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What if plants were animals like any other?

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Re: What if plants were animals like any other?

#61

Post by chacha2 »

grawprog wrote: post #42
chacha2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

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!

Re: What if plants were animals like any other?

#62

Post by mtalantikite »

grawprog wrote: post #50
mtalantikite wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: What if plants were animals like any other?

#63

Post by dane-pgp »

ping_pong wrote: post #7

If you spend enough time watching nature videos like I do, you will notice that the vast majority of animals are eaten alive by their predators. It's slow, and exceedingly painful and it is ubiquitous. So even if plants were conscious, I honestly don't care. A bear would eat me alive in the most painful way possible and they wouldn't even think a second about it. Neither will I.

There are potentially interesting questions here about The Limits of Obligation.[0] If killing animals is wrong, do humans have a moral duty to bring about the extinction (or at least genetic engineering) of all carnivorous animals?

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...

Re: What if plants were animals like any other?

#64

Post by perl4ever »

chacha2 wrote: post #27
grawprog wrote: post #15

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…

> 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...

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

Re: What if plants were animals like any other?

#65

Post by morelisp »

dane-pgp wrote: post #63
ping_pong wrote: post #7

If you spend enough time watching nature videos like I do, you will notice that the vast majority of animals are eaten alive by their predators. It's slow, and exceedingly painful and it is ubiquitous. So even if plants were conscious, I honestly don't care. A bear would eat me alive in the most painful way possible and they wouldn't even think a second about it. Neither will I.

There are potentially interesting questions here about The Limits of Obligation.[0] If killing animals is wrong, do humans have a moral duty to bring about the extinction (or at least genetic engineering) of all carnivorous animals? 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 a…

> killing animals... would continue to occur at roughly the same rate even if there were no humans in the world

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.

Re: What if plants were animals like any other?

#66

Post by cheese_goddess »

cheese_goddess wrote: post #11
didibus wrote: post #4

This seems like a rabbit whole, at some point there's no objective ethics, you pick your line. Are you going to include bacteria, yeast, common viruses, dust mites, there's plenty to choose from. 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…

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, mic…

Replying to all sibling comments: oh, well. Maybe I know that wrong. I'll have to go back to find the source where I took this. I don't remember what that source was.

Re: What if plants were animals like any other?

#67

Post by cheese_goddess »

karpierz wrote: post #14
cheese_goddess wrote: post #9

> Worse, the production of one animal protein requires 7 to 10 plant proteins. The argument is a strictly accounting one. 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. So, seven proteins make seven ... sufferings? Proteins are a measure of suffering?

No, the point is that the process of generating meat requires the animal eat plants. So even if plants suffer, eating animals is still worse, since the animal suffers along with 7-10x the number of plants.

OK, so 1 animal suffering = 7 to 10 plant sufferings, yes?

There's a quantification of suffering according to which the suffering of one animal is equal to the suffering of 7-10 plants, correct?

Re: What if plants were animals like any other?

#68

Post by karpierz »

cheese_goddess wrote: post #67
karpierz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the point is that the process of generating meat requires the animal eat plants. So even if plants suffer, eating animals is still worse, since the animal suffers along with 7-10x the number of plants.

OK, so 1 animal suffering = 7 to 10 plant sufferings, yes? There's a quantification of suffering according to which the suffering of one animal is equal to the suffering of 7-10 plants, correct?

No, it's not comparing the suffering of plants and animals. It's only pointing out that by virtue of feeding an animal, you necessarily kill plants. So when you raise an animal to eat, you're killing both the animal as well as the plants it consumed. The 7-10x number is relative to the number of plants you'd have killed if you instead ate plants directly.

Re: What if plants were animals like any other?

#69

Post by [deleted] »

karpierz wrote: post #68
cheese_goddess wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so 1 animal suffering = 7 to 10 plant sufferings, yes? There's a quantification of suffering according to which the suffering of one animal is equal to the suffering of 7-10 plants, correct?

No, it's not comparing the suffering of plants and animals. It's only pointing out that by virtue of feeding an animal, you necessarily kill plants. So when you raise an animal to eat, you're killing both the animal as well as the plants it consumed. The 7-10x number is relative to the number of plants you'd have killed if you instead ate plants directly.

[deleted]

Re: What if plants were animals like any other?

#70

Post by cheese_goddess »

karpierz wrote: post #68
cheese_goddess wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so 1 animal suffering = 7 to 10 plant sufferings, yes? There's a quantification of suffering according to which the suffering of one animal is equal to the suffering of 7-10 plants, correct?

No, it's not comparing the suffering of plants and animals. It's only pointing out that by virtue of feeding an animal, you necessarily kill plants. So when you raise an animal to eat, you're killing both the animal as well as the plants it consumed. The 7-10x number is relative to the number of plants you'd have killed if you instead ate plants directly.

The quote says:

"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.

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