Opinion | You should kill that spotted lanternfly. Or don't.

Behold the lanternfly. Two tan wings, two red, both covered in small black spots. Very slightly fuzzy. Maybe you think it’s gross, as all insects are. Maybe you think it’s a crawly kind of cute. Look into its bug eyes — watch it prepare to lay a batch of its gray eggs.

Now, smush it.

The spotted lanternfly is a pest originally from China now happily residing in 12 states, mostly along the Eastern Seaboard. It is invasive, and it is voracious, gobbling up trees from oak to apple to nectarine. Do you like wine? The spotted lanternfly loves the grapes used to make it. Enjoy snacking on almonds? So, apparently, does the bug disrupting orchard and logging industries nationwide.

This public enemy has become the subject of so-called smash-on-sight campaigns in several jurisdictions. You’re even supposed to file an official report on any sightings outside quarantine areas. “JOIN THE BATTLE. BEAT THE BUG,” booms the U.S. Agriculture Department website.

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The directive to squish without question is a departure from the norm — because while we may not think twice before slapping a sipping mosquito, we do sometimes hesitate to wipe out pests that aren’t actively pestering us. Even Shakespeare wrestled with the moral implications of unprovoked insecticide: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,” says the newly blinded Earl of Gloucester in “King Lear.” “They kill us for their sport.” The lanternfly is turning us into philosophers in the same tradition — and easily, given how inclined we are these days to treat every small decision as a weighty judgment.

With bugs, we’ve developed a sort of social code around which to kill and which to save. You can absolutely neutralize a threatening yellowjacket or the tribe of cockroaches nibbling at your baking supplies. With spiders, though, better to slip a sheet of paper underneath, place a plastic cup on top and release it outside — where, by the way, it will help everyone else by doing some fly removal of its own. And only a psychopath would raise a shoe to an inchworm, ladybug or other plausible picture-book protagonist.

The lanternfly is a strange subject, somewhere in the middle. The menace to the individual is minimal; plus small spots and fuzziness are as endearing attributes as you usually manage to find in insects. Yet the risk to society is real. Suddenly, to smush or not to smush is a question of collective action, and killing a fly is no longer a matter of sport but of civic duty.

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So how do we react? A few, nervous to strike out against an (immediately) harmless creature, with squeamishness: A New York Times article exhibits this reluctance at its extreme in interviews with vegans horrified at “state-endorsed bloodlust”; one man compared it to a hypothetical directive to purge all Pomeranians. Others are attacking with zeal: A girl in my workout class missed a session this week because she broke a finger in an attempted slaying.

It’s another ethical mini-conundrum in an age when boycotting Chick-fil-A or Disney, depending on your druthers, is supposedly a way to make the world better. Think of mask-wearing, clear enough early in the pandemic: Cover up! Squash the coronavirus! Over time, with vaccines in the mix and lethality on the decline, the calculations have become more complicated. But rather than see that as a sign of lower stakes, we’ve treated it as a reason to spend even more time dwelling on whether and when to put on an N95, as if the choice determines life or death — or who’s a good person and who’s a bad one.

We tell ourselves that everything we do matters so very much; oftentimes, though, it really matters only if everyone else does the thing, too, and sometimes it matters not at all. Now smushing a bug, whether a fly or a spider or a ladybug or lanternfly, isn’t merely about the bug but also about us, the smushers.

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Perhaps instead, the lanternfly should give us some perspective. The subject is, literally, tiny. There’s no need always to make a mountain out of a moth when we can instead just let go — channel the frustrations of the day into a smack that turns an environmental menace into a tan-and-red splat on the sidewalk or watch quietly as a defenseless animal flies safely away — and feel fine about it either way. To smush or not to smush might not really be so fraught a question.

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