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Comment by shared4you | Hacker News Reader

This article [1] says that cockroaches do experience pain, care for their offspring, form social hierarchies. They can suffer from stress and can die from it, even without injury.

Therefore, the ethics issue cannot be ignored.

[1]: http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/insect-pain.html

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I have a hard time considering cockroach control a major ethical issue when cockroaches are considered a major pest and are often killed on sight. I don't see how a few minutes of steering where it goes is substantially worse than stepping on it. I mean, letting a kid play with cockroaches brings about a greater understanding than just telling kids that they all need to be killed. In that way, I'd consider it a good experiment for children akin to catching a caterpillar and watching it make a cocoon.

Maybe I'm missing something.

Ethics is not just about the consequences of an action. Other factors such as motivations are also important.

I think it is sad but ethically acceptable to kill an ant colony in my house, yet I don't think it is OK for children to go in the forest and destroy ant colonies for fun. Or even to dismember one ant for fun, though I may be in a small minority here.

To take a more extreme example, a majority of people seem to find it ethical to have drone strikes in Pakistan despite the civilian casualties. They would certainly not approve of the same drone strikes if they were made for entertainment, even though the physical consequences on the targets would be the same.

Can I just point out that the examples you gave are invalid?

I won't advocate the destruction of ant colonies in forests because for ecological reasons, not because of individual ant suffering.

Video footage released from the drone/missile strikes are already being used for entertainment purposes. When I go onto reddit for videos titled "Hellfire missile blows up terrorist". I'm actually enjoying a video of a man being blown up by a Hellfire missile.

I don't think motivations factor into it at all. A death is a death. At the risk of invoking Freduian psycholoanalysis, it's your cognitive dissonance that making you feel one is more justified than the other.

> "I can't be the one killing animals, I'm a good person"

Of course my examples cannot fit the ethics of everybody, there is no absolute ethics. That does not make the examples invalid. They went meant to help the reader understand my point of view, not necessarily share it.

I won't advocate the destruction of ant colonies in forests because for ecological reasons, not because of individual ant suffering.

To me there are ecological and moral reasons why you should not destroy ant colonies. I am aware that not everybody agrees.

Regarding the drone strikes: whether videos of the strikes are also used for entertainment is irrelevant here, as long as it is not part of the motivation behind performing the strikes.

I don't think motivations factor into it at all. A death is a death.

I don't know what you are getting at here. Are you seriously suggesting that shooting people for fun is morally equivalent to shooting them for a good reason?

>Are you seriously suggesting that shooting people for fun is morally equivalent to shooting them for a good reason?

That's an over simplication. I don't quite see the problem with shooting condemned people for fun (provided they experience more or less the same amount of suffering).

But I would point out that your example is loaded since I can't seem to see a senario where extermination of the enemies of the United States would be done for fun. The only reason we kill those people is because they are enemies. If they weren't we won't kill them. Whether we enjoy killing them is a different matter.

The crux of my argument is that it doesn't matter if you enjoyed killing ant colonies/terrorists. You still achieved the same result (dead ants/terrorists).

You believe it is morally reprehensible to have enjoyed killing ants/terrorists. I disagree. Does it matter what the executioner feels when he decapitates his subjects?

All I'm saying is that from a moral point of view, it makes a difference whether you shoot someone for fun (i.e. they get shot because you wanted the fun) or for a better reason (e.g. the person was sentenced to death). This is quite obvious right? I'm just saying your motivations matter from a moral point of view. Whether you enjoy the killing is irrelevant here. Same for the ants: I think it is wrong to destroy an ant colony in order to have fun. I think it is OK to destroy it in order to clean your kitchen. Whether you end up having fun while cleaning your kitchen is irrelevant. What matters is the reason why the action was taken.

In some places in Australia kangaroos are such a nuisance that they're actively poisoned and hunted. That doesn't mean one would tolerate sticking electrodes into a living kangaroo's head, except in the most controlled circumstances (in the case of a kangaroo: sedated, sterilized, and fully locked into an apparatus for brain surgery). Hell, they're starting to give kangaroos the right to contraceptives instead of slaughter! [1]

A cockroach is an invertebrate but nevertheless part of the animal kingdom. We should strive to be a species that maintains order (population control for the sake of the overall biome) without acts of cruelty. Killing may be a last resort we have to often take, but this kind of stuff "offends the sensibilities," if you care for such things.

[1] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/09/060906-kanga...

I'm kind of suspiscious of that page and it's sources.

Did my own search, appears the role of opiates isn't fully understood in cockroaches and it isn't very conclusive on any front.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00319384879... <-- Reports changes with morphine and naloxone. Seems to increase how fast headless cockroaches learn to avoid shocks. (Yes, headless. great way to figure out what kind of receptors there are in the body)

http://link.springer.com/article/10.3103/S0096392508040032

Norwegian gold mine ahoy: http://english.vkm.no/dav/413af9502e.pdf

>This article [1] says that cockroaches do experience pain, care for their offspring, form social hierarchies. They can suffer from stress and can die from it, even without injury.

Oh, the poor cockroaches.

Of course people raising the ethics issue about stompable insects, have already done whatever they can to help actual PEOPLE and even ANIMALS with their unethical treatment, right?

I mean, they don't just idly bring up an extremely marginal and peripheral issue while ignoring orders of magnitude greater issues...

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