What if plants were animals like any other?
booksandideas.net
booksandideas.net
But in the end, it's a basic biological fact, unless a form of life can photosynthesize, it likely consumes some form of matter that was likely from something living. Extremophiles that eat sulphur and minerals and such aside, the majority of non-photosynthesizing life consumes organic matter. Said matter was at one time from something that was alive.
In the end debates about whether plants or animals suffer the same or more seem sort of moot. Life involves suffering of some kind for every living thing on this planet. It's another one of those inescapable facts.
I agree we should all try and minimize the amount of suffering we directly cause, but every day something somewhere suffers because each of us exist. Trying to pretend we can erase any and all suffering we may cause ever is a fruitless effort.
I wouldn't be so sure. Eduard Hartmann came up with a solution in the 19th century.
https://theconversation.com/solve-suffering-by-blowing-up-th...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead#Role_in_the_philos...
It's frustrating that your article brushes off the philosophy as "unimaginably wrong" so easily with some hand wave of techno-utopian "genetic engineering". Benatar's writing takes pains to address why the situation cannot fundamentally be solved, especially via naive scientism.
Is that any better? That sort of thing makes me think first of the horrifying disorder where people are unable to feel pain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pa...
And Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands" which is sort of a story of another kind of paperclip maximization.
So when plants consciously grow edible parts to themselves in exchange for seed dispersal, are they suffering? Do they suffer when they drop leaves every autumn?
Depends on the plant and the kind of life cycle they have, in some cases, yes they slowly die after.
Even if they don't, think of human pregnancy and childbirth. Human mothers suffer a fair amount even during pregnancy as their nutrients are shared between their young and they grow inside them.
When plants produce fruits and seeds, they stop vegetative growth for the duration of this, the send any available nutrients to the seeds and fruit, thereby depriving the rest of the plant of needed nutrients. Post fruit production, it typically takes at least a season before vegetative growth begins.
>Do they suffer when they drop leaves every autumn?
Yes, they go dormant and can't feed themselves or grow. Sometimes overwintering trees or plants will die from the stress.
When I say suffering, I mostly mean, show visible signs of either stress or delayed growth, or other things plants typically 'suffer' from when mistreated or grown in poor conditions.
Whether it's the same as an animal suffering, I don't know and I doubt anyone could know or if it even matters. Animals and plants are fundamentally different, the way they display their 'suffering' is not really comparable. What we see as suffering in animals comes from our own experiences with suffering. We have no possible way to empathize or experience plant suffering so we have no actual way to ever truly understand how they may or may not 'feel' the same way we ever will with animals.
However, I do see the unpacking/evaluation of assumptions inherent in the debate as valuable … "why is ending a life that can experience suffering the way humans do more ethical than a life that doesn't?" and "what does it say about us that we want to prevent animals from suffering?" and so on …
I mean, an entire religion was formed around insights around suffering, so clearly people have been thinking about this for a long time!
It's not comparable, they're two entirely different forms of life, suffice to say, they both suffer, discussions around how people can directly if not reduce suffering mitigate it.
Telling people to only eat vegetables because suffering animals or it's cool eat meat because suffering plants is an utterly pointless topic of debate.
A more useful topic for debate if we're going to talk about such things would be maybe something like mitigating the suffering on both plants and animals through industrialized agriculture by returning to small scale production of both. Or something like that anyway.
The article as framed just didn't really talk in any useful way about the issue.
Which, if you are serious about ending suffering, a plant or animal grown in a small scale way where it can be looked after properly is going to suffer significantly less, even if it inevitably will die to feed somebody.
Personally, I'm a vegetarian because I find it unethical to eat animals for many reasons. Their individual suffering, the environment, my personal health. Of course even within that you have to be careful, because going vegetarian but only eating food flown in from around the world isn't too great either.
I think one thing that seems relevant to humans, is we seem to be bothered only once we can relate to the other being in a more explicit way. This is true even between our peers. Maybe as we understand more and more of other creatures so will our empathy.
Particularly good if you're interested in diving in more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c33XPyljUiw
Essentially, bread rises because of the the death throes of tiny, microscopic unicellular fungi.
But when the drought get hot the tiny bubbles of CO2 expand and when it's too hot and the drought get cooked and the structure around the bubbles is fixed like in a sponge.
My impression was that fermentation outside the oven causes most of the rising, with a bit of "oven spring" from the vaporization of water in the dough.
The yeast obviously die in the oven, but I don't think the death per se is critical for the leavening.
(And of course, the spring only "sticks" if the dough is both elastic enough to permit that expansion -for example because it has a gluten network- and developed enough that, in that expanded state, the dough can set well enough to support its own shape, rather than deflating once we remove the heat, and the high pressure gasses cool down and contract, pull the now baked bread in on itself)
construction kills animals, eating animals kills animals, using computers promotes industry which kills animals. what activity can a human participate in that doesn't kill animals?
of course, one can say fewer animals could be killed by doing [other things], but that's besides the point. I'm not sure you can win, nature will always find an equilibrium that will result in the same amount of death - you save the goats and they'll ruin the land and eventually all die. you kill the predators and overpopulation of the prey will run rampant resulting in eventual famine, etc.
and of course, if you're lucky things are in a stable state until something evolves and figures out efficient ways to wipe everything out - I suppose that's where we come in.
Not sure why I'm sharing this, but I saw a hawk kill a squirrel yesterday. It was standing on top of the squirrel (still alive) on my neighbor's lawn.
Three other squirrels were screeching and they made futile charges at the hawk to try to free the other squirrel.
The amount of distress / suffering / chaos was far more disturbing than I would have expected to see on a suburban lawn. I even considered intervening and trying to scare the hawk away.
But the hawk's gotta eat, too.
Plus, it probably would've kicked my ass.
*edits for better phrasing.
As to why it matters in a philosophical sense, I'd say it doesn't. Everything's just matter and energy. But it matters to some people so they try to reduce their impact, just like violence matters to most people so most people try to avoid injuring or maiming people, even if it doesn't matter in the end.
Things that photosynthesize, before some resource limit is reached.
I mean sure it's perfectly natural, sure, whatever, it's also perfectly natural if the rest of us decide to ostracize and/or throw you in jail for it.
Journey to the Microcosmos - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBbnbBWJtwsf0jLGUwX5Q3g
For example - a Paramecium hunter - https://youtu.be/yXiJ__5-tI8
The only reason I may care about animal suffering is because the other human can get angry can cause me trouble.
Simply personal preference.
>And that means you're okay with things like torture of animals and bestiality?
Yes
It might be wise to moderate that position by also objecting to people taking pleasure in seeing/causing the suffering of animals. You may not care about the experience of those animals, but you should still care what effect it has on the human who indulges that side of themselves.
Similarly you should also care that humans are not excessively exposed to scenes of "necessary" animal suffering, whether that be abattoir workers or veterinarians. Having psychological counselling mandated and freely available for these professions would be an ethical improvement for the world even if it didn't reduce the amount of animal suffering at all.
I wouldn't object to people taking pleasure in seeing/causing the suffering of animals, as long as its only limited to animals (does not harm other human).
Technically the truth, because insects and fish are mostly eaten alive. But mammal predators generally kill their prey before they start eating it.
But nature documentaries aren't really the best way to learn about it. They're designed to entertain rather than inform. They show an exceedingly skewed view of nature.
They're also not a great source of morality. You're not a bear. In particular, you don't live among bears. You have a sense of conscience that's different from a bear's, as a consequence (both nature and nurture) of living a very different life from a bear.
Probably not, but that begs the question: is killing animals wrong (given that it would continue to occur at roughly the same rate even if there were no humans in the world)?
One way to approach questions of moral obligation is to consider the actions of the median person. As an example, we could simplistically say that someone who emits more than the median amount of CO2 is responsible for anthropogenic climate change, whereas someone who emits less is not responsible for it.
In the case of animals and humans eating each other, though, the set of agents being considered might have to be the set of all animals on Earth. Under that analysis, since there are apparently 21 quadrillion spiders alive on the Earth today[1], the vast majority of which are exclusively carnivorous, any human who obtains some of their calorie intake from plants is less carnivorous than the median animal.
[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2215174
[1] https://www.allthingsnature.org/how-many-spiders-are-there-i...
Would it? Maybe in absolute terms when you include insects, but it's less clear if you talk about specific taxa. >50e9 chickens per year are slaughtered (and most don't have great lives before that), which is comparable to low-end estimates of the total number of wild birds on the planet (https://www.dw.com/en/50-billion-birds-live-on-earth-new-stu...). It seems likely that humans kill more chickens pa than non-humans kill all other birds combined.
So, seven proteins make seven ... sufferings? Proteins are a measure of suffering?
There's a quantification of suffering according to which the suffering of one animal is equal to the suffering of 7-10 plants, correct?
"Even if plant suffering were of the same intensity as animal suffering, omnivores would produce seven to ten times more suffering than plant lovers alone."
Note the word "suffering". The quote is comparins suffering, not killing.
> The 7-10x number is relative to the number of plants you'd have killed if you instead ate plants directly.
The quote says:
"Worse, the production of one animal protein requires 7 to 10 plant proteins."
So the quote is counting proteins, not animals or plants.
In order to get 1 calorie of meat, you need to use 7-10 calories of plants. So by necessity, if you eat 1 calorie of meat, you are producing (at least) 7-10x the suffering relative to eating 1 calorie of plants, since 7-10x as much plant mass (and hence plants) needed to suffer to create the meat.
I'm going to stop responding at this point because I'm not sure how else I can explain this.
But where does this counting of calories come from? The article is talking about proteins. It says "the production of one animal protein requires 7 to 10 plant proteins" (my underlining).
> So by necessity, if you eat 1 calorie of meat, you are producing (at least) 7-10x the suffering relative to eating 1 calorie of plants, since 7-10x as much plant mass (and hence plants) needed to suffer to create the meat.
So, when you say "7-10x as much plant mass (hence plants)", you mean that 1 unit of plant mass = 1 plant, or did I wilfully misunderstand you again?
> I'm going to stop responding at this point because I'm not sure how else I can explain this.
You can explain it if you get the units right. Are we talking of proteins, calories, or units of suffering? What are we counting exactly? Maybe try to explain that?
The article is a little vague on why killing plants is bad. Whether it's because you believe that destruction is intrinsically bad, because they have souls, because they feel suffering, or because there's some potential for growth that's aborted, the various reasons are harder for me at least to understand and to build a coherent argument around.
It's philosophically very obvious why killing people is bad, this is so self-evident it's almost nonsense to write it down and inadvertently equivocates it with killing plants: it's trivial to imagine oneself in the position of the victim, or to enumerate the harms being perpetrated, the goals and values being denied, and the rights being violated in the transaction, and conclude that it's wrong. No reasonable person can reach a different conclusion.
It's a little more difficult to extend this empathy towards an especially intelligent animal being killed; while humans have vastly richer communication and more advanced tool use, some animals can have mental and emotional processes not that much different than us. In that case, measuring suffering is more difficult and sometimes leads to surprising conclusions when you do the math. (I said a couple days ago [1] that a reasonable metric for suffering is the number of cortical neurons possessed by the victim, see also [2]). People can disagree about the scale of the suffering or what behaviors are appropriate in light of this problem, but it's easy enough to consider.
Of course, plants, lacking a brain or any neurons at all, are undefined by this criteria. And it's really difficult for me to anthropomorphize a carrot.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27492230 [2] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moral-costs-of-chicken...
What can fungi teach us?- - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbcIQpmiZ3Y
When researchers opened their eyes and looked, they could find concrete proof that plants often communicated and nurtured their young. They shared and built communities. They worked together to fight enemies. Sure, they don't use the same tactics as animals, but if you look at their progress in the abstract, it's easy to see how they're not sedentary or stupid.
> but if you look at their progress in the abstract
Good thing we don't eat abstract plants then.
Do trees pass sugars on to their offspring? Yes. Is that projection? It was validated with scientific methods that tracked deuterated hydrogen. But you can see it as some kind of wacko imagination if you want to be a science denier.
And if you go back, you'll see I didn't say that plants should be treated like humans. Maybe you're the one with an imagination?
Breeding sterile fruit for convenience might be considered bad form in the plant world.