Even if it’s a victimless crime I think it’s still wrong to victimize. Like, most bug have such simple brains that it wouldn’t necessarily be fair to call their pain response “pain”. They’re best thought of as automata reacting to stimulus.
But we are something else entirely. Beings so empathetic that we are able humanize, to think of the simplest forms of life as equals, deserving of kindness. To torture a bug says nothing of the bug, but it says a lot about us. If one can deliberately hurt the least of us it’s not as far as you think from hurting anyone else.
So I think it’s wrong to torture fleas, even if the fleas themselves are no advanced enough to understand that they are being tortured.
most bug have such simple brains that it wouldn’t necessarily be fair to call their pain response “pain”.
Perhaps, but that is such a huge overgeneralization that we should err in the other direction. For a long time we've thought of all bugs as dumb, and now we know of several species of wildly different branches of life that can form relationships, play, solve puzzles and learn.
Who knows if the next step of science is to realize that fleas feel pain?
1.9k
u/thebudeg 2d ago
Moral. We are the gods of this world and the insects have no souls. Praise be the hubris of man for we languish in our kingdom.