally retarded superheroes don’t have a right to trespass on our roads in the first place.
This is not an argument for callousness. If billions of mentally retarded superheroes arrived on Earth, we should first try to find any reasonably practical way to herd them into areas where they could do no harm, so that there would not have to be a conflict between our rights and their survival. In almost all cases there would be some humane solution. But in the highly contrived case where they have superpowers that make them impossible to contain and they are also too mentally disabled to understand instructions, a defense of our own rights would require us to kill large numbers of the mentally retarded superheroes and we would be justified in doing so.
If it is justifiable to use deadly force against human superheroes with IQs of 30 in order to defend your property, it is definitely justifiable to use deadly force against bugs in order to defend your property. So we should not have moral qualms about killing bugs while building buildings or fumigating houses, although we may want to investigate whether some fumigation chemicals cause more pain to bugs than others, and we should choose the one which causes less pain if it is reasonably practical.
4. Bug Rights are not prima facie absurd
When I was in third grade, some boys from my class caught a cockroach in a milk carton. They laughed as they slowly tore its legs off one by one. I had a strong feeling that there was something wrong with this, and also a feeling of confusion because I didn’t have a moral principle on which to say that it was wrong. I had a moral principle that hurting people was wrong, but that principle didn’t apply here. I think most people would share my intuition that there is something morally wrong with tearing a bug’s legs off one by one.
Your superhero analogy is entertaining 😆 now, I want to read a science fiction story with that premise.
Even if animals don't have a concept of property rights as such (meaning through contract law), they definitely have a sense of property, and a desiref to defend and utilize their property toward higher ends. Most human affairs are not explicitly contract-based (mediated by a large body of common law), either, historically or in the present. That's a specific artifact/innovation of post-Westphalian culture.
I even question your claim that animals don't know how to enter property agreements. Wolves that occupy the same biome carve out specific hunting grounds for their clans, and learn not to cross into other territories. Hornets (somtimes wasps, too) and bees are notoriously known for getting into death matches over hive space and food.
https://www.voyageurswolfproject.org/about-the-project
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240206-the-bees-learning-to-fight-off-invasive-hornets
Also, humans are not the only ones who engage in cruelty toward lesser beings. Orcas are known for toying with their prey, or even killing for fun without eating their victims.
https://www.livescience.com/63622-orca-spins-sea-turtle.html
As we learn more and more about the detailed & particular nature of intelligence, sentience, and sapience—the minutae of which will only be further exposed as the age of computation races forward—it will become more & more difficult to conceive of a comprehensive moral paradigm that encompasses all human behavior toward other humans, let alone animals, or non-human entities; and vice-versa.
None of our moral intutions are calibrated toward the present, in which we have ancient evolutionary software running alongside ridiculously fine-tuned control over both our own natures and the larger environment, both embedded in a network of instant global communication.
I certainly agree with you that torturing bugs seems wrong, but it is impossible to parse out whether that's primarily because, (1) I'm a sensitive individual, (2) I spent thirty years as a committed vegetarian on religious (dharmic) grounds, or (3) I've grown up in a society that teaches & values mercy toward the weak as a moral good.
1. Animals don’t have rights because rights are a product of duties. They have no duties to us or other animals; therefore, they don’t have rights from us or any animal.
2. If animals are our moral equivalents, then they don’t have rights since no animal has rights from any animal. If we are morally superior to animals, then animals don’t have rights from us because they are morally inferior.
Animals don’t have rights no matter how you slice it.