What if plants were animals like any other?

Speaking of yeasts, I guess it's not something that's on everyone's minds, but the reason bread rises is because yeasts die in the heat of the oven and, reacting to the deadly environmental conditions, radically increase their rate of fermentation of the carbohydrates in the dough thus releasing abnormally large amounts of CO2 in a very short time.

Essentially, bread rises because of the the death throes of tiny, microscopic unicellular fungi.

I would just like to point out that the existence of (what I assume you mean when you say) "objective ethics" isn't a sure thing. I don't mean to imply that ethical nihilism (basically saying ethics aren't "a thing") is the only way forward though. We can probably assign ethical value to human action even (some would say especially) if "objective ethics" don't exist.

I'm never really sure what the point of things like this are. I've grown enough plants in my life to understand they're at least 'aware' in some way when bad things happen to them.

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.

Damnit, I'm all out of suffering points today. No meat for me!

It's a purely mathematical counter to the argument that if plants suffer, people (who consume a roughly fixed amount of protein) could just eat animals instead. That's a contradictory position, because animal protein comes from animals eating plants.

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...