Do you think stepping on bugs is right or wrong- why?

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LuckyR
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Re: Do you think stepping on bugs is right or wrong- why?

Post by LuckyR »

Morality what you do when no one (except a couple of bugs) is watching.
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Thrylix
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Re: Do you think stepping on bugs is right or wrong- why?

Post by Thrylix »

LuckyR wrote: December 13th, 2017, 3:38 am Morality what you do when no one (except a couple of bugs) is watching.
I agree with that to a point, although I don't think it applies here. Are you thinking that I might be less likely to squash some ants if I thought other people were scrutinizing me? Most of my friends and acquaintances already know I have no problem stepping on bugs.
Jose Lazaro wrote: December 12th, 2017, 9:59 am You are as good as you deem yourself to be. All moral backbone is designed to fit into a certain culture in order for it to flourish. Morality is a concept, nothing more, nothing less.
That's a good point. Does my viewpoint help America as a culture flourish? I recognize that other cultures consider how I treat bugs to be morally corrupt but most people I know don't give a damn.
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LuckyR
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Re: Do you think stepping on bugs is right or wrong- why?

Post by LuckyR »

Thrylix wrote: May 7th, 2018, 4:12 pm
LuckyR wrote: December 13th, 2017, 3:38 am Morality what you do when no one (except a couple of bugs) is watching.
I agree with that to a point, although I don't think it applies here. Are you thinking that I might be less likely to squash some ants if I thought other people were scrutinizing me? Most of my friends and acquaintances already know I have no problem stepping on bugs.
No, why would I? You just said that stepping on bugs is fine by your moral code, so why would you decrease your likelihood of doing so when observed? In fact my comment applies especially to you, since you are more likely (or at least equally likely) to follow your moral code when not observed.
"As usual... it depends."
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Sy Borg
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Re: Do you think stepping on bugs is right or wrong- why?

Post by Sy Borg »

Interestingly, Lucky, it occurs to me that I might be a little more likely to step on bugs if I was observed, especially if the effort to avoid them would attract attention. For instance, if walking with a prospective client, a dramatic attempt to avoid stepping on a beetle could easily cast one in a less favourable light than those who ignore such "unimportant details" as is more usual.
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Re: Do you think stepping on bugs is right or wrong- why?

Post by ThomasHobbes »

Greta wrote: May 8th, 2018, 4:02 am Interestingly, Lucky, it occurs to me that I might be a little more likely to step on bugs if I was observed, especially if the effort to avoid them would attract attention. For instance, if walking with a prospective client, a dramatic attempt to avoid stepping on a beetle could easily cast one in a less favourable light than those who ignore such "unimportant details" as is more usual.

i think it depends of the species of bug.
CIN
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Re: Do you think stepping on bugs is right or wrong- why?

Post by CIN »

I don't gratuitously kill insects. I do, however, swat flies when they come in my house, simply because they carry disease. This seems to me a rational thing to do. There is a known risk of catching a disease from a fly, whereas whether a fly is capable of feeling anything at all is a complete unknown. It's a known evil against an unknown, and in such a situation I think I am justified in preventing the known evil.

If scientists discover the necessary and sufficient conditions for an organism to feel, and these conditions are present in flies, I shall have a problem. But until then, I swat on regardless.
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Re: Do you think stepping on bugs is right or wrong- why?

Post by LuckyR »

CIN wrote: May 8th, 2018, 8:08 am I don't gratuitously kill insects. I do, however, swat flies when they come in my house, simply because they carry disease. This seems to me a rational thing to do. There is a known risk of catching a disease from a fly, whereas whether a fly is capable of feeling anything at all is a complete unknown. It's a known evil against an unknown, and in such a situation I think I am justified in preventing the known evil.

If scientists discover the necessary and sufficient conditions for an organism to feel, and these conditions are present in flies, I shall have a problem. But until then, I swat on regardless.
While a few individuals avoid all insect death. For most, the issue of this thread is not killing for this reason (disease prevention) or that reason (embarrassment), but the idea of killing bugs for no reason.
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Sy Borg
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Re: Do you think stepping on bugs is right or wrong- why?

Post by Sy Borg »

LuckyR wrote: May 9th, 2018, 1:31 am
CIN wrote: May 8th, 2018, 8:08 am I don't gratuitously kill insects. I do, however, swat flies when they come in my house, simply because they carry disease. This seems to me a rational thing to do. There is a known risk of catching a disease from a fly, whereas whether a fly is capable of feeling anything at all is a complete unknown. It's a known evil against an unknown, and in such a situation I think I am justified in preventing the known evil.

If scientists discover the necessary and sufficient conditions for an organism to feel, and these conditions are present in flies, I shall have a problem. But until then, I swat on regardless.
While a few individuals avoid all insect death. For most, the issue of this thread is not killing for this reason (disease prevention) or that reason (embarrassment), but the idea of killing bugs for no reason.
Exactly. Protection of self, family, assets, resources and territory are not the issue. When I was young I sometimes killed ants pointlessly. It's hard to even understand why - it was certainly in part abuse of empowerment, no doubt spurred by my own sense of disempowerment. In short, bullying. It was also curiosity - to see how they reacted. With larger insects, such cruelty would seem too personal, but ants were small enough not to make a mark on my conscience. After all, almost every person who is not a Jain Buddhist or an admirer accepts that ants are trodden on by larger animals all the time. Still, today the idea turns me right off.

It's not uncommon for people to catch stray Christmas beetles, spiders or moths that blunder into a home to be released outside (not so much cockroaches, flies and mosquitoes for obvious reasons). While wholesale destruction of invasive ant trails is often necessary for those living near nests, I am curious to know how many will go to the trouble to catch and release with a single stray ant? You must evict her or she'll call her friends and start a party in your home, and it's so simple to wipe them up like a piece of mobile dirt. So I try to catch them - which still has a pretty high mortality rate due to clumsiness. Some would say that's a waste of energy - that one would ideally direct their energies into less trivial pursuits, but that could be said about much that we do.

Sometimes when I do that I feel like a bit of a weirdo, even though it's just trying to be being humane to a weaker animal at my mercy.

Edit: erroneous word
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Re: Do you think stepping on bugs is right or wrong- why?

Post by Felix »

In one of Richard Feynman's books, he described his amusing experiments with ants. He didn't harm them, just wanted to understand what sort of intelligence they have, how they find their way around and communicate with one another.

Alan Watts used to talk about the dangers of "thingifying" life - seeing living things as objects rather than appreciating them as the wonders they are.

Kinship with All Life by J. Allen Boone is a great book about communicating with other life forms, even a house fly, if you can believe that. Some flies do seem to be smarter than others, they'll fly out almost as soon as you open a door wide in the room, whereas others will bounce off the walls and window screens for untold minutes as if they've lost their senses - which in a way I suppose they have.

Yes, I can't say I've met anyone who takes pity on mosquitoes, I think even Gandhi swatted them (prayerfully). Can't be pleasant to be one of the most reviled creatures on earth, not that they worry about their social standing.
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LuckyR
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Re: Do you think stepping on bugs is right or wrong- why?

Post by LuckyR »

Greta wrote: May 9th, 2018, 2:30 am
LuckyR wrote: May 9th, 2018, 1:31 am

While a few individuals avoid all insect death. For most, the issue of this thread is not killing for this reason (disease prevention) or that reason (embarrassment), but the idea of killing bugs for no reason.
Exactly. Protection of self, family, assets, resources and territory are not the issue. When I was young I sometimes killed ants pointlessly. It's hard to even understand why - it was certainly in part abuse of empowerment, no doubt spurred by my own sense of disempowerment. In short, bullying. It was also curiosity - to see how they reacted. With larger insects, such cruelty would seem too personal, but ants were small enough not to make a mark on my conscience. After all, almost every person who is not a Jain Buddhist or an admirer accepts that ants are trodden on by larger animals all the time. Still, today the idea turns me right off.

It's not uncommon for people to catch stray Christmas beetles, spiders or moths that blunder into a home to be released outside (not so much cockroaches, flies and mosquitoes for obvious reasons). While wholesale destruction of invasive ant trails is often necessary for those living near nests, I am curious to know how many will go to the trouble to catch and release with a single stray ant? You must evict her or she'll call her friends and start a party in your home, and it's so simple to wipe them up like a piece of mobile dirt. So I try to catch them - which still has a pretty high mortality rate due to clumsiness. Some would say that's a waste of energy - that one would ideally direct their energies into less trivial pursuits, but that could be said about much that we do.

Sometimes when I do that I feel like a bit of a weirdo, even though it's just trying to be being humane to a weaker animal at my mercy.

Edit: erroneous word
Not a weirdo. There is no reason to snuff out a life for no reason at all or boredom at best. True for most the threshold is low, perhaps incredibly low. If there is NO threshold for bugs, perhaps there isn't one for pets, or for humans, since it is all a question of gradation.
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Sy Borg
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Re: Do you think stepping on bugs is right or wrong- why?

Post by Sy Borg »

Thanks Lucky. It wasn't a strong sense of being a weirdo, less strong than my embarrassment at the mistakes and typos in my post :)

As with all things, we draw our lines where we will - that which we approve, tolerate or judge. Since these standards change during a lifetime, ideally age will bring increased understanding of others' positions that we may have already held ourselves at times on our own journeys.

It seems to me that as human population increases, the value of a human life will decrease, perhaps to the point where we see each other as troublesome vermin. I have been playing catchup with my education in retirement and was stunned to learn about a year ago that after the Black Death had finished decimating Europe there was an immediate flourishing of business, culture and creativity. Intuitively I'd imagined deeply traumatised survivors in a prolonged period of mourning but it was basically a celebration! Imagine the opinions people would have had of each other just prior to the breakout as the crowds, dirt and stench built up year after year.

Value often seems to be based on convenience and comfort rather than absolute standards, with the notion of "vermin", arguably the key concept of this topic, seemingly contingent. Anyone or anything can be vermin! In a tribe of ten, every person is family, essential. In a perilously crowded city, portions of the population are thought of and treated as vermin.
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LuckyR
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Re: Do you think stepping on bugs is right or wrong- why?

Post by LuckyR »

Greta wrote: May 9th, 2018, 5:26 pm Thanks Lucky. It wasn't a strong sense of being a weirdo, less strong than my embarrassment at the mistakes and typos in my post :)

As with all things, we draw our lines where we will - that which we approve, tolerate or judge. Since these standards change during a lifetime, ideally age will bring increased understanding of others' positions that we may have already held ourselves at times on our own journeys.

It seems to me that as human population increases, the value of a human life will decrease, perhaps to the point where we see each other as troublesome vermin. I have been playing catchup with my education in retirement and was stunned to learn about a year ago that after the Black Death had finished decimating Europe there was an immediate flourishing of business, culture and creativity. Intuitively I'd imagined deeply traumatised survivors in a prolonged period of mourning but it was basically a celebration! Imagine the opinions people would have had of each other just prior to the breakout as the crowds, dirt and stench built up year after year.

Value often seems to be based on convenience and comfort rather than absolute standards, with the notion of "vermin", arguably the key concept of this topic, seemingly contingent. Anyone or anything can be vermin! In a tribe of ten, every person is family, essential. In a perilously crowded city, portions of the population are thought of and treated as vermin.
I disagree. While the popular attitude is that human life is treated with low value as many YouTube videos will attest, that ignores the tremendously low value that existed in antiquity (which don't have videos to accompany the incidents). The misperception is because the idea of human value has outpaced the practice of it (as every issue is easier to think about than adopt), but the trajectory of both is clearly towards improvement.
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Sy Borg
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Re: Do you think stepping on bugs is right or wrong- why?

Post by Sy Borg »

Fair point about antiquity, Lucky, but I think you will find that living conditions for the most bloodthirsty societies were crowded, smelly and dangerous, not ideal for fostering neighbourly love and a great deal of homelessness due to lack of social welfare.

Bring in a crowd and you lower the value of human life, noting that a "crowd" is not a number but something that is felt.
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LuckyR
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Re: Do you think stepping on bugs is right or wrong- why?

Post by LuckyR »

Greta wrote: May 11th, 2018, 5:58 pm Fair point about antiquity, Lucky, but I think you will find that living conditions for the most bloodthirsty societies were crowded, smelly and dangerous, not ideal for fostering neighbourly love and a great deal of homelessness due to lack of social welfare.

Bring in a crowd and you lower the value of human life, noting that a "crowd" is not a number but something that is felt.
Well if you mean that even though the population is increasing, that "crowdedness" is decreasing, then I agree with you. And your conclusions.
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Sy Borg
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Re: Do you think stepping on bugs is right or wrong- why?

Post by Sy Borg »

The lesser sense of crowdedness is at least in part due to regulations preventing the most gross invasions of privacy.

Imagine the outrage of a large minority of Americans today to ANY laws inhibiting their behaviour in any way and think of how people with that attitude would have reacted to a new edict in the middle ages preventing people from throwing their toilet waste out the window into the street!

This is the west's issue today as populations increase which necessarily results in tighter regulation.
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