Can Christians Believe in Insect Suffering?

Why doesn't Bentham's Bulldog talk about this?

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I don’t usually do moral philosophy, but is shouldn’t be a surprise to my readers that I’m a big fan of Effective Altruism (EA), or that I read the popular EA blogger Bentham’s Bulldog; he was part of my inspiration to write on substack in the first place. Recently he’s been writing about honey and insect suffering and I saw an opportunity to bring up a point that nobody else seemed to be mentioning, so… here goes.

1. To Whom is Moral Weirdness Acceptable?

Bentham’s Bulldog (henceforth BB) writes great, provocative things about animal suffering, like “Don’t Eat Honey” and “Insect Suffering Is The Biggest Issue In The World,” where he argues… well, it’s in the title.

I think insect suffering is the worst thing in the world by far. … If insects screamed in volume proportional to their suffering, nothing could be heard over the cries of insects. If you lived the life of every creature who ever lived, you’d spend roughly 100% of your time as an insect. If you were a randomly selected organism placed behind the veil of ignorance, odds are nearly 100% that you’d be an insect. If you empathized more deeply, feeling the pain of all those around you within a 100-mile radius, every other sensation would be drowned out by the agony and pleasures of the insects.¹

Many folks think this is crazy and radical. One counterargument goes something like this:

The Weirdness Argument: If utilitarianism is true and insects suffer even a fraction as much as humans, then insect suffering is the biggest moral issue in the world, more important than anything else by many orders of magnitude. But that’s an insane belief to have! It would mean that the goodness or badness of any action basically boils down to “will this reduce or increase insect suffering?”, which is wildly implausible. Thus, this is strong evidence that utilitarianism is not true and/or insects do not suffer.

Silas Abrahamson has argued against this reasoning:

[T]he only way we can come to a moral judgement about some situation is assuming that the non-moral facts are a certain way (e.g. that shrimp aren’t conscious). If it then turns out upon further empirical investigation that the facts are probably different than first assumed (e.g. that shrimp are conscious), then we should no longer have any confidence in our previous judgement—and we definitely shouldn’t throw out the empirical evidence or moral principles in order to preserve the moral judgements. After all, we already knew that in the possible world where, say, shrimp are conscious and suffer 1/5 as much as humans, and where eating shrimp causes them harm, eating shrimp would be wrong. Merely finding out that that world is the actual world should in no way change our attitude towards this world. So it’s just completely inane to point to the surface level appearance of goodness of social progress, and inferring all sorts of contentious conclusions about the moral worth of certain creatures, as the valence of social progress is epistemically downstream of the facts about the moral worth of creatures.²

In other words, our moral judgments should come from facts about the world, not the other way around. Silas says it seems extremely implausible that scratching your butt is worse than murder, but if you discovered strong evidence to suggest that an evil being is watching you and murders a bunch of people every time you do it, then the sensible conclusion is "damn, I was wrong about butt-scratching!" rather than "the evidence is wrong and/or utilitarianism is false."³

In general, I agree with Silas. I think our moral intuitions about how much insect life matters are much less likely to be accurate than our empirical observations. Editing animals to look cuter increases sympathy and willingness to donate to their conservation;⁴ insects are weird and creepy-crawly and hard to empathize with. People would rather save one child from poverty than ten;⁵ there might be a million trillion insects, even if each individual is barely morally significant.⁶

Now, granted, if BB is right about insect suffering, our moral intuitions aren’t just “a little bit” wrong, in the way that would permit eighteen people to walk by a dying two-year-old hit by a car. They are not even “seriously” wrong in the way that would permit 500,000 Germans to deliberately arrange and execute the slaughter of six million Jewish people. To quote BB: “Insect suffering is plausibly responsible, every year, for millions of times more suffering than has existed in all of human history.”⁷ For that to be true and for most of us to feel as though the Holocaust is orders of magnitude worse than a years’ worth of insect suffering, our moral intuitions must be wrong at at a scale literally unfathomable to human beings.

Do I believe we could be this wrong? I think it’s at least possible. This is because I don’t believe in an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent creator (an “O3” god). If we weren’t created by a deliberate moral process, we could quite easily develop with an extremely parochial sense of ethics, thanks to natural selection, that doesn’t map very well onto moral truth. In fact, we have exactly the sense of ethics that you would expect from unguided natural selection: focused primarily on humans that are biologically related to us or form personal relationships of mutual beneficial exchange.

But if an O3 god exists, then he does not just permit people to deceive themselves into horrendous evils like the Holocaust—perhaps because we need the free will to be able to do horrible things.⁸ He does not just create us insensate to the suffering of the far-off global poor—which philosophy and religious teaching can overcome. If BB is right and an O3 god exists, he has left us insensate to the worst moral catastrophe ever and has offered us near-zero assistance, guidance, or chance at salvation.

Which makes it quite problematic that BB is an O3 theist.⁹

2. Christ Must Have Forsaken Us

BB is not a Christian, but calls Christianity “the religion that I have the highest credence in.”¹⁰ He cites the claims that keep him from being Christian as “The trinity. The atonement. The perfection and accuracy of Jesus. [And] the inspiration of scripture.”¹¹ Not seeing anything about insect suffering on there.

But consider: Christianity says nothing about insect suffering. Not in the Bible, not in the words of the saints, not in Catholic doctrine—zip. Nada. It is not just that humans blithely ignore the most pressing earthly moral problem ever, nor that God even created insects that would suffer and die for apparently no reason in the first place. It is that God offered us no teachings at all on insect suffering, despite apparently being all-knowing and all-good and therefore being fully aware that it was or would come to be the worst thing in human history.

Say what you want about God allowing the Holocaust: at least if you read the teachings of Christ and truly love Him he will tell you murder is wrong. If you accept the free-will defense for the problem of evil, that a good God allows bad things to happen because it is good to have free will, then you have to believe that someone who heart and soul chooses to embrace Christ and accept his love—and I mean total, 100% saint-level devotion—would not be indifferent to the Holocaust, but would correctly see it as a moral atrocity and stand against it. Nor would they support rape, slavery, the starvation of the global poor, or other great evils.

But if this is the case… why have no saints spoken about insect suffering? Why has Christ himself been silent on it? Why doesn’t Christianity teach veganism? Why is Christ’s love and mercy batting zero at addressing “the worst thing in the world by far”—not even at solving the problem, but at helping people become directionally correct?

It is essential to Christianity that Christ is not morally insufficient. If BB is even close to right about insect suffering, Christ is not enough for even the most pious and open-hearted to give a damn. There is no reconciliation of these facts. Either BB is totally wrong about insect suffering, or Christianity is totally wrong.

3. Alternatives for BB

Still, BB isn’t Christian. Hinduism, his second-most-probable religion,¹² does better: it seems like there are some Hindu traditions like the Bishnoi who take insect suffering seriously. The only religion that takes avoiding all animal suffering this seriously is Jainism, but it rejects an ominpotent creator god, which seems to be rather important to BB. [edit: perhaps I should have included Buddhism too, but it similarly does not have a creator as I understand it.] This is way out of my area of expertise, so I am not clear at all whether these religions treat insect suffering with the significance that it demands. Maybe they do!

However, I note a complete of writing or focus on Hinduism or other religions from BB since he considered it a serious contender almost a year ago.¹³ In fact, that post indicates that in March 2024 he considered Hinduism more probable than Christianity, which is no longer the case. I’d be quite curious to learn how he now ranks it below Christianity and how insect suffering is not a huge strike against Jesus.

I think BB should significantly update away from Christianity or away from insect suffering. And I think the former will be easier for his philosophical commitments; denying insect suffering either requires denying utilitarianism (which he really isn’t going to do) or denying that insects feel even a fraction of the pain that humans do, which would likely send deeper shockwaves through his commitments to animal welfare (especially shrimp).

1. Bentham’s Bulldog. “Insect Suffering Is The Biggest Issue In The World.” Substack newsletter. Bentham’s Newsletter (blog), May 19, 2025. https://benthams.substack.com/p/thinking-insect-suffering-is-the.

2. Abrahamsen, Silas. “Surely We’re Not Moral Monsters!” Substack newsletter. Wonder and Aporia (blog), March 13, 2025. https://wonderandaporia.substack.com/p/surely-were-not-moral-monsters.

3. Ibid.

4. Shaw, Meghan, Matilda Dunn, Sarah Crowley, Nisha Owen, and Diogo Veríssimo. “Using Photo Editing to Understand the Impact of Species Aesthetics on Support for Conservation.” People and Nature 6, no. 2 (2024): 660–75. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10602.

5. Lee, Seyoung, and Thomas Hugh Feeley. “The Identifiable Victim Effect: A Meta-Analytic Review.” Social Influence 11, no. 3 (July 2, 2016): 199–215. https://doi.org/10.1080/15534510.2016.1216891.

6. Williams, C. B. “The Range and Pattern of Insect Abundance.” The American Naturalist 94, no. 875 (1960): 137–51.

7. Bentham’s Bulldog. “Insect Suffering Is The Biggest Issue.” Substack newsletter. Bentham’s Newsletter (blog), April 1, 2025. https://benthams.substack.com/p/insect-suffering-is-the-biggest-issue. (BB asserts this piece was not an April Fool’s Joke, and was not intended to be released on April Fool’s Day.)

8. As many prominent Christian apologists have argued. The last time I personally encountered this defense was from Richard Swinburne at a panel on the problem of evil hosted by the Princeton Project in Philosophy and Religion. (Side note: if you look at the “Précis” page on their website, I’m the guy with the long, curly brown hair in the center of the very front row!)

9. Bentham’s Bulldog. “How I Came To Believe In God.” Substack newsletter. Bentham’s Newsletter (blog), September 28, 2024. https://benthams.substack.com/p/how-i-came-to-believe-in-god.

10. Bentham’s Bulldog. “Why I’m Not A Christian.” Substack newsletter. Bentham’s Newsletter (blog), April 18, 2025. https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-im-not-a-christian.

11. Ibid.

12. Bentham’s Bulldog. “How I Came To Believe in God.”

13. Bentham’s Bulldog. “Linkpost March.” Substack newsletter. Bentham’s Newsletter (blog), March 21, 2024. https://benthams.substack.com/p/linkpost-march.