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ForHackernews

Counterpoint: I care about reducing animal suffering.

I do not care about vague, unspecified concerns regarding what is "natural" or "processed".

Bring on the processed pea-mush that doesn't suffer as it dies.

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How do you know plants don't suffer as they die? That seems like a pretty bold assertion.

Sure they don't really have muscles, so they don't thrash around like animals, and they don't make noise or cry out when they are killed.

On the other hand, when they are wounded they do make chemical compounds to resist predation and to signal to nearby plants that predators are present (e.g. salicylate). This seems vaguely parallel.

Is the moral worth of plant suffering lower because it isn't close enough in form to human suffering?

If we were to encounter a truly alien species, how would you know whether or not it experienced suffering?

If you really care about the suffering of plants, which I strongly doubt, you should still eat them because the alternative is feeding ten times as many of them to an animal and then also eating the animal.

I'll admit to being wildly inconsistent on this, since I do care about what I perceive as the suffering of some of my favorite individual plants and animals, but not enough about the suffering of plants or animals in general to stop eating them or building things out of wood and leather, or what have you.

I could imagine other alternatives. I knew a fruitarian once (before Notting Hill came out). I suppose you could try and engineer auxotrophy into human cells. I went to a conference once where some people earnestly (but naively) proposed it.

If this were an argument made in good faith, you would have done the absolutely mediocre amount of required thinking about what it is animals eat. Given that you evidently did not, this reads as empty contrarian posturing. Not very useful for anyone, except maybe for your pleasure.

A question isn't an argument. I'm genuinely curious about how people have decided what suffers and what does not.

The tone and content of your post are both unhelpful and needlessly cynical.

When someone is curious about something it is most appropriate to just respond to what they asked instead of second-guessing their motives.

> On the other hand, when they are wounded they do make chemical compounds to resist predation and to signal to nearby plants that predators are present (e.g. salicylate). This seems vaguely parallel.

When a fighter jet is hit by a bullet, it releases chemical compounds to stop its fuel from exploding, and signals nearby forces that threats are present.

The reaction to damage alone does not suggest something is capable of suffering. There are other considerations, and there's little suggesting plants are capable of experiencing suffering (or experiencing anything at all).

>there's little suggesting plants are capable of experiencing suffering (or experiencing anything at all).

So walk me through this, I'm curious how you know whether or not plants have experiences? How would you know whether any arbitrary life form (or object, since you brought up fighter planes) has experiences? What method allows you to make this determination?

I can't be 100% certain because we don't understand consciousness yet, but I believe we can derive some logical conclusions.

Starting from the basics: life is just complex, carbon-based nanotechnology. There's nothing we know that suggests cells are anything more than complex machines. There's nothing suggesting that if you put a bunch of cells together, you get something more than a complex machine. From the other end, we're only sure that conscious experience happens in human brains, though through structural and behavioral similarity, we may assume some degree of conscious experience in a lot of animals. Going this route, around smaller insects you may start to wonder whether what you're looking for is more like a machine, or more like a feeling thing capable of experiencing emotions. Plants are biologically less complex than insects, and have no identifiable "locus of cognition".

I mean, you have to note that when guessing whether or not something can experience emotions, we're projecting our own mental states based on that thing's phenotype. Look how works of fictions - pictures, movies, even textual descriptions in books - can make you feel compassion towards a rock, or a car. A skilled writer could rephrase my fighter jet example in a way that would make you actually feel sorry for it. This means our intuition is not a good judge here. Past that, the best we have (AFAIK) is heuristics, like "has no brain/brain-level complexity = probably can't have experiences".

If plants suffer this is actually an argument FOR plant-based diets, since less plants/sentient beings suffer. Meat is a super in-efficient (land/water/energy consumption) way of turning plants, which are already food, into food.

Unless you consider that those grasses and rainwater used by the cow would’ve been completely ignored if the cow wasn’t there. And no, humans wouldn’t be able to get energy from those grasses without the cow.

I think you are underestimating the scale of our cattle. The majority of deforestation is due to cattle [1]. The world is basically dominated by us and our cattle [2] leading to massive losses in biodiversity [3].

If everyone in the world would eat the recommended USDA diet (mostly backed by industry and totally not healthy for you) we'd need another Canada to sustain us all [4]. By the way, most of the grasslands are man-made and we should try and reforest those areas to combat losses in biodiversity and climate collapse. Furthermore about a third of all fresh drinking water (not rainwater) is used for cattle [5].

[1]: https://rainforests.mongabay.com/0812.htm / https://scholar.google.nl/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=defor...

[2]: http://peakoilbarrel.com/carrying-capacity-overshoot-and-spe...

[3]: https://www.ipbes.net/news/Media-Release-Global-Assessment

[4]: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[5]: http://www.takepart.com/article/2016/02/18/4-billion-people-...

I think you should look into the accounting of those sources. So much of what you posted is totally irrelevant to cattle ranching, particularly in the United States. You’re just throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, “look, muh data”

Is human suffering part of what you consider to be animal suffering? If so, do you not care to know how nutritious (or not) this pea-mush is in relation to whole foods (plant or animal)?

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