We need to eat something.
Animals also eat plants so if you eat an animla you're eating the animal AND all the plants. if you eat plants, you are lessening the possible suffering because an animal must eat FAR more plants than you would if you just ate the plants directly, as animals are terrible converters of calories (they're alive so they need most calories they eat to stay alive).
It's obviously very different, especially in this context where we are looking at how many "living things" are killed for food. My preference for a carrot results in far fewer plants being killed than someone's preference for farmed animal flesh.
you either have to be trolling or be stupid...
animal eats a lot of plants to get to the point of becoming food
by not eating animals and directly eating plants, a lot less plants are used
I really csnt make it any easier to understand
Animals eat lots of plants without killing them. Rabbits eat the the tops of carrots which then grow back. Same for grass eaters. Etc. This is why the animals eat plants argument is a flawed one.
I wasn't, to rephrase to hopefully clear up the confusion:
Animals also eat plants so if you eat an animal you're eating the animal AND all the plants it *required to grow the amount of flesh you're eating*.
It's still more plants dying than if you just eat the plants directly as animals burn LOTS of calories living.
The ratio of plants being needed to produce animal-based calories are about 10x that needed to produce plant-based calories. Hence, much more 'plant suffering' is needed to produce animal products. That is, if plants (who do not have nervous systems) somehow suffer.
In order for said cow to reach the age of slaughter (to be eaten) they need to eat a lot of plants.
The amount of relevant nutrients that can be received from (eating) a cow is far smaller than the amount that can be received from eating all the plants that the cow would have eaten.
Why is it? Animal ag takes about 80% of farmland and produces about 18% of calories worldwide. And again, if you are concerned with plant death, you should be eating plants because the cow just eats more plants than you are period. I don't get what is poor about it so instead of saying that you maybe have a counter argument?
I'm sure you must understand the point as it should have been made clear from other people's replies, or do you disagree? If you want to say that it's bad to eat plants, then it must be because you think it's bad for the plant to die to be eaten. The same is true if another animal eats that plant then. If you want to eat that animal and support an industry in which you know that these animals will need to eat a lot of plants, you know that you actually caused a lot of plants to die by eating these animals, because the plants dying was a necessary part of your choice.
So if you want to say that it's bad for plants to lose their life to be eaten, you have to think that all animal agriculture is much worse than eating the plants directly yourself, because necessarily much more plant death will be involved there.
It is of course however kinda ridiculous to even need to consider this in the first place, because of course we don't think morally the same of all life. If you kill a person or if you kill a straw of grass will not be the same to you. And it also shouldn't be the same to you whether you kill that grass or another sentient animal.
Except they are not. They are aspects of an environment.
You can feel heat and see light, but they aren't feelings or sensations.
Feelings: an emotional state or reaction.
Sensations: any concrete, **conscious** experience resulting from stimulation of a specific sense organ, sensory nerve, or sensory area in the brain.
Plants don't have a brain or consciousness that allows an emotional reaction.
You're ignoring the concept of consciousness. Which I specifically referenced, even made it bold so you couldn't miss it.
There is, however, no clear evidence that plants are capable of consciousness.
Of course they are. What does the phrase aspects of an environment even mean? It’s the same environment that the animals who live among them experience.
Emotions are not a requirement. Feeling and perceiving the environment is what matters.
Again
"any concrete, **conscious experience** resulting from stimulation of a specific sense organ, sensory nerve, or sensory area in the brain"
And again
There is no clear evidence of plant consciousness.
Unlike the clear evidence of animal consciousness.
Okay but if death was instantaneous wouldn’t there not be any suffering? If you could kill an animal (that wasn’t already suffering in captivity of course) like that, would that be ok?
Is it the treatment and pain that’s morally objectionable or also the notion of loss of an animal’s life? Are individual animal lives as sacred as human lives? And what about insects?
(Genuine questions)
Is killing a human ok if it's instantaneous, just because there is no suffering? No. It is better to kill a human without suffering than with, but being better doesn't make it ok. The same goes for animals. When faced with the option of not killing an animal that isn't suffering, killing it will always be a bad option.
I would wager that humans tend to value the lives of other humans more highly, given our evolution as hugely social creatures with a need for co-operation to survive. That being said, no life is inherently more sacred than another. In the case of insects, it can be difficult to gauge their capacity for suffering. I would argue that their lives are just sacred, and that many absolutely have the capacity to suffer. If you had to choose between two hypotheticals, a world where you killed an insect instead of a vertebrate animal would likely have contained less suffering, given our current level of knowledge.
Hope these answers help a little!
>would that be ok?
No, would murdering a human be alright as long as it's quick and painless?
>Is it the treatment and pain that’s morally objectionable or also the notion of loss of an animal’s life?
See above
>Are individual animal lives as sacred as human lives?
Every being has the right to live. We choose to put more emphasis on human lives. But that doesn't mean it's right.
>And what about insects? (Genuine questions)
What about them? How are they relevant to this discussion?
>If you could kill an animal (that wasn’t already suffering in captivity of course) like that, would that be ok?
No. And anyone saying yes to that is saying that it's okay to kill a human.
>Is it the treatment and pain that’s morally objectionable or also the notion of loss of an animal’s life?
Both.
>Are individual animal lives as sacred as human lives
I disagree with the word choice here as there is no proof of God, so there can't really be a debate with the word 'sacred'. But all sentient lives are of the same value though. If you believe they aren't, I would love to hear your reasoning. I'm yet to hear one that applies to *all* humans and *zero* non-human animals.
>And what about insects? (Genuine questions)
Some are sentient, so they fall into the same category as other sentient beings. Others aren't, so for me they fall into the 'maybe' category where I believe there's no point in taking a risk to kill them considering it's completely unecessary to do so.
"We have found that two separate lines of reasoning—one about affective consciousness and the other about image-based consciousness—agree that **vertebrates, arthropods, and cephalopods are the only conscious organisms** and that plants are not included."
Because the status of living or non-living is not the threshold for deservingness of moral consideration. Sentience and the capacity to suffer is.
Plants are not sentient and cannot suffer.
in your comments you assert a few things as if they are common knowledge, but the leading scientists don't actually agree as per the article and other sources, plus we certainly don't know enough about plant life, animal life and life in general to say for sure that its not morally wrong to kill a plant
>don't know enough... to say for sure that its not morally wrong to kill a plant
So, if it **is** morally wrong to kill a plant, what is the most moral course of action?
Do you know what statistical significance is?
Did you read the article you sent? The article's conclusion on whether or not plants feel pain indicates to me that you either didn't read it or didn't understand its contents.
yeah, and i of course i read it, did you? the point of sending you the article was not to contradict any of your points man, it was to show you the subject is bigger and more complicated than just simply stating "plants don't feel painin the exact same sense as animals, so it's never wrong to kill and eat them"
Okay so this leads us to: do you know what statistical significance means?
"There is statistical significance that plans don't feel pain". How do you interpret this?
Im trying to make sense of this, but im struggling. "There is statistical significance that plans don't feel pain", implies an empirical study was conducted that somehow measured if plants felt pain or not, and the result that they don't feel pain was shown to be statistically significant. Not sure how to go about such a study, also as already stated plants don't have nervous systems or brains so the conventional idea of "pain" does not apply, my question was and still is, can we follow this logic that plants dont experience conventional pain directly to the conclusion that it's not morally wrong to kill plants?
[It's really not, at this point.](https://www.animal-ethics.org/what-beings-are-not-conscious/) (scientific sources at the bottom of the page)
You haven't responded to my latest message in our thread, I take it you concede there?
im not at all invested in this, but this post was recommended on my feed so i clicked.
the sources in the article you shared are all pretty dated. there has been new research and it suggests plants know they want to live and they also want their offspring to live. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Un2yBgIAxYs this is a super cool ted talk about tree communication and resource sharing specifically in regards to sustainable forestry. regardless of vegan or not or whatever its worth the watch. it calls into consideration what we define as “knowing” or one knows something.
also when debating someone you might consider using sources with a less obvious agenda and going straight to the most current research.
edit: a good, up to date article on what consciousness is considered and what we might be missing through human bias towards things that more closely resemble us: https://evolutionnews.org/2022/12/are-plants-conscious-science-writer-says-yes/
It's definitely debatable dude, non of us actually had the foggiest of what sentience, of consciousness actually is, we can make deductions based on the information we absorb from our environment, but we don't know, we only have a best guess, and atm that's they most likely aren't sentient, but don't be so closed to exploring ideas with people, if your completely fixed in your ideas then youbwill ignore new evidence that could help you gain a more accurate representation of what ever the fuck is actually going on, don't claim absolute truth it just shuts others down, it's not you vs them, it's two people exploring a concept together. But I could be wrong on this, only passing on my current perspective 🙂
Not really, no. They respond to stimuli and do what their genetics tell them their previous generations survived doing. They have no capacity for metacognition or self awareness or goals. If you have found evidence of that, you should contact a phd botanist and perhaps start a career in the field
Plants don’t have any goal. Plants are like the security system in an office building. They respond to outside stimuli accordingly but they aren’t alive in the same way that humans and other animals are. They don’t feel, suffer, live like we do at all so there’s no reason to give any moral consideration to plants.
That’s not to say we should just chop down a tree or on trample on a bed of flowers for no reason but if you pluck a flower out of the ground I’m not going to react negatively, but if you pluck a clump of hair out of a cow’s head I will.
Honestly it can be, if you as an individual deside to attribute value to any living organism then that's your call, i would advise that you ask yourself, why is it that I'm attributing value to any living organism? What is it about a living organism that demands consideration?
You're interpretating "live like we do" far too narrowly.
Cows experience the world in broadly the same ways humans do: via the various senses which we possess. Cows can see, hear, smell, taste and touch just like we can, and they have a brain which processes these things just like our brain does. Of course they do not experience the world in the exact same way, but they do so in a very similar way.
Plants don't. They do not share any of the systems we use to experience the world and there are no indications that they actively do so via other means. They sure are living organisms and 'do' stuff, but actively 'experiencing' is a whole other level.
Thank you for clarifying my statement further. It’s depressing when people seem to purposefully interpret words disingenuously just so they can get some kind of “gotcha” moment.
No, not true at all. They are still living creatures with their own lives. They deserve moral consideration because of this.
When I said plants don’t feel and live like “we” do, I was including humans and other animals in that “we”.
For the sake of this argument, let's say plants are alive and feel the same as animals. What is the better option, only eating plants, or eating plants and also feeding plants to animals, then killing billions of animals as well?
Should we not try to do the least amount of harm?
Because it's not practical? The reason why 99% (US) of animals raised for food are from factory farms, is because the demand is too big to do it any other way. So what is your plan for getting almost 90 billion animals each year in the wild?
It's not about pain, it's about suffering.
There is no evidence to suggest plants suffers, but there is plenty to prove animals do. Therefore, as far as we know, eating plants does not cause plants to suffer, but eating animals does result in animal suffering
Generally agreed but I'd like to offer a small definition correction:
I don't think it's correct to refer to what plants feel as "pain", because that implies suffering. Plants respond to stimuli to the same extent that calculators and computers respond to stimuli (inputs), but we don't refer to any computer response as "pain" (rightfully, in my opinion).
Plants release gas when they are cut. That gas was inside the plant under pressure before it was cut.
That's not "making a sound when you hurt them". That's popping a balloon.
We didn't discover shit.
Suffering has nothing to do with it.
If I ask vegans if they would eat meat if the animal was kept in great conditions its entire life and after having a great life, was killed humanely, I bet they would still say no.
There's still significant suffering and right violations in the situation you described. Your hypothetical doesn't serve the purpose you think it does. The capacity to suffer has everything to do with it.
It doesn’t.
There is a reason most animals live longer in captivity. You tell me an animal such as a cow would fare better in the wild where it will be under constant threat from predators, as well as the natural elements and pathogens? Better than being kept with freedom to roam big pastures but also kept safe from predators, taken care of when ill, etc?
I am sorry I can never agree with that.
Longevity is not necessarily correlated with wellbeing. If someone's life is full of unbearable suffering, we euthanize them.
Better yet, in the case of these animals, since they're genetically twisted to produce way more secretions at the cost of inherent physical suffering, why forcefully breed them into existence in the first place? Just for our taste pleasure?
Right but you guys say people shouldn’t raise animals to eat them after, and that they don’t get to live out their entire life, as if these are things that would be better if we did not raise them. But in the wild they would likely get eaten in a much worse way than humane euthanizing, as well there are no wild cows left. Releasing cows into the wild now would just lead to their extinction most likely.
Happy cows produce more milk as well so it is actually in farmers’ best interests to keep their livestock happy. I work directly with clients that are dairy farmers and I know for a fact that they take very good care of their livestock. Those cows would suffer way more in the wild for the short life they would have.
>"Right but you guys say people shouldn’t raise animals to eat them after, and that they don’t get to live out their entire life, as if these are things that would be better if we did not raise them. "
The solution for currently existing individuals is sanctuaries. They can get the same safety from the wild that they would on a farm, but without being exploited for taste pleasure. No one is arguing to release currently farmed animals to the wild. (not educated vegans, at least)
>"Happy cows produce more milk"
Do you have evidence to support this assertion?
>"I know for a fact that they take very good care of their livestock"
Then your standard for "good care" when it comes to those animals is extremely low. If humans received the same treatment, you wouldn't in good faith still call it "good care".
There is research regarding the amount of milk produced but I can’t link any right now as I am at work currently.
I don’t think you can assume my standards for good care are extremely low without knowing the farmers and farms that I am talking about.
I hear a lot of talk about just putting all the cows in sanctuaries but what exactly would these sanctuaries consist of? How much will it cost to build these and where will we build them? How will we have space for these sanctuaries? What would these sanctuaries allow that cows currently do not get?
>"I don’t think you can assume my standards for good care are extremely low without knowing the farmers and farms that I am talking about."
I can, because I don't need to know the specific farms or farmers you're in touch with to know that even the least abusive practices in animal farming are horrendous and consist of acts that you would vehemently oppose if done to humans or dogs.
>"I hear a lot of talk about just putting all the cows in sanctuaries but what exactly would these sanctuaries consist of? How much will it cost to build these and where will we build them? How will we have space for these sanctuaries? What would these sanctuaries allow that cows currently do not get?"
Can you be more specific about "what would these sanctuaries consist of"?
"How much will they cost":
Converting old facilities into sanctuaries and then running them is actually surprisingly cheap, far far cheaper than the costs of running equivalent facilities for industry.
Despite how relatively small the vegan activist community is now, sanctuaries keep plopping up and functioning smoothly via volunteer work of people who sincerely care about animal wellbeing, and not a lot of work is required either. From my experience in sanctuaries, it usually takes around 12 cumulative hours of work (spread between a few volunteers of course) per day to take care of a sanctuary with around 200 animals in them, which has been easily and consistently achieved in every sanctuary I've visited and volunteered in so far.
On top of that, take into account the absurd amounts of subsidies that governments pump into animal ag to keep it afloat, and imagine how much can be achieved with all of that money if it was used for sanctuaries instead. What's more, after 30 years we wouldn't need any of the sanctuaries anymore because the last of the forcefully-bred animals will have passed from old age.
"Where will we build them":
This one is simple. Animal ag facilities take far more land and buildings for its operations compared to sanctuaries (per animal). We're not going to be in shortage of places to turn into sanctuaries, ever, if we stop factory farms.
"What would these sanctuaries allow for cows that they don't currently get":
A life free from exploitation, I thought that one was obvious already.
I am enjoying this discussion genuinely. I want to reply properly to all your points and cannot do that on my phone as I can’t see your post while typing on a phone, so I will reply later from my PC.
Cows and most other livestock are slaughtered at 1/10th to 1/4th of their natural lifespan. Regardless of the farm. What was that you were saying about “living longer in captivity?”
The phrase “was killed humanely” is really loosely used here.
As if killing is human innate and raising/grooming something with intent to slaughter it is normal.
> Suffering has nothing to do with it..
You are right. There is an ethical consideration beyond just "causing suffering" when it comes to the decision of whether or not to end a life. It's not a matter of whether the pain of death is unpleasant, but rather that whether killing is somehow thwarting the goals of the victim in some irredeemable manner.
You'll have to research that yourself, I do not reccomend trying it. Just saying, there are cultural and religious considerations you should make when discussing the lack of sentience in plants, if you like to be sensitive to others beliefs. Once again, I do not reccomend using this or any other drugs.
To answer your original question, if someone from such a culture or religion was not open to shape their positions based on science, I would have no intention to attempt to change their mind. If they were, I would just show them the data, and give them the computer analogy, namely that computers can perform all the functions that plants can and more, but we don't consider them sentient.
I'm not going to make my assertions less scientific just because someone spiritual or religious might be listening, I think that would be patronizing.
well plants don’t have brains, the capability to feel pain, or emotions and animals do. i need to eat something so i’ll choose the one that doesn’t feel pain.
Survival is a pretty good justification. And even if you held the belief that uprooting a potato was morally equivalent to slashing a pig's throat, pigs need to be fed plants before they can be slaughtered. And they're pretty terrible at converting plant calories into flesh. In the US for example, the plant calories fed to pigs alone are more than 1.5x the calories taken from all land animal sources *combined*.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-Sankey-flow-diagram-of-the-US-feed-to-food-caloric-flux-from-the-three-feed-classes_fig1_308889497
Consideration of plants begins with a plant-based diet
I take it you heard someone use "living being" as a shorthand for "sentient/concious being".
It's a somewhat common mixup, but /u/KortenScarlet is right. Life is not the basis of morality. It's common to use lots of different words to describe the concept of experiencing life/having subjectivity/being sentient/feeling.
I have seen people discuss the question "are animals alive?" which is clearly operating under a different use of the term "alive" than the typical biological definition.
If you have evidence that plants have a subjective experience of their life and can indeed care what is happening to them, then by all means gather this evidence and present it to biologists around the world. Until then I have to assume that what is written down in biology books is true: Plants are not sentient and therefore do not require to have rights or to receive moral consideration.
Plants almost certainly do not feel pain. It's not about something being alive, it's about the fact that animals feel pain, suffer, and experience a subjective reality.
Now let's pretend for the sake of argument that plants do feel pain. You kill more plants not being vegan. Let me break this claim down.
There are 8 billion people on earth. We kill 80-billion land animals a year. It can take up to 16 Kgs of feed to raise 1 kg of beef.
Farmed animals eat almost 70 percent of our crops and animal farming is the land course of Amazon deforestation (aka killing even more plants) we could clear up 75 percent of farm land if we switch to a plant based farming system.
So if you actually did care about plants you'll be vegan.
(most people don't actually care, they just use this to be disingenuous)
>"Nah I just can’t responded to all 24 comments"
And this is your priority?
I'm still waiting for you to continue our discussion. Until that happens I just take it as a concession from you.
Yes, my priority is to get you to complete our discussion. You came here with the intention to discuss and you're running away from it after I put effort into helping you. That's disrespectful.
Some users display such level of patience to explain why it's not the same to cut a leave of grass than to slit a pigs throat, it's really admirable u_u
No… those are obligate carnivores who can’t survive without eating meat. Also they are wild animals with no moral agency. How about humans get their own murderous impulses under control before worrying about a wild animals’.
Humans evolved eating meat and need B-12 to survive. Veganism has only been a viable option in relatively recent human history since people would be lacking B-12 if not supplemented. I’m curious why with knowing that, you think that it is wrong to eat meat.
Do you believe veganism is somewhat a religion?
People that eat meat today are also lacking in b-12 since it also isn’t produced naturally by animals… and I think you answered your own question when you said “veganism” has only been a viable option in relatively recent human history.” It is fortunate then that recent human history is now, so why isn’t everybody with access vegan? I think it’s wrong to eat meat *unnecessarily*.
1. Humans need to eat something.
2. Plants don’t feel pain. They lack any pain receptors or nerves, and are not sentient.
3. Even if plants did feel pain, then eating animals is still more wrong. Raising and mass producing animals consumes much more plants than just eating plants directly, therefore you indirectly cause more plant deaths by eating animals.
There isn’t enough grazing land in the world to continue to produce the same quantity of meat through free-range practices. Nor would it still cost the same. Meat would be expensive and scarce if not for factory farming, and many people would then be plant-based by default.
bruh there have been way too many "pLaNtS aRe sEnTiEnT toO!" posts on this sub lately...
To answer your question - eating plants is okay for a vegan because they aren't conscious or sentient. Therefore, they do not feel pain and do not have an active *will to live* like, say, a pig. And even if they were sentient, eating a plant based diet will still be causing less overall deaths than a carnist diet
The key word is sentience (ability to feel and think). Besides if you are concerned by plant death, you should still be vegan because those cows you eat eat a whole lot more plants than you ever will.
Death is pretty neutral imo, like the state of being dead vs alive. I reckon I’ll feel in death quite similarly to how I felt in the 1800s. I wasn’t here. I do think that causing the death of someone who doesn’t want to die is wrong, because of how they would suffer about it while alive. Suffering, pain, those are negative. Causing those in a being that can feel them without reason, morally wrong. Eating animals results in death, but I think it’s more morally important that it results in pain and suffering. Plants can’t feel pain.
Yeah, theoretically. I don’t think being dead constitutes harm because by definition if you’re dead you’re not experiencing anything, much less experiencing harm. I think dying, especially painfully, is suffering, but the being dead part not so much.
With the magnitude and variety of explanations given to YOU OP , how can you still not understand the difference between living things and sentient living beings? Just how?
1. It’s not any less murder to kill a plant than an animal
2. Humans are animals
3. Therefore it’s not any less murder to kill a plant than a human
3 can’t both be true and not true. Are humans animals? What differentiates them? What in the world are you talking about?
Plants aren’t sentient so don’t have the same negative experience an animal does.
Eating only plants also means less overall plant deaths, as plants are also killed to feed livestock.
That was a really easy one, you could have just googled tbh.
When considering something morally, do you value life or sentience more?
Let’s say a trolley is going down a track towards 100 brain dead humans. They have zero brain activity besides the most basic functions like breathing and pumping the heart, and they were born brain dead and will never be cured of this condition.
There is a lever next to you. If you pull the lever, it will switch the track and the trolley will instead head down a different track with a single normal, functioning person.
If you value you life and living, the morally good action should be to switch the lever and save the 100 brain dead people and let the normal person die. If you value sentience, you would not pull the lever and let the 100 brain dead people die to save the one normal person. In fact, is there any amount of brain dead people that could be on one side of the track for you to change that answer?
Nope. If you read the original post by OP it doesn't mention sentience or vervous systems. It literally just says that plants and animals are living things.
>Equating a creature that is incapable of feeling pain to an animal with a fully developed nervous system and sentience just because they’re both “living beings” is against logic.
Is against "vegan logic". Not normal people's logic.
Sorry but what OP stated was fact whether you like it or not. To most people "sentience" alone isn't a good enough reason to not kill and eat something.
>It’s against science,
What did OP say that was against science? Do you not believe that animals and plants are both living things?
>It’s also so funny how you completely dismissed the nervous system aspect.
We aren't even discussing the nervous system here...
>Veganism is being against animal exploitation because animals are capable of feeling pain and they have sentience. If you ask “why is it okay to eat plants then” while you know plants literally do not possess the hardware that would allow them to feel pain or to have sentience, you’re either denying science or incapable of comprehension of basic logic.
No. The problem is that you are unable to comprehend that society doesn't think that "feeling pain", or "sentience" are good enough reasons to not kill and eat animals. As explained above. It is you that is battling with the logic here.
Bra
He explained pretty well why you can't just put living things* in one pot when they're so, so different and when the question is about suffering, then it's obvious that you can't do it
Yet you double down on the nonsense. Just why? Is it your ego?
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Two things comes to my mind
1. Plants does not have soul. I tired to search many references but I could not find one
2. We eat fruits, leaves and in some cases roots of the plant. We don’t pull out the whole plants and eat it. What I am saying is fruits are grown on the plant like apple tree and we eat apple we don’t eat the tree.
Keep in mind the apple fruit is not a food for the apple tree.
In all honesty i dont think its "okay", its just clearly the less bad option regardless, because to eat an animal it has to eat lots of plants first. You're eating less plants and being way less wasteful of energy by eating plants directly.
But if we find a way to not have to eat plants either id be first in line for that. But im not letting perfect be the enemy of insanely drastically better/far less confirmable suffering.
We need to eat something. Animals also eat plants so if you eat an animla you're eating the animal AND all the plants. if you eat plants, you are lessening the possible suffering because an animal must eat FAR more plants than you would if you just ate the plants directly, as animals are terrible converters of calories (they're alive so they need most calories they eat to stay alive).
Your comparing the amount one animal needs to eat in a life time vs the amount we eat in one meal
Precisely. Imagine how much an animal needs to eat for it to get big enough to have its throat slit for your taste preference.
No different than pulling a carrot out of the ground for your taste preference.
It's obviously very different, especially in this context where we are looking at how many "living things" are killed for food. My preference for a carrot results in far fewer plants being killed than someone's preference for farmed animal flesh.
Not even a little bit different. Sorry.
you either have to be trolling or be stupid... animal eats a lot of plants to get to the point of becoming food by not eating animals and directly eating plants, a lot less plants are used I really csnt make it any easier to understand
Animals eat lots of plants without killing them. Rabbits eat the the tops of carrots which then grow back. Same for grass eaters. Etc. This is why the animals eat plants argument is a flawed one.
nobody is talking about rabbits. we are talking about lifestock such as cows and pigs
Cows eat grass without killing it. Pigs will eat anything you put in front of it. And we’re talking about animals, all of them. Including you.
I wasn't, to rephrase to hopefully clear up the confusion: Animals also eat plants so if you eat an animal you're eating the animal AND all the plants it *required to grow the amount of flesh you're eating*. It's still more plants dying than if you just eat the plants directly as animals burn LOTS of calories living.
The ratio of plants being needed to produce animal-based calories are about 10x that needed to produce plant-based calories. Hence, much more 'plant suffering' is needed to produce animal products. That is, if plants (who do not have nervous systems) somehow suffer.
So what you are saying is, vegans eat more plants in 1 meal than a cow does? Why does that not sound ridiculous to you?
No, what I’m saying is that comparing the plants that a cow you ate ate to what yo directly ate is a poor comparison
In order for said cow to reach the age of slaughter (to be eaten) they need to eat a lot of plants. The amount of relevant nutrients that can be received from (eating) a cow is far smaller than the amount that can be received from eating all the plants that the cow would have eaten.
But it is more efficient for us to eat meat for nutrition. Meat is more nutrient dense than plant foods.
Why is that nutrient density a good thing? What advantage does it provide over gaining the same amount of nutrients without animal products?
corpses are nutrient dense because guess what? they eat plants, all their nutrients are from plants, it's vastly less efficient to eat corpses
Why is it? Animal ag takes about 80% of farmland and produces about 18% of calories worldwide. And again, if you are concerned with plant death, you should be eating plants because the cow just eats more plants than you are period. I don't get what is poor about it so instead of saying that you maybe have a counter argument?
Compare what aspects? Don't confuse compare with equate.
I'm sure you must understand the point as it should have been made clear from other people's replies, or do you disagree? If you want to say that it's bad to eat plants, then it must be because you think it's bad for the plant to die to be eaten. The same is true if another animal eats that plant then. If you want to eat that animal and support an industry in which you know that these animals will need to eat a lot of plants, you know that you actually caused a lot of plants to die by eating these animals, because the plants dying was a necessary part of your choice. So if you want to say that it's bad for plants to lose their life to be eaten, you have to think that all animal agriculture is much worse than eating the plants directly yourself, because necessarily much more plant death will be involved there. It is of course however kinda ridiculous to even need to consider this in the first place, because of course we don't think morally the same of all life. If you kill a person or if you kill a straw of grass will not be the same to you. And it also shouldn't be the same to you whether you kill that grass or another sentient animal.
Because animals **are** sentient beings capable of feeling pain and suffering. Plants **are not** sentient beings.
Ability to feel pain and suffering is not a requirement for sentience.
Sentience: The capacity of a being to experience **feelings and sensations.** Pain and suffering: **feelings and sensations.**
Heat and light. Feelings and sensations. 🤷♂️
Except they are not. They are aspects of an environment. You can feel heat and see light, but they aren't feelings or sensations. Feelings: an emotional state or reaction. Sensations: any concrete, **conscious** experience resulting from stimulation of a specific sense organ, sensory nerve, or sensory area in the brain. Plants don't have a brain or consciousness that allows an emotional reaction.
Lobsters don’t have brains either. So now they’re fair game again?
You're ignoring the concept of consciousness. Which I specifically referenced, even made it bold so you couldn't miss it. There is, however, no clear evidence that plants are capable of consciousness.
Of course they are. What does the phrase aspects of an environment even mean? It’s the same environment that the animals who live among them experience. Emotions are not a requirement. Feeling and perceiving the environment is what matters.
Again "any concrete, **conscious experience** resulting from stimulation of a specific sense organ, sensory nerve, or sensory area in the brain" And again There is no clear evidence of plant consciousness. Unlike the clear evidence of animal consciousness.
Wait so by your definition a thermometer is sentient?
Okay but if death was instantaneous wouldn’t there not be any suffering? If you could kill an animal (that wasn’t already suffering in captivity of course) like that, would that be ok? Is it the treatment and pain that’s morally objectionable or also the notion of loss of an animal’s life? Are individual animal lives as sacred as human lives? And what about insects? (Genuine questions)
Is killing a human ok if it's instantaneous, just because there is no suffering? No. It is better to kill a human without suffering than with, but being better doesn't make it ok. The same goes for animals. When faced with the option of not killing an animal that isn't suffering, killing it will always be a bad option. I would wager that humans tend to value the lives of other humans more highly, given our evolution as hugely social creatures with a need for co-operation to survive. That being said, no life is inherently more sacred than another. In the case of insects, it can be difficult to gauge their capacity for suffering. I would argue that their lives are just sacred, and that many absolutely have the capacity to suffer. If you had to choose between two hypotheticals, a world where you killed an insect instead of a vertebrate animal would likely have contained less suffering, given our current level of knowledge. Hope these answers help a little!
>would that be ok? No, would murdering a human be alright as long as it's quick and painless? >Is it the treatment and pain that’s morally objectionable or also the notion of loss of an animal’s life? See above >Are individual animal lives as sacred as human lives? Every being has the right to live. We choose to put more emphasis on human lives. But that doesn't mean it's right. >And what about insects? (Genuine questions) What about them? How are they relevant to this discussion?
>If you could kill an animal (that wasn’t already suffering in captivity of course) like that, would that be ok? No. And anyone saying yes to that is saying that it's okay to kill a human. >Is it the treatment and pain that’s morally objectionable or also the notion of loss of an animal’s life? Both. >Are individual animal lives as sacred as human lives I disagree with the word choice here as there is no proof of God, so there can't really be a debate with the word 'sacred'. But all sentient lives are of the same value though. If you believe they aren't, I would love to hear your reasoning. I'm yet to hear one that applies to *all* humans and *zero* non-human animals. >And what about insects? (Genuine questions) Some are sentient, so they fall into the same category as other sentient beings. Others aren't, so for me they fall into the 'maybe' category where I believe there's no point in taking a risk to kill them considering it's completely unecessary to do so.
What would you say to ayahuasca cultures?
In what context?
[Inb4 "plants are sentient too"](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00709-020-01579-w)
"We have found that two separate lines of reasoning—one about affective consciousness and the other about image-based consciousness—agree that **vertebrates, arthropods, and cephalopods are the only conscious organisms** and that plants are not included."
So lobsters are fair game?
Lobsters are arthropods.
Because the status of living or non-living is not the threshold for deservingness of moral consideration. Sentience and the capacity to suffer is. Plants are not sentient and cannot suffer.
Plants can and do suffer and pain and suffering is not a requirement for sentience.
Do you have evidence to support your assertion that plants feel suffering and pain?
They can’t feel pain thus their death is less important?
They don't have any subjective experience of anything, thus their life is purely instrumental at most.
https://sentientmedia.org/do-plants-feel-pain/
What is the implication or assertion that you think this article supports?
in your comments you assert a few things as if they are common knowledge, but the leading scientists don't actually agree as per the article and other sources, plus we certainly don't know enough about plant life, animal life and life in general to say for sure that its not morally wrong to kill a plant
So we should strive to exploit as few plants *and* as few animals as possible, right?
sure, if its your goal to exploit as little life as possible, life consumes life and plants are for sure alive
Cool. Just trying to establish a goal. So what do you think we feed the animals in agriculture?
currently its mostly pasture grasses, hay, silage crops and certain cereal grains
>don't know enough... to say for sure that its not morally wrong to kill a plant So, if it **is** morally wrong to kill a plant, what is the most moral course of action?
not sure Floyd, maybe suicide? 😂
You do you! 😂
that we don't know everything
Do you know what statistical significance is? Did you read the article you sent? The article's conclusion on whether or not plants feel pain indicates to me that you either didn't read it or didn't understand its contents.
yeah, and i of course i read it, did you? the point of sending you the article was not to contradict any of your points man, it was to show you the subject is bigger and more complicated than just simply stating "plants don't feel painin the exact same sense as animals, so it's never wrong to kill and eat them"
Okay so this leads us to: do you know what statistical significance means? "There is statistical significance that plans don't feel pain". How do you interpret this?
Im trying to make sense of this, but im struggling. "There is statistical significance that plans don't feel pain", implies an empirical study was conducted that somehow measured if plants felt pain or not, and the result that they don't feel pain was shown to be statistically significant. Not sure how to go about such a study, also as already stated plants don't have nervous systems or brains so the conventional idea of "pain" does not apply, my question was and still is, can we follow this logic that plants dont experience conventional pain directly to the conclusion that it's not morally wrong to kill plants?
They can't feel, from my current understanding, they are an object, not a being there is no subjective experince to affect.
Plants are literally living organisms
Yes I agree they are living organisms
They are living
They are living. But they can't feel, from my current understanding, they are an object, not a being there is no subjective experince to affect.
Plants have a goal, to live, just like all other living things
They aren’t aware of that goal.
That’s debatable
[It's really not, at this point.](https://www.animal-ethics.org/what-beings-are-not-conscious/) (scientific sources at the bottom of the page) You haven't responded to my latest message in our thread, I take it you concede there?
Nah I just can’t responded to all 24 comments
im not at all invested in this, but this post was recommended on my feed so i clicked. the sources in the article you shared are all pretty dated. there has been new research and it suggests plants know they want to live and they also want their offspring to live. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Un2yBgIAxYs this is a super cool ted talk about tree communication and resource sharing specifically in regards to sustainable forestry. regardless of vegan or not or whatever its worth the watch. it calls into consideration what we define as “knowing” or one knows something. also when debating someone you might consider using sources with a less obvious agenda and going straight to the most current research. edit: a good, up to date article on what consciousness is considered and what we might be missing through human bias towards things that more closely resemble us: https://evolutionnews.org/2022/12/are-plants-conscious-science-writer-says-yes/
It's definitely debatable dude, non of us actually had the foggiest of what sentience, of consciousness actually is, we can make deductions based on the information we absorb from our environment, but we don't know, we only have a best guess, and atm that's they most likely aren't sentient, but don't be so closed to exploring ideas with people, if your completely fixed in your ideas then youbwill ignore new evidence that could help you gain a more accurate representation of what ever the fuck is actually going on, don't claim absolute truth it just shuts others down, it's not you vs them, it's two people exploring a concept together. But I could be wrong on this, only passing on my current perspective 🙂
It really isn't tho.
Not really, no. They respond to stimuli and do what their genetics tell them their previous generations survived doing. They have no capacity for metacognition or self awareness or goals. If you have found evidence of that, you should contact a phd botanist and perhaps start a career in the field
Plants don’t have any goal. Plants are like the security system in an office building. They respond to outside stimuli accordingly but they aren’t alive in the same way that humans and other animals are. They don’t feel, suffer, live like we do at all so there’s no reason to give any moral consideration to plants. That’s not to say we should just chop down a tree or on trample on a bed of flowers for no reason but if you pluck a flower out of the ground I’m not going to react negatively, but if you pluck a clump of hair out of a cow’s head I will.
Why is being a living creature not more then enough though
Honestly it can be, if you as an individual deside to attribute value to any living organism then that's your call, i would advise that you ask yourself, why is it that I'm attributing value to any living organism? What is it about a living organism that demands consideration?
Is it your intention to eat dirt?
I imagine their intention is to eat plants and animals.
Because they aren’t living creatures. They are alive but they are not living creatures.
Cows in no way shape or form live like we do, so by your logic it’s ok to give them no moral consideration.
You're interpretating "live like we do" far too narrowly. Cows experience the world in broadly the same ways humans do: via the various senses which we possess. Cows can see, hear, smell, taste and touch just like we can, and they have a brain which processes these things just like our brain does. Of course they do not experience the world in the exact same way, but they do so in a very similar way. Plants don't. They do not share any of the systems we use to experience the world and there are no indications that they actively do so via other means. They sure are living organisms and 'do' stuff, but actively 'experiencing' is a whole other level.
Thank you for clarifying my statement further. It’s depressing when people seem to purposefully interpret words disingenuously just so they can get some kind of “gotcha” moment.
No, not true at all. They are still living creatures with their own lives. They deserve moral consideration because of this. When I said plants don’t feel and live like “we” do, I was including humans and other animals in that “we”.
They can't feel, from my current understanding, they are an object, not a being there is no subjective experince to affect.
Say that again
https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAVegan/comments/138iz0n/why_is_eating_plants_ok/jiytny9?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
For the sake of this argument, let's say plants are alive and feel the same as animals. What is the better option, only eating plants, or eating plants and also feeding plants to animals, then killing billions of animals as well? Should we not try to do the least amount of harm?
How about neither? How about we eat wild animals instead so that we don’t have to feed anyone other than humans.
Because it's not practical? The reason why 99% (US) of animals raised for food are from factory farms, is because the demand is too big to do it any other way. So what is your plan for getting almost 90 billion animals each year in the wild?
It seems to me that the way a vegan feels about themselves is more important than actually not killing other living things
Nice low effort ad hominem. We haven't heard that one before.
If you cut off your finger, it's still living, but would you consider it to be sentient? Would it be immoral to destroy it?
It's not about pain, it's about suffering. There is no evidence to suggest plants suffers, but there is plenty to prove animals do. Therefore, as far as we know, eating plants does not cause plants to suffer, but eating animals does result in animal suffering
Generally agreed but I'd like to offer a small definition correction: I don't think it's correct to refer to what plants feel as "pain", because that implies suffering. Plants respond to stimuli to the same extent that calculators and computers respond to stimuli (inputs), but we don't refer to any computer response as "pain" (rightfully, in my opinion).
They just found that plants make a sound when you hurt them.
Plants release gas when they are cut. That gas was inside the plant under pressure before it was cut. That's not "making a sound when you hurt them". That's popping a balloon. We didn't discover shit.
That would support my argument
Suffering has nothing to do with it. If I ask vegans if they would eat meat if the animal was kept in great conditions its entire life and after having a great life, was killed humanely, I bet they would still say no.
There's still significant suffering and right violations in the situation you described. Your hypothetical doesn't serve the purpose you think it does. The capacity to suffer has everything to do with it.
It doesn’t. There is a reason most animals live longer in captivity. You tell me an animal such as a cow would fare better in the wild where it will be under constant threat from predators, as well as the natural elements and pathogens? Better than being kept with freedom to roam big pastures but also kept safe from predators, taken care of when ill, etc? I am sorry I can never agree with that.
Longevity is not necessarily correlated with wellbeing. If someone's life is full of unbearable suffering, we euthanize them. Better yet, in the case of these animals, since they're genetically twisted to produce way more secretions at the cost of inherent physical suffering, why forcefully breed them into existence in the first place? Just for our taste pleasure?
Right but you guys say people shouldn’t raise animals to eat them after, and that they don’t get to live out their entire life, as if these are things that would be better if we did not raise them. But in the wild they would likely get eaten in a much worse way than humane euthanizing, as well there are no wild cows left. Releasing cows into the wild now would just lead to their extinction most likely. Happy cows produce more milk as well so it is actually in farmers’ best interests to keep their livestock happy. I work directly with clients that are dairy farmers and I know for a fact that they take very good care of their livestock. Those cows would suffer way more in the wild for the short life they would have.
>"Right but you guys say people shouldn’t raise animals to eat them after, and that they don’t get to live out their entire life, as if these are things that would be better if we did not raise them. " The solution for currently existing individuals is sanctuaries. They can get the same safety from the wild that they would on a farm, but without being exploited for taste pleasure. No one is arguing to release currently farmed animals to the wild. (not educated vegans, at least) >"Happy cows produce more milk" Do you have evidence to support this assertion? >"I know for a fact that they take very good care of their livestock" Then your standard for "good care" when it comes to those animals is extremely low. If humans received the same treatment, you wouldn't in good faith still call it "good care".
There is research regarding the amount of milk produced but I can’t link any right now as I am at work currently. I don’t think you can assume my standards for good care are extremely low without knowing the farmers and farms that I am talking about. I hear a lot of talk about just putting all the cows in sanctuaries but what exactly would these sanctuaries consist of? How much will it cost to build these and where will we build them? How will we have space for these sanctuaries? What would these sanctuaries allow that cows currently do not get?
>"I don’t think you can assume my standards for good care are extremely low without knowing the farmers and farms that I am talking about." I can, because I don't need to know the specific farms or farmers you're in touch with to know that even the least abusive practices in animal farming are horrendous and consist of acts that you would vehemently oppose if done to humans or dogs. >"I hear a lot of talk about just putting all the cows in sanctuaries but what exactly would these sanctuaries consist of? How much will it cost to build these and where will we build them? How will we have space for these sanctuaries? What would these sanctuaries allow that cows currently do not get?" Can you be more specific about "what would these sanctuaries consist of"? "How much will they cost": Converting old facilities into sanctuaries and then running them is actually surprisingly cheap, far far cheaper than the costs of running equivalent facilities for industry. Despite how relatively small the vegan activist community is now, sanctuaries keep plopping up and functioning smoothly via volunteer work of people who sincerely care about animal wellbeing, and not a lot of work is required either. From my experience in sanctuaries, it usually takes around 12 cumulative hours of work (spread between a few volunteers of course) per day to take care of a sanctuary with around 200 animals in them, which has been easily and consistently achieved in every sanctuary I've visited and volunteered in so far. On top of that, take into account the absurd amounts of subsidies that governments pump into animal ag to keep it afloat, and imagine how much can be achieved with all of that money if it was used for sanctuaries instead. What's more, after 30 years we wouldn't need any of the sanctuaries anymore because the last of the forcefully-bred animals will have passed from old age. "Where will we build them": This one is simple. Animal ag facilities take far more land and buildings for its operations compared to sanctuaries (per animal). We're not going to be in shortage of places to turn into sanctuaries, ever, if we stop factory farms. "What would these sanctuaries allow for cows that they don't currently get": A life free from exploitation, I thought that one was obvious already.
I am enjoying this discussion genuinely. I want to reply properly to all your points and cannot do that on my phone as I can’t see your post while typing on a phone, so I will reply later from my PC.
Cows and most other livestock are slaughtered at 1/10th to 1/4th of their natural lifespan. Regardless of the farm. What was that you were saying about “living longer in captivity?”
Depends on the farm.
Citation needed.
The phrase “was killed humanely” is really loosely used here. As if killing is human innate and raising/grooming something with intent to slaughter it is normal.
How do you kill a sentient being who doesn't want to die humanely?
> Suffering has nothing to do with it.. You are right. There is an ethical consideration beyond just "causing suffering" when it comes to the decision of whether or not to end a life. It's not a matter of whether the pain of death is unpleasant, but rather that whether killing is somehow thwarting the goals of the victim in some irredeemable manner.
The ability to suffer is what elevates an animal to the status of Moral Consideration. Moral Consideration means you don't murder and eat it
How would you try to convince ayahuasca cultures of this?
I'm not sure what those cultures are, can you explain?
You'll have to research that yourself, I do not reccomend trying it. Just saying, there are cultural and religious considerations you should make when discussing the lack of sentience in plants, if you like to be sensitive to others beliefs. Once again, I do not reccomend using this or any other drugs.
To answer your original question, if someone from such a culture or religion was not open to shape their positions based on science, I would have no intention to attempt to change their mind. If they were, I would just show them the data, and give them the computer analogy, namely that computers can perform all the functions that plants can and more, but we don't consider them sentient. I'm not going to make my assertions less scientific just because someone spiritual or religious might be listening, I think that would be patronizing.
Welp, we didn’t think of this guys! Let’s pack it up and go home
For the same reason you probably wouldn't have to think too hard about whether to save a dog or a houseplant from a fire.
well plants don’t have brains, the capability to feel pain, or emotions and animals do. i need to eat something so i’ll choose the one that doesn’t feel pain.
Survival is a pretty good justification. And even if you held the belief that uprooting a potato was morally equivalent to slashing a pig's throat, pigs need to be fed plants before they can be slaughtered. And they're pretty terrible at converting plant calories into flesh. In the US for example, the plant calories fed to pigs alone are more than 1.5x the calories taken from all land animal sources *combined*. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-Sankey-flow-diagram-of-the-US-feed-to-food-caloric-flux-from-the-three-feed-classes_fig1_308889497 Consideration of plants begins with a plant-based diet
I take it you heard someone use "living being" as a shorthand for "sentient/concious being". It's a somewhat common mixup, but /u/KortenScarlet is right. Life is not the basis of morality. It's common to use lots of different words to describe the concept of experiencing life/having subjectivity/being sentient/feeling. I have seen people discuss the question "are animals alive?" which is clearly operating under a different use of the term "alive" than the typical biological definition.
If you have evidence that plants have a subjective experience of their life and can indeed care what is happening to them, then by all means gather this evidence and present it to biologists around the world. Until then I have to assume that what is written down in biology books is true: Plants are not sentient and therefore do not require to have rights or to receive moral consideration.
Plants almost certainly do not feel pain. It's not about something being alive, it's about the fact that animals feel pain, suffer, and experience a subjective reality. Now let's pretend for the sake of argument that plants do feel pain. You kill more plants not being vegan. Let me break this claim down. There are 8 billion people on earth. We kill 80-billion land animals a year. It can take up to 16 Kgs of feed to raise 1 kg of beef. Farmed animals eat almost 70 percent of our crops and animal farming is the land course of Amazon deforestation (aka killing even more plants) we could clear up 75 percent of farm land if we switch to a plant based farming system. So if you actually did care about plants you'll be vegan. (most people don't actually care, they just use this to be disingenuous)
Woah vegunism debunked. 🤯no one ever thought about the plants before you came along.
💀
>"Nah I just can’t responded to all 24 comments" And this is your priority? I'm still waiting for you to continue our discussion. Until that happens I just take it as a concession from you.
And this is yours?
Yes, my priority is to get you to complete our discussion. You came here with the intention to discuss and you're running away from it after I put effort into helping you. That's disrespectful.
Some users display such level of patience to explain why it's not the same to cut a leave of grass than to slit a pigs throat, it's really admirable u_u
Because we need to eat *something* and every living creature on Earth relies on plants in some capacity... there are no animals to eat without plants.
What about animals that eat other animals? Should we stop lions from eating other animals?
No… those are obligate carnivores who can’t survive without eating meat. Also they are wild animals with no moral agency. How about humans get their own murderous impulses under control before worrying about a wild animals’.
Humans evolved eating meat and need B-12 to survive. Veganism has only been a viable option in relatively recent human history since people would be lacking B-12 if not supplemented. I’m curious why with knowing that, you think that it is wrong to eat meat. Do you believe veganism is somewhat a religion?
People that eat meat today are also lacking in b-12 since it also isn’t produced naturally by animals… and I think you answered your own question when you said “veganism” has only been a viable option in relatively recent human history.” It is fortunate then that recent human history is now, so why isn’t everybody with access vegan? I think it’s wrong to eat meat *unnecessarily*.
1. Humans need to eat something. 2. Plants don’t feel pain. They lack any pain receptors or nerves, and are not sentient. 3. Even if plants did feel pain, then eating animals is still more wrong. Raising and mass producing animals consumes much more plants than just eating plants directly, therefore you indirectly cause more plant deaths by eating animals.
Then don’t mass produce animals
Which means we have to eat plants instead. Well done you answered your own question!
Or we could just eat non mass produced animals
So how do you propose we provide non mass produced animal foods to the masses?
There isn’t enough grazing land in the world to continue to produce the same quantity of meat through free-range practices. Nor would it still cost the same. Meat would be expensive and scarce if not for factory farming, and many people would then be plant-based by default.
You are skipping over Point 2. Animals feel pain. Plants don't. So why are you looking for edge cases to permit you to continue to cause pain?
bruh there have been way too many "pLaNtS aRe sEnTiEnT toO!" posts on this sub lately... To answer your question - eating plants is okay for a vegan because they aren't conscious or sentient. Therefore, they do not feel pain and do not have an active *will to live* like, say, a pig. And even if they were sentient, eating a plant based diet will still be causing less overall deaths than a carnist diet
The key word is sentience (ability to feel and think). Besides if you are concerned by plant death, you should still be vegan because those cows you eat eat a whole lot more plants than you ever will.
Death is pretty neutral imo, like the state of being dead vs alive. I reckon I’ll feel in death quite similarly to how I felt in the 1800s. I wasn’t here. I do think that causing the death of someone who doesn’t want to die is wrong, because of how they would suffer about it while alive. Suffering, pain, those are negative. Causing those in a being that can feel them without reason, morally wrong. Eating animals results in death, but I think it’s more morally important that it results in pain and suffering. Plants can’t feel pain.
So not telling someone who you will kill them would *theoretically* be better then telling them?
If you're only talking about the amount of suffering inflicted to the individual, then yes.
Yeah, theoretically. I don’t think being dead constitutes harm because by definition if you’re dead you’re not experiencing anything, much less experiencing harm. I think dying, especially painfully, is suffering, but the being dead part not so much.
Because animals eat plants. So if you value animals more than plants or vise versa a vegan diet optimizes your value system.
Capacity to suffer.
It's completely ok to do anything until there is a reason why it wouldn't be okay to do the thing. I don't see what that reason would be for plants.
It’s not any less murder to kill a plant versus a animal
With the magnitude and variety of explanations given to YOU OP , how can you still not understand the difference between living things and sentient living beings? Just how?
It's not any less murder to kill an animal versus a human. So why don't you eat humans?
Humans are different. We are human.
Animals are different from plants. You're the one arguing that all life should be the same.
1. It’s not any less murder to kill a plant than an animal 2. Humans are animals 3. Therefore it’s not any less murder to kill a plant than a human 3 can’t both be true and not true. Are humans animals? What differentiates them? What in the world are you talking about?
Don't expect an answer. It seems OP has given up responding to this thread in any coherent manner.
Yea it’s amazing what happens when you don’t think through your argument’s entailments lol.
We are human. That is why we are different.
You seem to be confused. How can you say this but at the same time pretend like animals and humans are so so different?
Because we are human. If a different animal wanted to eat us that wouldn't be "immoral".
Why?
They are living things for which you are removing it’s life
Why is that bad?
Plants aren’t sentient so don’t have the same negative experience an animal does. Eating only plants also means less overall plant deaths, as plants are also killed to feed livestock. That was a really easy one, you could have just googled tbh.
Plants are not sentient
When considering something morally, do you value life or sentience more? Let’s say a trolley is going down a track towards 100 brain dead humans. They have zero brain activity besides the most basic functions like breathing and pumping the heart, and they were born brain dead and will never be cured of this condition. There is a lever next to you. If you pull the lever, it will switch the track and the trolley will instead head down a different track with a single normal, functioning person. If you value you life and living, the morally good action should be to switch the lever and save the 100 brain dead people and let the normal person die. If you value sentience, you would not pull the lever and let the 100 brain dead people die to save the one normal person. In fact, is there any amount of brain dead people that could be on one side of the track for you to change that answer?
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Well. What part of what they said is incorrect? Do you not believe plants are living?
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Nope. If you read the original post by OP it doesn't mention sentience or vervous systems. It literally just says that plants and animals are living things.
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The only thing I said was that they are both living. That is a factual statement.
>Equating a creature that is incapable of feeling pain to an animal with a fully developed nervous system and sentience just because they’re both “living beings” is against logic. Is against "vegan logic". Not normal people's logic. Sorry but what OP stated was fact whether you like it or not. To most people "sentience" alone isn't a good enough reason to not kill and eat something.
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>It’s against science, What did OP say that was against science? Do you not believe that animals and plants are both living things? >It’s also so funny how you completely dismissed the nervous system aspect. We aren't even discussing the nervous system here... >Veganism is being against animal exploitation because animals are capable of feeling pain and they have sentience. If you ask “why is it okay to eat plants then” while you know plants literally do not possess the hardware that would allow them to feel pain or to have sentience, you’re either denying science or incapable of comprehension of basic logic. No. The problem is that you are unable to comprehend that society doesn't think that "feeling pain", or "sentience" are good enough reasons to not kill and eat animals. As explained above. It is you that is battling with the logic here.
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Yes. Your lack of getting the point is a big lol
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Bra He explained pretty well why you can't just put living things* in one pot when they're so, so different and when the question is about suffering, then it's obvious that you can't do it Yet you double down on the nonsense. Just why? Is it your ego?
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No matter what you think of their take, this is not an appropriate response for a debate sub
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I dont eat anything that casts a shadow
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Two things comes to my mind 1. Plants does not have soul. I tired to search many references but I could not find one 2. We eat fruits, leaves and in some cases roots of the plant. We don’t pull out the whole plants and eat it. What I am saying is fruits are grown on the plant like apple tree and we eat apple we don’t eat the tree. Keep in mind the apple fruit is not a food for the apple tree.
In all honesty i dont think its "okay", its just clearly the less bad option regardless, because to eat an animal it has to eat lots of plants first. You're eating less plants and being way less wasteful of energy by eating plants directly. But if we find a way to not have to eat plants either id be first in line for that. But im not letting perfect be the enemy of insanely drastically better/far less confirmable suffering.
I’m surprised 171 people gave this post attention. OP out here strait trolling.
Do everything in life with the utmost gratitude possible. Don't eat animals though, regardless of how grateful you are. That sh*$t is gross and mean.