Final Decision and Accepting Moral Responsibility

Support for this show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance Do you have a pet Every six seconds, a pet owner in the US gets hit with a vet bill of over a thousand dollars. And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise That's where fetch pet insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance. Get paid back up to ninety percent of vet bills. You can use any vet in the US and Canada. All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet d. com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet dot com slash save How many third party vendors does your company use twenty, two hundred Thanks to AI, someone on your team probably added three more this week. And your security lead has no idea. Traditional third party risk management can't keep up Avanta gives you continuous coverage across every vendor, automatically So you actually know what's in your stack and what to do about it. AI on, risk off Svanta d. com slash tpRM I have returned today to a scene from my past. This is where I was standing last summer when I saw A bug Skittering up this tree trunk It was a very distinctive bug. It has a polka dottty sort of wing with red underneath. This unmistakably was a spotted lantern fly. The spotted lantern fly may be pretty small, but it has the potential to cause big problems. The invasive species showing up around the T State area this summer. These gray and black dotted bugs that are said to be destructive pests that feeds on more than seventy different plants that are critical to the state's agriculture. So I knew what this thing was. I had seen these many times before. They are all over Brooklyn. they took off around twenty twenty, twenty twenty one And so I knew what I was supposed to do this situation. Authorities say if you see one, you're asked to kill it. You heard right kill the bugs So I ran after it. I ran up to this tree and I remember I tried to stomp it on the tree, which is hard to do. So it got away from me and I'm going after it again. And then this is what I remember most. this woman yelled at me from down the street. And I don't remember exactly what she said, but the spirit was like, Yeah, get it. Get the lantern fly This is not the first time I've had that kind of interaction. Like this has definitely been the vbe. Welcome to New York guys, where citizens have turned merciless mercenaries to protect nature. your friend Lanerpug and ask him about it. Ask him what happens when you f to New Jersey. Huh? No, are he ain't here? I wonder where he went, Maybe under my shoe. Like people really, really got on board with just the mass murder of bugs. And I in that moment was actually feeling really ambivalent Becauseuse on the one hand, it did feel good to be a part of this big civic project with my neighbor. And also it is satisfying to kill one of these bugs. Like it feels like you're almost scoring a point in a game. But I also kind of wanted to say to her like, isn't it weird that we're all just happily participating in this big project that is about killing living creatures and we're like giving each other high fives over that? Something about it just feels also really bad. And I did not say any of that. I was kind of just like, a, It was a lantern fly But now, lantern fly season is coming again. There's a chance the lanternflies are above me in this tree right now, like getting ready to hatch And I'm once again going be faced with essentially a moral question of a kind that comes up in conservation all the time, where we're forced to choose between different types of beings and their lives. So the question is Should I personally be killing these invasive lanternflies And also just, what is the right way for any of us to think through that kind of decision people to learn that the Lanternfly had arrived in the United States was a scientist named Julie Urbin. An old acquaintance of hers unexpectedly left her a message You know, Julie, this is Leo callall me back And like they found it They got it, it's here. I knew into just. I haven't talked to the guy in like years, right? You were like, it's the lantern fly. It's gotta be. Totally. Wow. Oh my gosh. How'd she you feel out totally freaked out The lanternfly had been on Julie's radar because she studies the group of insects that it belongs to. plant tooppers And she got into that work not because she was interested in invasive species management, but because she was into evolutionary biology And she just thought that these bugs were incredibly cool Cicadas are great, everything. But if you've seen one, seen them all, okay? they kind of have the same like body shape and form Flathoppers, they're extremely, we call it morphologically, but body shaped, diverse. Right? One of them, its common name is the peanut headed bug because it looks like it has a peanut on its head, right?. Who has that, right? And Some of them shoe wax out their rear ends And I'm like, wow, like they shoot wax out their butts. I'm in But like Even if you're in it for the wax, you do have to stay up to date on bugs you study that could have a real world impact. So that's why Julie had her eye on lantern bllies Because around two thousand four, they had landed in South Korea And they did a lot of damage there Mostly to grapevines, but also to apples and other tree fruit ornamental trees and timber trees, they have this straw like beak that sits along their abdomens, and they use that to suck on a part of the plant tissue called flloem carries sugars that are created by photosynthesis That sugar is what fuels its growth, it allows it to reproduce that kind of thing. And so it's But it's also famously delicious, Exactly, right. And so the insects are stealing So Julie calls Leo back and she learns that the lantern fly has indeed been detected in the United States, specifically in Pennsylvania And a little while later, in the spring of twenty fifteen, she heads up there. with a team of people who are trying to figure out what to do We went to the landscaping company where It was thought that that was like ground zero, so to speak. I had never seen a landscaping company at this scale What it look like like greenery orre Well, piles of stone, like really from around the world The lantern flies seem to have arrived on one of those piles of stone a shipment from Asia these bugs are unusually good at hitchhiking. And when the team looked closer, they found old egg masses on the grounds of this landscaping company, meaneaning that actually, the lanternflies had probably arrived more than a year earlier And they also noticed that lanternflies seem to be feeding especially on the tree of heaven which, despite the nice sounding name, is actually itself an invasive species from Asia Non native species arriving in new places That is not always a problem Honey bees are not from North America nor are most earthworms But the worry is that a non native species with no natural predators can get out of control They can displace other species, or in the case of lantern fllies, they can kill a lot of trees Pennsylvania took some steps to manage the lantern flies They put some areas of the state under quarantine so that things like landscaping materials had to be inspected before they could move They cut down some trees of heaven, they used insecticides. and at first, the population is not exploding. Then comes twenty seventeen Julie now has a job at Penn State, studying lanternflies, and a grape grower has agreed to test some insecticides at his vineyard As part of that, he leaves a couple of rows of grapes untreated for comparison And so We go out and it was raining cats and dogs. You know, we're in thisower in the back of this gower's pickup truck. And we're driving through this vineyard. and the support posts at the end of the rows. We just see them post after post slackkeered with lanterfly egg mases. Oh lot? And we're all, oh my gosh. like, you know, And so it if the movie jaws, you know, when Brody first sees a shark. I think we're going to need a bigger boat Julie described twenty seventeen as one stomach drop after another She had been working with a grad student on all this, and one day, the student calls her. She said, Julie, I'm out here. I'm going to the Walmart. They're flying into Walmart And like. Now' doing here. And then she called me again at that vineyard, he also grew apples And she called me and she said, Julie, I'm you know at the vineyard and they're flying over into the apple trees. they're hitting my car. and we had never seen them on the apple General public gets wind of all this, and some of them begin to take matters into their own hands. One enterprising individual goes after some lantern flies with a blow toorch. tries attackem here and just go at 'em And some people who are hearing about the rise of lanternflies start getting angry. They say, why didn't you just na At the beginning, everything you did was wrong Julie and her colleagues, including at the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, they had been balancing a lot of concerns as they figured out how to deal with the lanternfies. Like they could have just torchued the infected area with strong, nasty insecticides, but you know, they already were using powerful insecticides. They were just trying to do it in a way that didn't kill too many other bugs But the containment measures didn't totally work. By twenty eighteen and twenty nineteen, despite the quarantines and the pesticides The lantern flies are really on the move. spread to the city of Philadelphia about sixty miles away from where they were first attected. And in the summer of twenty twenty amid everything else going on They are exploding. Invasion of the spotted Lantern flies in University City and it looks like ground zero is this Tpotle at thirty fourth in Lancaster. There's footage of the bugs absolutely blanketing the sidewalk at the entrance of this ill fated Philadelphia Chipotle There are photos of the bugs wrapping around the trunks of Pennsylvania trees, which is very creepy, though also oddly beautiful And ordinary people in Philadelphia are fighting back as they have been told to In the summer of twenty twenty, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture posted on Facebook about the lantern fllies, saying that you should quote Pish their guts out anytime you see them. Unquote Kill order people get very into this. Stomping Wishing There are reports of kids in Philly going after them with skateboards It seemed to me that the point of the various Lanternfly campaigns was to inspire us all to action But I did wonder like Why I'm curriious about is like, is the stomp it part of the campaign actually to help bring down populations So what is it for then? It's again, if you don't kill it, you're going to carry it don't have good data on this, but it doesn't seem like the individual stompers have had that much of an actual impact on lantern fly population levels. Other mitigation measures are way more effective Julie and the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture are really focused on whether the lantern fly will spread. Like you stomp it so it doesn't try to hitch a ride with you in your car And if you look a little more closely, you can see that the public outreach campaigns in Pennsylvania and eventually New York do include information about this. Like make sure to report these bugs if you see them outside of the quarantine zone In Pennsylvania, you can call the hotline at one eight eight four Bad Fly A lot of their communication is also about scraping away egg masses, which is more efficient than stomping individual bugs But when I started to hear about this It seemed like some of that nuance had gotten lost People were kind of just stomping with abandon even with a sense of glee And like We were sending children off to do this Girl Scouts love taking action. They love finding ways that they can help out in the community. And one of the ways thatZ Girl Scouts are showing the love to parks today is through a little bit of a lanternfly squishathon But there were also signs that people were conflicted about the kill orders One friend told me that in the summer of twenty twenty one, she saw someone running after a lantern fly yelling out, The New York Times told me to kill you I personally know a couple of people who gave up stomping The question even made it on Jimmy Fallet where comedian Kate McKinnon was making an appearance. And I saw this baby on the street. And I was like, This m What It's like sepia toned wing Fishnz basically.ically It's gorgeous. Pak of red with polka dots like this is a burlesque dancer. But she promises that now that she knows it's invasive, she's gonna kill it. No, we're supposed to. We're supposed to and I will. I will kill the next Wantern fly. I take a photo of it You w my God, you' waking We're supped to. We'reos I will. I will kill the next one If you didn't catch that, Kate is saying she's gonna do this, but then overtly winking at the audience, like letting us know that she's crossing her fingers behind her back. People were starting to wonder why exactly we had to kill these gorgeous burlesque dancer bugs. And actually, the science was getting a little more murky on this question too The initial worries about how the lanternflies might kill all these trees and crops Th did not pan out As of now, in the US, the bugs are really mostly a problem for grapes and therefore for grape growers Julie told me, in her mind, there is still urgency around making sure that the lantern flies don't expand to new places. So if heat makes them develop, they're going to develop earlier as they move south mean more time to feed on Georgia peaches, or maybe on the many grapes in my home state of California. Even though things haven't been as bad in the Northeast as they initially feared, it is still possible that in other places, it could be worse. past couple of summers, I have shared Kate McKinnon's ambivalence about stomping lantern flies. I have felt especially ambivalent about the kill orders and how happy we all seem to be to comply This year, I don't know I wanted to face my ambivalence head on It is really not the biggest deal in the world. So I was like, I should actually just decide once and for all, what I'm gonna do here makeake a moral choice that I can live by. Do you think it's morally right? For me to kill lanternflies Yes because I think If if anything It It can only help Julie doesn't like the idea of killing living things, and she knows better than anyone what cool creatures lanternflies are. But she was like, we just gott to do it I mean, this is it's kind of like as humans, we've manipulated our environment so much, you know? and Ethically, it's our responsibility to try to fix that or keep it from getting worse as much as we can You know, we have to do our chores environmentally, right? And a lot of times they're distasteful. And this is one that's very distasteful I totally see how Julie landed here And yet Even with what I had now learned about the science, I felt like there were still ethical questions here that I wanted to think through more deeply. Ideally with the help of a moral philosopher And when I did I learned more than I had bargained for about the ethics of conservation and of decision making in general That is after the break Support for the show comes from Odu Running a business is hard enough So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other Introducing Odu It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all in one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier CRM, accounting, inventory, e commerce and more And the best part, OdDu replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you Try Odoo for free at odoo. com That's OD Oo d. com Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start Thumb Tack knows homes, so you don't have to Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin orr what that clunking sound from your dryer is With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro You just have to hire one You can hire top rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app Download today. Support for this show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance Do you have a pet Every six seconds, a pet owner in the US gets hit with a vet bill of over a thousand dollars, and it's almost always an unwelcome surprise That's where fetch pet insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance. Get paid back up to ninety percent of vet bills. You can use any vet in the US and Canada. All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet dot com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet dot com slash save several different papers and articles as I was trying to think through my decision about whether or not to kill lantern fllies this summer if they should be so unlucky as to cross my path And there was one that I kept thinking about by an author named Chelsea Batavia. She lives in Washington State The lantern fllies have not made it there yet, but I told her the whole story Oh boy, what a mess. Chelsea now works in government. She is representing her own views here, not the state of Washington Back when she was a PhD student, studying ecosystem management and environmental ethics, she got interested in moral dilemmas in conservation Because, you know, mostly, people who care about conservation are trying to do the right thing But sometimes they face conflicting moral demands You know, it's challenging. Should we be killing Bards to save sppottedds This is something that happened in the Pacific Northwest starting in twenty thirteen. And the images of the bodies of invasive barred owls that had been killed in the name of conservation They made people uncomfortable. Chelsea gets that You know, like I have a kind of a strong intuitive response to like, no, we shouldn't be killing anything. Don't we say that we care about nature, Don't we say we care about wildlife And so killing is bad. Like that's the first thing you learned Exactly. It's like thou shalall not kill. But then when you dig into like the details, because that's the thing. ethics, we can think about it at an abstract. But at the end of the day we are making decisions. We're acting in the context of particulars, right? And once you get into those particulars, these like high level yes, we should kill or no we should not kill, that just doesn't There's too much nuance. So Tulsi started thinking deeply about the ethics of this kind of situation And she agreed to help me think through my version of that. The lantern flies. I guess a first response is that I think it is grossly inappropriate for anybody to be killing gleefully This seemed like a very reasonable place to start. Like a lot of my discomfort is about how the killing sometimes feels like this big collective game But if you put gleeful killing aside There is still the question of killing at all And Chelsea was like, okay could get into the world of normative ethics, which is about helping us choose what to do It's got three big branches, three big frameworks we could consider Number one is consequentialism Csequentialism says the right action very, very ly but the right action is the one that produces the best outcomes U so the focus is on what happens. In the case of lantern fllies There is one big obvious outcome We're killing life. We're killingsects, we're killing bugs. These are little lives, right? Yeah Many smart people do think that insects are conscious and feel pain That is in the donon't kill them, column But of course, on the flip side, Humans are conscious and feel pain And humans are harmed by lanternflies especially humans who grow grapes So that is in the kill them column Chelsea also pointed out a whole world I hadven't thought of, also in the kill them column that is like, if I stomp on lanternflies now, then I' may be preventing people in California or other states from having to make this decision. And I'm also preventing the lanternfies's future children from also being killed. But then it's like, do it how do we weigh the value of a potential life that never was against the life that is here right now. So like to me, that's I'm just, I think that consequentialism is a useful tool for thinking through things, but like I'm very rarely going like put a flag and be like, yes, this is the way should we should be thinking about. And out, there's just a of uncertainty about outcomes. There's a lot of uncertainty. and there's a lot of types of outcomes can't be quantified and even if they could, they would not be comparable. So you know, I think that that's not helpful for you making your decision to try to make a calculation based on the best outcomes I gotta say, I was relieved I think part of me thought I had to have all the information in order to responsibly make this decision. L read the appendix of all the studies or something But actually that is not necessarily required in order for me to make an ethical choice. mightight even be a way for me to avoid the decision because it's hard Chelsea did say it is of course very important that scientists keep learning more about the outcomes. Like if it turns out that the lanternfies making it to California is definitely going cause mass famine That could really change my moral calculation But for the moment, we left consequentialism aside. The second frame Chelsea told me about is Dontology which means the science of moral duty focuses on the intention behind my action Why am I doing it When you talk about feeling like you're, you, participating with your community and doing something to support your hometown, that to me sounds a lot like more of a deontological claim. you're thinking about you know, your intention, your motivation is not to be cruel and kill lantern flies. Your motivation is to be a good neighbor to make that connection with your neighbor. So you know, to me,'s that's not irrelevant. That is something to pay attention to All right, so we put those issues into the mix Framework number three is called virtue ethics. It is a really old branch of normative ethics, which essentially says that virtues should guide your actions So Aristotle talked about Virtues being things like know courage and temperance. And so the idea is then as you are moving through your life and you have to make moral decisions, you do what a virtuous person would do. So like the reason why this was not very popular for you know, as we got into the Enlightenment, we were looking for rules, it's like, that's not a rule There's definitely something to be said for rules This flexible framework seems useful to me too. becausecause There actually are multiple reasonable ways to think about this Maybe a virtuous person would take on the task of killing bugs on behalf of their community Maybe a virtuous person would decide, the principle of protecting life is the most important thing here Gleeful killing of creatures could be a slippery slope The important thing is to think about what is actually good and then try to take action to get there. I also realized I had been assuming that I needed to make like an ironclaw decision here that I can never violate I think because I wanted to make sure that I wasn't letting myself off the hook But it's also true that There's no law that I always kill lantern flies or that I never do Maybe I've been looking for something overly simple I think that when I see work in conservation ethics and a lot of ethics in general, it tends to be quite definitive. It says like, you know, this is right, this is wrong. and I just I really like language that gives us away to say that That's simple When Chelsea was doing her PhD, she felt like she really needed some language like that to describe these conservation moral dilemmas, like the one with the invasive owls So I started snooping through some really gnarly moral philosophy stuff. Looking for like a word to describe that feeling? Looking for if there's any scholarship that acknowledges that this is a thing You know, ethics is not a matter of right. J just like, yeah, I got that. like Gld star for me that there's there's this gray zone. And that's how I found this language around. Moral residue. Moral residue It describes the feeling that's left behind when you make what you think is the best ethical choice, and it still just feels bad It's an emotional response actually, which is super interesting because moral philosophy puts a lot a high premium on the mind, on rationality, on logic, on thinking and deliberation. So it was really interesting to me that something that is recognized as an emotional signal is given language Allowing my emotions into the room That was actually really clarifying to me. because I've kind of been feeling like If I still felt bad about my decision mayaybe I just hadn't yet arrived at the right decision But actually maybe I'm just gonna feel bad about both options And I still have to choose One thing Moral Residue is not meant to do is let anybody off the hook You're going to have to kind of sit in your own moral responsibility and decide what you're going to do. There is no no action option. You either kill them or you don't. And I think you're going to probably going to have to sit with some sort of discomfort either way. but I think that wading into the complexity is the right way to do things. That's like a responsible way to be as a free willing moral agent in the world. Like if that's not what we're doing here as people, then I guess I'm not sure what we're doing By the end of our conversation, I had enough of a sense of Chelsea to know that she was not gonna tell me what to do here But I did ask her What would you do if they do to Washington Yeah, if they get to Washington, I'm definitely going to learn more and try to use my best critical brain to understand kind of how the research was done and what it means But I think that my This is where I would acknowledge my unwillingness to accept that personal burden of taking a life Um I wouldn't do that because Yeah like you're feeling like I wouldn't stomp them. Yeah. and that would be a loss that, you know, because I would recognize that I do have an obligation for all the reasons that we've already talked about, but yeah, I think my reverence for life is probably a little bit too strong of a signal for me at this point All right I'm back on this block near my house with this tree that had a lantern fly scuttling up at last summer that I tried to kill And I've made my decision When the lanternflies come out this summer, I am going to stop them. That is not where Chelsea landed for herself, but I think she modeled a way of making the decision that accepts the moral residue, makes the choice based on what feels important to her. And for me, I think the communitarian value of helping people in my region is just really important to me But I also accept that means I'm going be taking insect lives and that my individual actions actually don't have that much of an impact. Like I don't think I should kid myself about that But there is also one big thing that I'm gonna force myself to do differently from last year, which is that this time if someone comes up to me and is like, yeah, getem. I think I'm really gonna make myself be like I kind of hate doing this. Like I've decided to do it, but it's a rough tradeoff that we're being asked to make, right? Like killing bugs does not feel good becausecause I do think that maybe having a weird, honest conversation with a stranger about something that matters is also a good in itself This episode was produced by me, Sally Helm It was edited by Lisssa Soet. Christian Ayala did the mixing and sound design. Meredith Hodnott runs the show. Melissa Hirch checks the facts. Noem Hasenfeld, Valerie Shenankman, and Joanna Solitaroff are wondering what it is really like to be a bird. And Bird Pinkerton immediately pulled out the broken guitar when Flappon hissed Not here. They have ears everywhere And he led down a narrow passageway, away from the outside passageway, deeper into the station.