Question In your opinion, is it OK to kill a spider, or a fly? I'm sure everyone has done so at some stage and felt no guilt, or only just a fleeting moment of sadness at the life just ended. But, should we go out of our way to avoid the killing of other living things, even seemingly insignificant insects? Can we allow ourselves this luxury on the basis that these are so much "lower" creatures as ourselves and therefore not worth bothering about? I would appreciate your thoughts on this.

Accepted:
February 10, 2006

Comments

There is more to your question than you might think. In the case of some living things, it looks as if it is not only OK to kill them, but actually good--disease organisms, for example. I raise this kind of case to try to show that "respect all life!" is not likely to serve us very well as a moral mandate. If not, then the questions become much more complex: Which lives? Why? On the one hand, your intuition (widely shared, I'm sure) that even insects' (and arachnids') lives have some worth seems to be counter-balanced somewhat by an intuition that these lives are not worth as much as human lives (or, perhaps, those of primates).

As with so many other questions that seem to require straightforward "yes" or "no" answers, I am inclined to think that the expectation of clear decision principles in these and many other kinds of cases is unwarranted. In the approach to ethics that I favor (virtue theory), the real question will not be about whether all (or some) lives are intrinsically valuable (and to what degree), but about how well we are conditioned to make judgments in hard, unclear, or marginal cases of these sorts. It seems that someone who is careless about lives other than human lives is a "speciesist"--a vice. It seems that someone who overvalues non-human lives is inhuman (or something along those lines)--a different vice. So, as Aristotle would advise, we wish to seek the mean between the extremes of too much moral concern for non-human lives (excess) and too little (deficiency). There can be no hard and fast principle for determining precisely where this mean is, nor should we expect or require there to be such a determinate principle. Ethical life, no matter how deeply we seek to understand it, will always require judgment.

Environmental philosophers have done a lot of work exploring what sort of "moral consideration" we should accord non-human life. For some discussion of this, see my answer to this question.