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If you think insects suffer and that that matters, the correct conclusion is not "eat less honey", it's "soak every meter of Earth with DDT". Which I support.Bees and honey only matter if you very specifically care about domesticated insect suffering.
So, first: The logistical details of reducing wild impact biomass are mooted by the fact that I meant it as a reductio, not a proposal. I have no strong reason to think that spraying insecticide would be a better strategy than gene drives or sterile insect technique or deforestation, or that DDT is the most effective insecticide.
To put rough numbers on it: honeybees are about 4e-7 by count or 7e-4 by biomass of all insects (estimate by o3). There is no such extreme skew for mammals and birds (o3). While domesticated honeybees have some bad things happen to them, they don't seem orders of magnitude worse than what happens to wild insects.
Caring highly about insect suffering, in a way that scales linearly with population, does not match my values but does not seem philosophically incoherent. But because of the wild/domestic population skew, avoiding honey for this reason does seem philosophically incoherent.
8niplav
(Being nitpicky)
The extermination of insects needs more than just the fact that they suffer, but
1. They suffer so much that their existence is not outweighed by other positive things (e.g. their happiness, their contribution to the welfare of other beings, their intrinsic value).
2. There is no easier/more valuable method for relieving their suffering while keeping other goods.
3. The suffering outweighs other goods at every "margin", i.e. there is no amount of insects for which it isn't better to reduce their population.
This post is a container for my short-form writing. See this post for meta-level discussion about shortform.