Should we really kill all the lanternflies?

Summary

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Unexplainable – "Should we really kill all the lanternflies?"

Vox Media Podcast Network | June 17, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the ethical, scientific, and emotional questions surrounding the invasion of the spotted lanternfly, an eye-catching but damaging insect, in the northeastern US. The host dissects the public's enthusiastic response to calls for lanternfly extermination, explores whether "stomping" is genuinely effective, and unpacks the deeper moral conundrums that arise when we're told to kill one living thing to protect another. Conservation scientist Julie Urban and environmental ethicist Chelsea Batavia weigh in, providing both data and philosophical context for making a hard decision: to stomp, or not to stomp?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Lanternfly Hysteria in New York (00:37–04:53)

• Personal Anecdote: Host recalls their own experience trying and failing to stomp a lanternfly, encouraged by a neighbor’s shouts—capturing the surreal collective enthusiasm for squishing these bugs.

• Public Kill Orders: Authorities have called for the public to kill lanternflies on sight for years, particularly as populations exploded in urban areas like Brooklyn and Philadelphia.

• Ethical Ambivalence: The host expresses inner conflict—does it really feel right to celebrate killing any creature, even if it's invasive?

  "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?"
  (Narrator, 02:11)

2. Origins & Spread of the Lanternfly (04:53–11:47)

• Expert Introduction: Entomologist Julie Urban recounts the arrival of lanternflies in the US, identifying them from a tip-off and tracing their journey from Asia via landscaping shipments.

• Biology & Threat: Lanternflies suck plant sugars and pose a threat to crops, especially grapes. Initial fears were dire, based on South Korea’s experience.

• Containment Attempts: Pennsylvania authorities set up quarantines, cut invasive "tree of heaven," and applied insecticides—initially limiting spread, but by 2017, numbers exploded.

  "We just see [support posts] post after post slackered with lanternfly egg masses. Like, a lot."
  (Julie Urban, 09:24)

• Public Outcry: As the bugs took over, frustration grew—some accused officials of not doing enough.

  "Why didn’t you just nuke them at the beginning? Everything you did was wrong."
  (Julie Urban, 10:48)

3. Does "Stomping" Actually Do Anything? (11:47–13:51)

• Campaign's Real Purpose: Despite kill orders and civic campaigns, scientists admit that individual stomping does little to suppress populations. The main concern is to prevent lanternflies hitchhiking to new areas.

  "You stomp it so it doesn’t try to hitch a ride with you in your car."
  (Julie Urban, 13:06)

• Media & Public Perception: Narratives spiraled—kids chased bugs with skateboards; adults staged “squish-a-thons.” Yet some people felt uncomfortable with the glee behind all the killing.

4. Scientific Uncertainty & Shifting Stakes (15:03–16:10)

• Real Impacts: Lanternflies mainly threaten grape crops—not the tree apocalypse some predicted. But the host and experts warn that the risk could increase in other states or as climate changes.

  "If heat makes them develop, they're gonna develop earlier as they move south."
  (Julie Urban, 16:10)

5. The Deeper Ethical Dilemma (20:22–29:44)

• Ethics Expert: Chelsea Batavia, a conservation ethicist, is brought in to help the host parse their uneasy feelings. She reviews three major frameworks:

  • Consequentialism: What action creates the best outcomes? Killing reduces pest spread but also kills conscious beings; future harms are uncertain and hard to measure.
  • Deontology: Focuses on duty and intention—are we motivated by care for community, not cruelty?
  • Virtue Ethics: Guided by character and virtues like compassion, temperance, and civic-mindedness. There's no single right answer.

  "I think it is grossly inappropriate for anybody to be killing gleefully."
  (Chelsea Batavia, 22:12)

  "Ethics is not a matter of righteous... there's this gray zone, and that's how I found this language around 'moral residue.'"
  (Chelsea Batavia, 27:55)

• Moral Residue: Batavia introduces "moral residue"—the lingering discomfort even after making what seems like the right ethical choice.

  "It's an emotional response...that is recognized as an emotional signal is given language."
  (Chelsea Batavia, 28:22)

6. Making a Personal Decision (29:44–31:33)

• Chelsea's Choice: Ultimately, Batavia doubts she could personally kill lanternflies if they arrived in her state, her “reverence for life” outweighing utilitarian concerns.

  "I wouldn't do that...because I would recognize that I do have an obligation...but my reverence for life is probably a little bit too strong."
  (Chelsea Batavia, 30:10)

• Host’s Resolution: The host decides to continue killing lanternflies if they cross their path, but with full awareness and acceptance of the mixed feelings and limited impact. However, they commit not to be gleeful and to foster honest conversations about these tough choices.

  "I'm going to stomp them...but 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 trade off that we're being asked to make, right? Like killing bugs does not feel good."
  (Narrator, 32:16)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• The thrill and weirdness of communal bug-killing:
  "Like, people really, really got on board with just the mass murder of bugs...it feels like you're almost scoring a point in a game."
  (Narrator, 02:42)
• On lanternfly biology:
  "Plant hoppers...they’re extremely...body shape diverse...one of them, its common name is the peanut headed bug because it looks like it has a peanut on its head."
  (Julie Urban, 05:30)
• On ethics and ambiguity:
  "When Chelsea was doing her PhD, she felt like she really needed some language...that there's this gray zone, and that's how I found this language around moral residue."
  (Narrator, 27:55)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:37 – Host introduces the spectacle and culture of lanternfly killing in New York.
• 04:53 – Scientist Julie Urban tells the story of lanternflies’ US arrival.
• 09:08 – Realization of the infestation’s scale and the failure of early containment.
• 11:47 – Public guidance and the real (minimal) effect of mass stomping.
• 15:03 – The evolving scientific consensus: threat mainly to grapes.
• 20:22 – Introduction of Chelsea Batavia and the ethical frameworks.
• 22:53 – Consequentialism applied to stomping lanternflies.
• 25:20 – Deontology and community action.
• 25:59 – Virtue ethics and wrestling with trade-offs.
• 27:46 – "Moral residue": the lingering discomfort of imperfect choices.
• 29:44 – Batavia’s personal decision; acceptance of moral complexity.
• 31:33 – Host’s resolution: stomp, but without glee, and with honest dialogue.

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Conclusion

This episode of Unexplainable offers a nuanced, empathetic exploration of how science, public policy, and personal morality collide during an invasive species crisis. It acknowledges that sometimes, there are no neat answers—only responsible choices, emotional complexity, and the duty to face our discomfort honestly. The real takeaway: blindly following moral absolutes (either for or against stomping) misses the messiness of the real world. What matters is recognizing the weight and ambiguity of these choices, and approaching them—and each other—with candor and care.

Transcript

[Podcast Host]

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[Narrator / Main Speaker]

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[Chelsea Batavia]

The spotted lanternfly may be pretty small,

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

but it has the potential to cause big problems. The invasive species showing up around the tri state area this summer, these gray and black dotted bugs that are said to be a destructive pest that feeds on more than 70 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 2020, 2021. And so I knew what I was supposed to do in 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 like on the tree, which is hard to do. So it got away from me and I was 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 lanternfly. And this is not the first time I've had that kind of interaction. Like this is definitely thin the vibe.

[Chelsea Batavia]

Welcome to New York guys. Where citizens have turned merciless mercenaries to protect nature.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

Your friend Lancer Pug and ask him about it. Ask him what happens when you with New Jersey, huh?

[Chelsea Batavia]

No.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

Are you in 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. Cause, like, 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, huh, it was a lanternfly. But now lanternfly 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 gonna 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? One of the first people to learn that the lanternfly had arrived in the United States was a scientist named Julie Urban. An old acquaintance of hers unexpectedly left her a message.

[Julie Urban]

You know, Julie, this is Leo. Call me back. I'm like, they found it. They got it. It's here. I knew instantly why elsewhere.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

You just found that?

[Julie Urban]

I haven't talked to the guy in, like, years. Right?

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

You were like, it's the lanternfly. It's gotta be.

[Julie Urban]

Totally.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

Wow. Oh, my gosh. How'd you feel?

[Julie Urban]

Freaked out. Totally freaked out.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

The lanternfly had been on Julie's radar because she studies the group of insects that it belongs to, the plant hoppers. 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.

[Julie Urban]

Cicadas are great and everything, but if you've seen one, seen them all, okay. They kind of have the same, like, body shape and form. But plant hoppers, they're extremely. We call it morphologically, but body shape 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?

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

Okay, good.

[Julie Urban]

Like, who has that? Right? And some of them shoot wax out their rear ends. And I'm like, wow. Like, they shoot wax out their butts. I'm in.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

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 lanternflies, because around 2004, 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, to 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 phloem, which carries sugars that are created by photosynthesis.

[Julie Urban]

That sugar is what fuels its growth. It allows it to reproduce, that kind of thing. And so it's.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

But it's also famously delicious.

[Julie Urban]

I mean. Exactly right? And so the insects are stealing that.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

So Julie calls Leo back, and she learns that the lanternfly has indeed been detected in the United States, specifically in Pennsylvania. And a little while later, in the spring of 2015, she heads up there with a team of people who are trying to figure out what to do.

[Julie Urban]

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.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

What did it look like? Like greenery or green?

[Julie Urban]

Well, piles of stone. Like, really from around the world.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

The lanternflies 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, meaning that actually, the lanternflies had probably arrived more than a year earlier. And they also noticed that lanternflies seemed to be feeding especially on the tree of Heaven, which, despite the nice sounding name, is actually itself an invasive species from Asia. Now, non native species arriving in new places, that is not always a problem. Like, honeybees 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 lanternflies, they can kill a lot of trees. So Pennsylvania took some steps to manage the lanternflies. 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. But then comes 2017. 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.

[Julie Urban]

And so we go out, and it was raining cats and dogs. You know, we're in this grower in the back of this grower's pickup truck, and we're driving through this vineyard, and. And the support posts at the end of the rows, we just see them post after post slackered with lanternfly egg masses. Like, a lot.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

Wow.

[Julie Urban]

And we're all, oh, my gosh, like, you know, and so it. The movie Jaws, you know, when Brody first sees a shark. I think we're gonna need a bigger boat.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

Julie described 2017 as one stomach drop after another. She'd been working with a grad student on all this. And one day, the student calls her.

[Julie Urban]

She said, julie, I'm out here. I'm going to the Walmart. They're flying into Walmart. And I'm like, what the.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

You know, what are you guys doing here?

[Julie Urban]

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 apples before.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

The 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 lanternflies with a blowtorch, trying to surprise attack him here and just go at him. Some people who are hearing about the rise of lanternflies start getting angry.

[Julie Urban]

They say, why didn't you just nuke them at the beginning? Everything you did was wrong.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

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 lanternflies. Like, they could have just torched the infected area with straight, 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 2018 and 2019, despite the quarantines and pesticides, the lanternflies are really on the move. They spread to the city of Philadelphia, about 60 miles away from where they were first detected. And in the summer of 2020, amid everything else going on, they are exploding.

[Chelsea Batavia]

Invasion of the Spotted Lantern flies in University City. And it looks like ground zero is this chipotle at 34th and Lancaster.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

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 2020, the Pennsylvania Department of agriculture posted on facebook about the lanternflies saying that you should, quote, squish their guts out anytime you see them, unquote, a kill order. And people get very into this stomping, squishing. There are reports of kids in Philly going after them with skateboards. And it did seem to me that the point of the various lanternfly campaigns was to inspire us all to action. But I did wonder, like, why. One thing I've been curious about is, like, is the stompit part of the campaign actually to help bring down populations?

[Julie Urban]

Nope.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

So what is it for then?

[Julie Urban]

It's again, if you don't kill it, you're gonna carry it.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

Now, we 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 lanternfly population levels. Other mitigation measures are way more effective. But Julie and the Pennsylvania department of agriculture are really focused on whether the lanternfly 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 1-884-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 that girl scouts are showing the love to parks today is through a little bit of a lanternfly squish a thon. But there were also signs that people were conflicted about the kill orders. One friend told me that in the summer of 2021, she saw someone running after a lanternfly yelling out, the New York times told me to kill you. I personally know a couple of people who gave up stomping. And the question even made it On Jimmy Fallon, where comedian Kate McKinnon was making an appearance.

[Chelsea Batavia]

And I saw this baby on the

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

street, and I was like, oh, my God, this moth.

[Julie Urban]

What?

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

It's like sepia toned wing fish nets.

[Chelsea Batavia]

Basically.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

Basically, it's gorgeous. Peak 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.

[Chelsea Batavia]

No, we're supposed to. We're supposed to. And I will. I will kill the next lanternfly.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

But take a photo of it.

[Podcast Host]

You won't.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

Oh, my God, you're waking your. No, we're supposed to.

[Julie Urban]

I will.

[Chelsea Batavia]

I will kill the next one.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

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, those did not pan out. As of now, in the US the bugs are really mostly a problem for grapes and therefore for grape growers. Though Julie told me in her mind, there is still urgency around making sure that the lanternflies don't expand to new places.

[Julie Urban]

So if heat makes them develop, they're gonna develop earlier as they move south.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

That could mean more time to feed on Georgia peaches or maybe on the many grapes in my home state of California. So 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. These past couple of summers, I have shared Kate McKinnon's ambivalence about stomping lanternflies, and I have felt especially ambivalent about the kill orders and how happy we all seem to be to comply. But 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 going to do here. Make a moral choice that I can live by. Do you think it's morally right for me to kill lanternflies?

[Julie Urban]

Yes. Because I think if. If anything can only help.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

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 gotta do it.

[Julie Urban]

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.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

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 Shopify. Every worthwhile journey starts with a handful of what ifs. But one day you'll be able to look back and realize that all those what ifs were small steps towards turning your dream into a thriving business. Shopify can help you get there. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US join them and turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com Vox Business go to shopify.com Vox Business that's shopify.com VoxBusiness. AI is moving fast across the enterprise, but without visibility, it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. ServiceNow turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place. What it's doing, what it's done, and what it's about to do.

[Chelsea Batavia]

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[Narrator / Main Speaker]

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[Chelsea Batavia]

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[Chelsea Batavia]

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[Narrator / Main Speaker]

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[Chelsea Batavia]

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[Narrator / Main Speaker]

I read several different papers and articles as I was trying to think through my decision about whether or not to kill lanternflies 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 lanternflies have not made it there yet? But I told her the whole story.

[Chelsea Batavia]

Oh, boy, what a mess.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

Chelsea now works in government. She is representing her own views here, not the state of Washington. But 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.

[Chelsea Batavia]

You know, it's challenging. Should we be killing barred owls to save spotted owls?

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

This is something that happened in the Pacific northwest starting in 2013, and the images of the bodies of invasive barred owls that had been killed in the name of conservation, they made people uncomfortable. And Chelsea gets that.

[Chelsea Batavia]

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?

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

And so killing is bad? Like, that's the first thing you learn.

[Chelsea Batavia]

Exactly. It's like, thou shall not kill. But then when you dig into, like, the details, because that's. 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, kill. That just doesn't. There's too much nuance.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

So Chelsea started thinking deeply about the ethics of this kind of situation, and she agreed to help me think through my version of that. The lanternflies.

[Chelsea Batavia]

I guess a first response is that I think it is grossly inappropriate for anybody to be killing gleefully.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

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, we 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.

[Chelsea Batavia]

Consequentialism says the right action, very, very coarsely put. The right action is the one that produces the best outcomes. So the focus is on what happens.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

In the case of lanternflies. There is one big, obvious outcome.

[Chelsea Batavia]

We're killing life. We're killing insects, we're killing bugs. These are little lives, right?

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

Yeah. Many smart people do think that insects are conscious and feel painful. So that is in the don'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 hadn'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 lanternflies fishing future children from also being killed.

[Chelsea Batavia]

But then it's like, 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 I, like. I'm very rarely gonna, like, put a flag and be like, yes, this is the way we should be thinking about things.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

And you're pointing out there's just a lot of uncertainty about outcomes.

[Chelsea Batavia]

There's a lot of uncertainty, and there's a lot of types of outcomes that can't be quantified. And even if they could, they would not be comparable. So, you know, I think that. That. That's not helpful for you making your decision to try to make a calculation based on the best outcomes.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

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, like, 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. This might even be a way for me to avoid the decision because it's hard. Though Chelsea did say it is, of course, very important that scientists keep learning more about the outcomes. Like, if it turns out that the lanternflies making it to California is definitely gonna 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 deontology, which means the science of moral duty. It focuses on the intention behind my action. Why am I doing it?

[Chelsea Batavia]

When you talk about feeling like you're, you know, 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 lanternflies. Your motivation is to be a good neighbor, to make that connection with your neighbor. So, you know, to me, that's. That's. That's not irrelevant. That is something to pay attention to.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

All right. So we put those issues into the mix, and then 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.

[Chelsea Batavia]

So Aristotle talked about virtues being things like, you 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.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

There's definitely something to be said for rules. But this flexible framework seems useful to me too, because there actually are multiple, reasonable ways to think about this. Like, maybe a virtuous person would take on the task of killing bugs on behalf of their community, or 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 ironclad decision here that I can never violate because 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 lanternflies or that I never do. Maybe I'd been looking for something overly simple.

[Chelsea Batavia]

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 a way to say that it's not that simple.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

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.

[Chelsea Batavia]

So I started snooping through some really gnarly moral philosophy stuff, looking for, like,

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

a word to describe that feeling. Looking for.

[Chelsea Batavia]

If there's any scholarship that acknowledges that, like, this is a thing that, you know, ethics is not a matter of righteous, like, yeah, I got that, like, gold star for me, that there's. There's this gray zone, and that's how I found this language around moral residue.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

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.

[Chelsea Batavia]

It's an emotional response, actually, which is super interesting, because moral philosophy puts a lot, you know, 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

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

emotions into the room. That was actually really clarifying to me because I'd kind of been feeling like if I still felt bad about my decision, maybe 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.

[Chelsea Batavia]

One thing moral residue is not meant to do is let anybody off the hook. You're gonna have to kind of sit in your own moral responsibility and decide what you're gonna do. There is no no action option. You either kill them or you don't. And I think you're gonna probably gonna have to sit with some sort of discomfort either way. But I think that wading into the complexity is the right way to do. 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.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

By the end of our conversation, I had enough of a sense of Chelsea to know that she was not going to tell me what to do here. But I did ask her, what would you do if they do get to Washington?

[Chelsea Batavia]

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. I wouldn't do that.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

Well, yeah, like, you're feeling like I wouldn't stop them.

[Chelsea Batavia]

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. I think my reverence for life is probably a little bit too strong of a signal for me at this point.

[Narrator / Main Speaker]

All right, I'm back on this block near my house with this tree that had a lanternfly scuttling up it last summer that I tried to kill. And I've made my decision. When the lanternflies come out this summer, I am going to stomp 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 to be taking insect lives and that my individual action 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, get em, 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 trade off that we're being asked to make right? Like killing bugs does not feel good because 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 Lissa Soet. Christian Ayala did the mixing and sound design. Meredith Hodnot runs the show. Melissa Hirsch checks the facts. Noam Hassenfeld, Valerie Shenkman and Joanna Solotaroff are wondering what it is really like to be a bird. And Bird Pinkerton immediately pulled out the broken guitar when Flapton hissed, shh, not here. They have ears everywhere. And he led down a narrow passageway away from the outside passageway deeper into the station. Thanks as always to Brian Resnik for co creating the show along with Bird and Noam. If you have thoughts about the show, please send us an email. We love reading them. We are@ unexplainableox.com you can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. That really helps us out. And if you are into supporting the show and all of VOX in general, join our membership program. You can go to vox.commembers to sign up. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and we'll see you next time.

[Podcast Host]

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