I agree, I love dogs. You wouldn't know it from my comments, but I actually like them more than flies ;).
I think you're right, dogs' historical utility along with their near human-like qualities have brought them much further along on the scale of "things that are not ok to kill" (towards humans). So perhaps there's a point when an animal becomes similar enough to us that we start viewing it as "one of us." This isn't just cultural, as you point out, but a sort of shared viewpoint of the world.
I'm also curious if size in general has something to do with it. Small animals have less value because we're perceiving killing "less of" something. Most people wouldn't think twice about killing a fly (myself included if it's a deer/horse fly) but would feel bad if they killed a bear that was attacking them, or even stepped on a lizard by accident.
So maybe dogs are a bad example (granted, I inherited the argument from a post up the tree from me), but I still think there's a cultural worth put on various animals.
Funny enough, I was in a catholic school when I was in third grade (9 years old?). I'm not catholic, and wasn't then, so I was always a bit suspicious. One of the teachers was talking about how there's a hierarchy to life. Rocks are at the bottom, then come plants, then animals, then humans, and angels/god on top. I remember, even then, thinking "without rocks, none of this would exist. without plants, no animals/humans could live, and without animals humans would die out." In other words, although we put ourselves at the top of the pyramid (of physical beings), the rest of the world would be just fine if humans disappeared tomorrow. Our existence has no meaning beyond our ability to evolve into better life forms. The point being, we have these odd social ratings for the value of other animals' lives, yet in many respects, our lives are almost worthless with respect the rest of the life on the planet. Our lives have value to us, but in essence we live in a bit of a bubble of self-importance.
Do you have a fully-coherent, logical system for deciding which lives to care about, and how much? I'd be interested to hear.
'Animals' is not a natural kind. There's no logical reason to care about all animals just because they are animals.
I care about dogs, pigs, other people, etc. not because they're 'animals', but because I think they are plausibly conscious (to varying degrees) and they can experience joy and suffering. Insects, not so much.
I'm unwilling to care any nonzero amount about insects. Here is why.
There are something like a billion billion insects in the world. Given their short lifetimes, it means dozens of billions of billions are born and die each year. Wild insect lives are mostly short and brutal. If you care at all about an insect's life, that tiny amount multiplied by dozens of billion billions means your moral concern for insects should pretty much swamp out any other concern.
You'd have to select how much you care about each insect life with suspicious precision for the sum total to be significantly different from zero, but less than how much you care about human and dog lives.
So to be coherent, you have to either not care at all about insects, or your first priority in life should be to help insects. I, uh, choose not to care.
(Some people seriously care though. See: http://reducing-suffering.org/the-importance-of-insect-suffering http://reducing-suffering.org/the-importance-of-insect-suffe...)
The utilitarian in me chooses to attach value to insects according to how I perceive their value in the ecosystem. Bees, bumblebees, spiders etc. are useful, so I don't kill those. Houseflies, gnats, ticks, mosquitoes on the other hand, I have zero problems killing when they annoy me.
Same here. I avoid killing certain invertebrates on a pragmatic basis rather than one of morality. I'll happily ignore or relocate certain species of spiders simply because they'll keep the things I don't like in check while killing others that present a danger to myself or pets around the house (black widows). On the other hand, if you live in an area that's bordered by vast swaths of forest, it quickly becomes impractical to avoid having the occasional creepy-crawly get inside somewhere, and you soon learn that it's best to live and let live. That's how I was taught, at any rate.
Now, humorously, having had "pet" mantids before is a great way to eliminate nuisance insects around the house somewhat autonomously. Although it doesn't always quite work the way you may intend (they'll self-relocate or sometimes lose interest in prey items). ;)
So you argument is that it's fine to not care for insects because there are a lot of them, and because their lives are short and brutal.
I would say the opposite. Animals whose lives are rife with pain and misfortune can use all the help anyone is willing to offer. Granted, I will not seek out every fly and try to "save" it. But if I come across one I can help, I will do so. I think you're making the argument "either you HAVE to care about every fly or you CANNOT care about any flies." Perhaps that logic works for you, but I think it's a fallacy. I can care about flies without needing to care about the well-being of every fly. I also adhere to non-interference. If a fly is caught in a spider web, I will leave it. To free the fly is to starve the spider. Some things we just don't have control over. But I will do my best personally to not harm other animals.
I said this in another comment, but I'll repeat:
> I will show kindness to animals, but only to the point where it doesn't completely impede my life or my ability to find happiness.
In other words, it doesn't impede life or my happiness to catch a fly and bring it outside. Therefor it falls under the "show kindness to animals" category.
(I should add an addendum to that: any animal that is attacking me physically is subject to death (horse flies, mosquitoes, dogs, bears, etc)).
Given all that, I do not judge people who don't care about insects. I get it, completely. But that doesn't mean I won't stop challenging people's viewpoint on why it's ok to kill some animals and not others.
> it's fine to not care for insects
Well no it's not exactly 'fine'. Maybe we will figure out some day that insects are a little bit conscious and it may turn out we have collectively been literally worse than Hitler for not caring.
In the meantime I choose not to care, not as a fully logical decision, but for my own sanity and well-being. I'm a dumb ape who tries (and even maybe succeeds) to be logical sometimes, my moral 'system' is a hodge-podge of intuition, rule-based and consequentialist thinking, I don't claim I have found a fully logical moral system.
> it's fine to not care for insects because there are a lot of them, and because their lives are short and brutal.
No no no, I'm saying, if you care at all, you should care about all of them, because as a rule their lives are short and brutal.
It's not like with humans where a lot of us have ok lives, so you can focus on the ones that have a bad time. Pretty much all insects have a bad time (if they are 'having a time' at all, i.e. if they are conscious).
I'm saying I reject caring about any one insect because it very probably leads to a repugnant conclusion (that I should care about insects above all else), based on utilitarian math -- unless you choose very very carefully how much you care about each insect.
I understand most people only care about local things. I think that's a moral failing, ideally I want to care just as much about people far away than about local people. I don't in practice but I try (I do donate to charities that help people in poor countries far from home.)
If I follow that logic and extend my caring to insects, I should care about all insects.
> I think you're making the argument "either you HAVE to care about every fly or you CANNOT care about any flies." Perhaps that logic works for you, but I think it's a fallacy
That's not my argument, that's my conclusion, based on utilitarian math, and I'm making a probabilistic argument, not a deductive logic argument, so calling it a fallacy is a type error on two counts.
> I also adhere to non-interference. If a fly is caught in a spider web, I will leave it.
What's the logic behind that? If a child stumbles into a pond and drowns, or is mauled by a wild coyote, will you let them die on the basis of non-interference?
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Any consciousness vastly superior to ours would be so complex that we wouldn't even be aware of it. So it wouldn't matter what it would do to us. It's the same with most animals. We might as well be gods to them. An ant lives in a completely different reality. The whole concept of "animal rights" is based on the flawed notion of trying to equate our reality to that of completely different beings. Something that is unable to even understand the concept of rights is incapable of having them, or morals, to begin with. Rights are not given, they are taken. There is a reason why humans rule Earth and not gerbils. Rights or morals didn't exist until we invented them. There is no objective spiritual truth out there.
Consciousness requires a critical mass of brain power. A wolf is relatively intelligent but not conscious, they are biological machines that only think about killing and mating and they have been doing that, without change for hundreds of thousands of years. And if the environment doesn't change then they will continue being identical for hundreds of thousands of years more. Trying to give animals human properties is really very foolish. It's like trying to do that with computers, just because they can give us illusions of intelligence and consciousness, but because computers don't have cute faces and cuddly bodies nobody thinks about it. Evolution really is very efficient but brutally so. Only reason why humans have things like compassion is because it has been evolutionarily advantageous to us. A single human is really quite weak and underpowered, we need to cooperate, it's the key to our progress. It is also why we think babies are cute and why we are instinctively protective of them and why sex feels good. There really is no deeper meaning behind any of it. If we had evolved from tigers then the world would look very (brutally)different, because tigers are solitary and territorial animals that have absolutely no use for things like compassion, empathy or cooperativeness. We wouldn't think twice about killing anything if it suited us, not even other tigers and it would be completely normal to us. If some hairless ape came to us on his high horse and started preaching about morals and rights then we would think that he was crazy, and then we would eat him.