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The lanternflies are here. Is it okay to stomp them?

I asked philosophy and an environmental scientist — here’s what they say.

Last summer, I was standing on a block near my house when I saw a very distinctive bug skittering up a tree trunk. It had a polka-dotty wing, with red underneath. It was, unmistakably, an invasive spotted lanternfly.

These are all over Brooklyn — they took off here around 2020 and 2021. And I knew what I was supposed to do in this situation: kill it.

Ordinary people have been told to kill the invasive spotted lanternfly, and many have embraced the task. But the bugs haven’t caused as much damage as scientists first feared, and eradicating them was never a likely option.

There’s a moral cost to taking insect life. Three philosophical frameworks could help us decide how to act here: consequentialism (considering outcomes), deontology (considering motivations) and virtue ethics (considering what’s good, and what a good person would do).

Even after all of that, there might be no action that feels perfectly right. Luckily, there’s a name for the bad feeling that’s left behind after you do something you’ve decided is good: “moral residue.”

Following orders, I ran after it and inelegantly tried to hike my leg up the tree trunk to stomp it dead. A neighbor I didn’t know yelled at me from down the street, something like: “Get it! Get the lanternfly!”

I didn’t know quite how to respond because, actually, I’d been feeling ambivalent. On the one hand, I like being part of a civic group project, and it is satisfying to squash a bug. But I also wanted to say something like, “Isn’t it weird that we’re all happily participating in a campaign to kill living creatures? Something about it just feels wrong.”

Lanternfly season is now upon us. And I’m once again going to be faced with a moral question that comes up repeatedly in conservation, when we’re forced to choose between different types of beings and their lives: Should I personally be killing these invasive lanternflies? And what is the right way for any of us to think through that kind of decision, anyway? So this year, I enlisted the help of an environmental scientist who is also deeply schooled in moral philosophy to help me figure this out.

The lanternflies are here. Now what?

Around 2004, lanternflies landed — from their native habitat in China, India, and Southeast Asia — in South Korea. And they did a lot of damage there. Mostly to grapevines, but also to apples and other tree fruit, to ornamental trees, and to timber trees. Then, in 2014, the bug was detected in the United States, in Pennsylvania.

Non-native species arriving in new places are not always a forever problem, but the worry is that a non-native species without natural predators can get out of control. They can displace other species or, in the case of lanternflies, potentially kill a lot of trees.

Should you feel guilty for killing the bugs in your house?

So Pennsylvania took serious steps to manage the lanternflies, such as quarantines and pesticides. But the containment measures didn’t totally work. And when the general public got wind of the problem, some of them started taking matters into their own hands. (One enterprising individual even blasted some lanternflies with a blowtorch.) By 2018 and 2019, despite the efforts to stop their spread, the lanternflies landed in the city of Philadelphia, about 60 miles away from where they’d first been detected. And in the summer of 2020, amid everything else going on, their populations were exploding.

Blowtorching spotted lanternflies is, in fact, a bad idea

There’s footage of the bugs absolutely blanketing the sidewalk at the entrance of an unlucky Philadelphia Chipotle. There are photos of them wrapping around the trunks of Pennsylvania trees. And ordinary people in Philadelphia fought back — as they’d been told to! That summer of 2020, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture posted on Facebook about the lanternflies, saying that people should “squish their guts out any time you see them.”

People got…very into this. Stomping. Squishing. But — and here’s where it gets tricky — it doesn’t seem like the individual stompers have had that much of an actual impact on lanternfly population levels.

Scientists I talked to said that the point wasn’t to eradicate the bugs as much as slow their spread, to give other........

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