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Personally debates like these make my head hurt, but I am grateful for philosophers and others who mine these topics and proffer summaries. I do think they are important topics [for some people] to think about.

> Life involves suffering of some kind for every living thing on this planet. It's another one of those inescapable facts.

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?

the cells that makeup those structures suffer the consequences of being sacrificed but the genes of that being have "decided" that the cost is worthwhile.

>So when plants consciously grow edible parts to themselves in exchange for seed dispersal,

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.

Fair. In the end, we'll find "well, _everything_ is suffering!" and be forced to just embrace it or pretend we never asked.

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 …

Absolutely, I still think it's important to deeply meditate on suffering and to ask ethical questions like the ones you've pointed out. The alternative is to be sort of nihilistic, shrugging the creation of suffering off as inevitable and to keep on causing unnecessary harm.

I mean, an entire religion was formed around insights around suffering, so clearly people have been thinking about this for a long time!

I think you and the parent poster missed the intention behind what I was saying. Not that we should have a nihilistic approach, but that the baseline for these conversations should be to assume suffering is a universal part of life and we should be focussing on how to minimize the amount of direct suffering each of us cause in our day to day life, rather than worrying about which suffers more, plants or animals.

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.

I definitely agree that we should focus on how to minimize the amount of direct suffering each of us causes. And yeah, of course, there are more productive ways to focus on these questions rather than "plants suffer too".

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.

> 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...

This is a common feature of critiques of Schopenhaur; Philipp Mainländer advanced the position that God created the universe to end its atemporal suffering, exploding and binding itself temporally in order that its suffering should eventually cease.

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.

That sort of implies trying to blow up the universe wouldn't be a fruitless effort in and of itself. You'd have better luck just waiting for the heat death of the universe at that point I think.

It is the struggle, itself, that is important!

The article suggests that eliminating suffering rather than sufferers is the common sense way to go.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands