Introducing Ethos: A Regular Forum for Interdisciplinary Conversations about Ethics in Entomology

Entomologists are responsible for the use or management of an untold number of insects each year. We serve an incredible range of global stakeholders, from governments to universities, urbanites to rural farmers. Our work occurs in a social environment that’s wrestling with difficult questions about diversity, inclusion, equity, and justice—many of which bear directly on practices within the entomological community and the outcomes of our work (e.g., Ramalho et al. 2020, Evangelista et al. 2020, Trisos et al. 2021). It’s no surprise, then, that we face numerous ethical challenges as we research insects and manage their populations. Consider a small sampling: How should we approach the ethical tradeoffs associated with the open science system? For instance, how should we balance the good of accessible information with the equity considerations that are created by high open-access fees? What are the ethical risks associated with generating and releasing genetically modified insects? When, if ever, have we taken sufficient precautions to generate and release them despite these risks? When managing pest species, how should we manage tensions between preserving ecological value, on the one hand, and various human disvalues, on the other? When digitally surveilling insect populations, what responsibilities do we have to humans who are unknowingly surveilled? What does ethical insect farming look like? Is de-extinction research a moral imperative or ethically dubious? How far should we go to help threatened species—especially when helping one has negative consequences for another (e.g., the delousing of California condors and black-footed ferrets, which led to the extinction of two species of lice; Milotic et al. 2020)? Finally, a question that students debated at the 2022 Entomological Societies of America, Canada, and British Columbia Joint Annual Meeting: are insects treated ethically in scientific research? WHAT ARE THE ETHICAL RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH GENERATING AND RELEASING GENETICALLY MODIFIED INSECTS? From this list, it’s clear that entomologists have faced ethical issues since the inception of our field. Moreover, these issues have steadily—or sometimes incredibly rapidly—changed due to shifts in our entomological knowledge; the economic, social, and political contexts in which we work; and the technologies available to us. Every sub-discipline of entomology, as well as every individual entomologist, is met with an array of moral challenges. Yet despite the complexity of the moral landscape, most entomologists receive little in the way of dedicated ethics training beyond—or even including—basic responsible conduct of research. For instance, 65% of entomology graduate students believe it’s important to discuss the ethics of using genetic technology with their research leaders. However, only 28% of those working with the technology have ever had that conversation (Trout et al. 2010). Relatedly, Triestsch and Deans (2018) describe students asking them about the ethics of insect collecting in their entomology courses, prompting the development of their Insect Collectors’ Code. Ethics has also played a prominent role in many student debate arguments since their inception in 1993 (e.g., in 2001, 2015, and 2022; Huberty 2003, Schmidt-Jeffris et al. 2017). Indeed, concerned early-career/student entomologists have been vocal about, and instrumental in, organizing supplemental opportunities for their own ethical professional development since at least 1978 (Mague 1979). Despite demonstrable and sustained interest in ethics among entomologists, we still lack dedicated spaces for regular discussions about ethics. Ultimately, this means that our community is often less than fully prepared to incorporate ethical considerations into our decision-making. This is a problem in its own right, of course, but it also creates independent concerns. Public trust in science depends on scientists being perceived as ethically informed. Drinkwater et al. (2019), for instance, suggested that our scientific community could lose public support if we didn’t begin to seriously revisit ethics in invertebrate research. This position is corroborated by recent data from North America showing that public trust in scientists decreases when there’s no ethical oversight of invertebrate research (Brunt et al. 2022). A lack of attention to ethics can leave us vulnerable to legal challenges, increase the labor or costs associated with research programs, harm individuals or communities, uphold power structures that reinforce inequity, cause persistent reputational damage to the field, and even work against our goal of generating reproducible research and effective management strategies. THESE ISSUES HAVE STEADILY—OR SOMETIMES INCREDIBLY RAPIDLY—CHANGED DUE TO SHIFTS IN OUR ENTOMOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE; THE ECONOMIC, SOCIAL, AND POLITICAL CONTEXTS IN WHICH WE WORK; AND THE TECHNOLOGIES AVAILABLE TO US. We’re helping launch the Ethos column to be a small part of the field’s solution to this long-standing problem. Ethos is an interdisciplinary column that provides brief articles (800–1,000 words) focused on a single ethical topic in each issue. American Entomologist is the ideal host for conversations about ethics, as the publication is both entomologist- and public-facing: ethical dialogue in the pages of American Entomologist will support our community’s deliberations while also demonstrating our values to the wider community. Notably, American Entomologist has already published many articles on ethical issues in entomology (e.g., Trout et al. 2010, Triestsch and Deans 2018, Sandall and Fischer 2019, Herrera et al. 2020). So, this column serves to make ethics a more frequent and reliable feature of our community’s discourse. Our goals for this column are: to briefly introduce an array of ethical challenges, to provide the entomological community with tools acquired from philosophical ethics for thinking through each challenge, to provide the community with relevant scientific literature related to the challenge, and to provide a forum for continually revisiting these issues as our scientific and ethical understanding continues to advance. Our goals are not: to act as the arbiter of morally correct thought or action within the entomological community, to advance any particular policies at the level of the ESA or within academia/industry/government, to address every nuance of these ethical issues in 1,000 words or less (impossible!). The column will always be written by both an entomologist and an ethicist, ensuring that it covers challenging issues from a scientifically informed, morally rigorous, and practically relevant perspective. Though we’re excited to help create this column, we aren’t interested in monopolizing it. Indeed, there are certain topics for which other entomologists and ethicists with different identities, experiences, or knowledge are better placed to serve our community. So, while we’ll take the lead in the column’s first few installments, we then plan to have others contribute. Ultimately, we hope these articles will serve as a starting point for further personal reflection on these issues, as well as kickstart community discussions on social media, at lab meetings, in conference symposia, or in future journal articles. Finally, while we’ve identified many ethical challenges faced by entomologists in this article, we’re sure there are many more we’ve never considered. So, we encourage readers to “Ask an Ethicist”—if you’ve spotted an ethical challenge, please send it to [email protected]. We’ll do our best to address it in a future column! Meghan Barrettis a NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Biology at California State University Dominguez Hills, where she studies insect neuroanatomy, thermal adaptations, and welfare. Bob Fischeris an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University and the author of Animal Ethics: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 2021).

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