[handmodel]

This is what I don't quite get. Perhaps eating octopi seems gratuitous since they are expensive and not integrated into everyday customs/life. But hard to imagine an octopus is on a higher status than a pig or a cow which are fairly close to us evolutionarily.

[hashimotonomora]

Cows (actually their genes) have been evolutionarily successful by paradoxically allowing themselves to be slaughtered and eaten by humans.

[nefitty]

"Allow" implies some sort of consent. I understand that you mean in an evolutionary sense, but it's clear that most living beings are averse to dying, even when possessing the most biologically primitive nervous systems. I prefer to head off any arguments in bad faith, "well, why don't all the cows just run away?" Some people are very comfortable resorting to satirical absurdity when discussing suffering, as evidenced by ridiculous arguments like "plants feel pain, why do you eat plants?"

[glenngillen]

Genuine question and not an attempt to bait you, but curious why the latter is a ridiculous argument? I’ve not heard that argument, but I have seen the occasional piece of research pop up to suggest there’s more complicated communication or social structures in plants. Particularly fungi. I’ve no idea how true any of it is and what why more may learn about that in the coming decades. So while I personally don’t have evidence or believe it to be true, I couldn’t with absolute conviction rule it out either.

[nefitty]

I'm definitely open to discussing the possibility when it's with someone arguing in good faith. It seems like that's where you're coming from, so thank you.

I won't bury the lede further. Plants can't experience pain, at least insofar as we conceive of it, because they don't have nociceptors that signal pain. Therefore, if they do have any sort of phenomenological experience, whether it would be recognizable to us or not, there is no sense in describing anything they experience as "pain".

There may be simple damage-avoidance reflexes, but comparing that with what it feels like to break a bone would be like saying that pedestrians and vehicles should share the road. The difference in quality is so significant that it makes better sense to categorize those reflexes as not pain at all although in service of the same tissue-protecting goal. My legs are not a vehicle I don't think.

A final point on the deficit of nociception, is that the experience of pain is so central to our lived experience that it's difficult to conceive of what that would be like. It's like the alpha channel in rgba... Without that signal for opacity, there's no color at all.

If the above is not enough to convince, there's some recent research that sought to systematize the analysis of sentience. Here's the 8 points used:

  1) possession of nociceptors;
  2) possession of integrative brain regions;
  3) connections between nociceptors and integrative brain regions;
  4) responses affected by potential local anaesthetics or analgesics;
  5) motivational trade-offs that show a balancing of threat against opportunity for reward;
  6) flexible self-protective behaviours in response to injury and threat;
  7) associative learning that goes beyond habituation and sensitisation;
  8) behaviour that shows the animal values local anaesthetics or analgesics when injured

As you can see, plants are immediately out of the running on the most fundamental point. As you continue down, it becomes more and more absurd to say that plants feel. There's no mechanism by which that would be possible.

I hope that helps!

[hackernewds]

I think you're misplacing the reasoning for the pain argument as "they can't feel pain the same way mammals do" whereas the contending logical argument is actually "we should avoid eating plants for the same reason we should animals - that is, it would be against their desires". The plant reflex is an indication of the latter.

Else you could easily ethically qualify meat eating that is limited to the consumption animals killed while blinded and under the influence of anaesthetics.

[nefitty]

I see what you mean. I took it for granted that it's clear that sentience is a prerequisite to the capability of having desires. If someone did argue that plants have desires then I would question what they mean: either they're implying conscious preference of future states, desire predicated on sentience or they mean some metaphysical teleological conception of desire. The first two are mistakes, the last is not really the type of argument that I find fascinating beyond its relevance to social ritual or linguistic games.

[tshaddox]

If you could anesthetize animals so that they could never feel pain would that solve any moral problems with farming and eating animals?

[nefitty]

Not necessarily. A large part of what makes killing unethical is that it's a subversion of the creatures' preferences. In my mind I imagine that sentient beings have a little sandcastle-shaped plan for the future. Killing them is like stopping on their sandcastle. It's not the only way, but it's the worst because that sandcastle can never be rebuilt.

[mlspector]

I'm writing the arguments and questions below in good faith. I'm legitimately conflicted over this, and I admit that I haven't engaged in any research on this subject.

From what I can tell, the moral argument that you're presenting seems to boils down to the fact that we arbitrarily value animal life more than other kinds of life. I'm not saying that this is somehow "wrong" -- I'm bothered by the fact that the it's often presented in a way that makes it seem like it's some kind of universal truth, based on some criteria of the subject itself (e.g. presence of certain biological structures or phenomena), rather than specifics about the human experience.

> Plants can't experience pain, at least insofar as we conceive of it, because they don't have nociceptors that signal pain. Therefore, if they do have any sort of phenomenological experience, whether it would be recognizable to us or not, there is no sense in describing anything they experience as "pain".

So, they lack the biological machinery to feel (let's call it) animal-like pain. Is the argument that it's our moral obligation to reduce the phenomenological experience of animal-like pain in this universe? And by extension, that other kinds of "pain" (for lack of a better word) are less important? If so, isn't it more to-the-point to simply say "we shouldn't hurt things that are like us"? (This simple perspective is obviously problematic in its own ways -- I'm not necessarily advocating for it -- I'm just trying to clarify the essence of what I'll call the "nociceptor argument").

> A final point on the deficit of nociception, is that the experience of pain is so central to our lived experience that it's difficult to conceive of what that would be like. It's like the alpha channel in rgba... Without that signal for opacity, there's no color at all.

The argument here seems to be something like: "it's incomprehensible to humans, so therefore it doesn't exist." Again, it seems more straightforward to simply say that the fundamental criteria is whether or not the thing experiencing "pain" is sufficiently "like us".

I think basically what I'm trying to say is this: the "nociceptor argument" feels like a way of skirting around the fact that morality regarding animal rights boils down to human-specific feelings we have about animals -- and that those feelings are rooted in the fact that they're like us, and some quirk of our psychology causes (most of) us to feel pain when we see or imagine something like us in pain.

I personally don't believe that reality has hard boundaries of the kind that the "nociceptor argument" presupposes. Humans conceived those boundaries because they're useful to us as a part of how we model reality. From your response to another commenter ("...the last is not really the type of argument that I find fascinating beyond its relevance to social ritual or linguistic games"), I imagine you might find these arguments to be too metaphysical for your taste, but in my opinion, it's important for people to realize that these moral frameworks are rooted in human culture and psychology, not some biological reality independent of our species.

I'd be very happy to hear your thoughts or rebuttals, if you care to share them.

[nefitty]

I see where you're coming from. It's a failure on my part that I didn't make it clear that one of my ideals is continual expansion of our moral intuitions. It's also partly a choice to leave it out because it can become so unintuitive that it affects the basis of the entire argument.

Since you expressed openness to this dialogue, I'll share. When I really, really stretch my moral imagination to the point it decouples from practical logic, I find myself feeling spiritually reverent for the things that the mental abstraction "complexity" points at. I arrive at this by synthesizing a particular metaphor from Alan Watts with Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi's ideas on complexity.

In the same way an apple tree apples, the universe peoples. It also dogs, and weathers and softwares and cows. Of it emerge these beautiful structures, including plants. If I was capable of surviving the endeavor, cherishing and protecting every single one of those things that the universe expresses would be my ultimate ethical goal. I don't know if there's farther expansive rings of morality. I imagine I might be able to peek at some with the help of deep, deep meditative practice or other tools.

The thing that re-embodies me is the Buddhist idea of bodhisattvas. They are beings who have reached enlightenment, but then rejected paradise in honor of the work still left to do on this plane of existence.

That's basically the outline of my metaphysical beliefs.

Finally, specifically regarding pain and plants, I agree that we bend our intuitions to the experiences that make sense to us. My argument is that the word "pain" and what we understand pain to be, is predicated on a specific biological structure, nociceptors. To speak of pain without nociception is like saying the water in my hand isn't wet. They're enmeshed, dependent properties. So, if plants do experience something that increments the universe's suffering counter, which I leave as a possibility, we would have to imagine some other form of communication. Language and thought extrudes from the human body. As a consequence of that fact, there are just some things it can't capture, and attempting to do so places us closer to the choice: bodhisattva or buddha.

[cheese_goddess]

(Not the OP). In summary I think you mean that animal rights activists anthropomorphize non-human animals and they want us to treat them like we treat humans. They don't anthropomorphize plants so they don't care what happens to plants. Is that right?

If that's your point, I agree and I think that goes a long way to explain why there are very fewer objections to eating insects, or why many vegetarians are fine eating fish, but not cows.

[ejolto]

> social structures in plants. Particularly fungi.

FYI, fungi aren't plants, they are part of their own eukaryotic kingdom, and are more closely related to animals than plants.

We also usually only eat the fruit of the fungi, which we call mushrooms. The main part of the fungi lives under ground and is called the mycelium.

[kuhewa]

I understand what you are saying about implied agency, but it really must have worked like this on some level. Cow (physiology and behaviour) had to allow domestication. People tried to domesticate cheetahs, they didn't breed in captivity.

[cheese_goddess]

Jarred Diamond makes a point of this in "Guns, Germs and Steel". I don't have a copy at hand but, from memory, he argues that we domesticated horses but not, say, zebras or onagers because they don't have a disposition that is amenable to domestication. Cheetahs are another famous example, like you say (and I wish we could have domesticated them because then there would be more of them around).

It works the other way also. Humans have the kind of disposition that allows us to domesticate animals. We find it easy to care for other animals. By contrast, lions or wolves would never be able to domesticate sheep because their natural tendency is to kill prey animals on sight, basically. Human's aren't obligate carnivores and despite what some people in certain communities will claim, we are not a predator species and we have no instincts to kill everything that may be food. Check out how little kittens play for example, and how human children play, how many small animals kittens kill and how many small animals human children kill. We have an instinct to nurture and care for other animals and we used it to domesticate our farm animals.

We are not violent, bloodthirsty lions or wolves. We are curious and inquisitive apes and we like to learn new things and figure out how things work. We used this trait to understand how to breed farm animals and how to take care of them and how to use their natural tendencies to our own ends.

And just to be perfectly clear: I don't think that's morally wrong, not in any way, shape, or form and not to any degree at all. It is our compassion and intelligence that has made us farmers of other animals, not our cruelty and greed, like the meat-is-murder people claim. But it is cruelty and greed that is responsible for factory farming and its horrors are something that should rightfully concern us all.

[TaylorAlexander]

Which is why it makes sense to simply not eat any of them. It seems to be the healthiest option too, as long as you have access to enough healthy calories from plants.

[cheese_goddess]

That's not right. You need much more than calories from food. You can take all the calories you need by eating sugar for example, or dietary fat. If you don't eat meat, or cut out any major food groups, you need to be vary careful to supplement your diet with the nutrients that are now missing from it and since we don't really understand nutrition and our needs for nutrients very well, there is a risk of messing up and making yourself unhealthy in the process.

[TaylorAlexander]

That is why I specified “enough healthy calories”. What I meant was that as long as you have access to enough produce. Basically some people need to eat meat because it’s the only way to get enough nutrition. But if you live in California near a well stocked grocery store for example, then you just need to learn what a healthy vegan diet is and most people will do better on a vegan diet. At least according to NutritionFacts.org. A vegan diet has incredible health benefits including significantly reduced risk of heart disease and cancer.

I was not attempting to say all calories are the same. You definitely have to learn what foods are right to eat. But I think meat is only necessary for people that live in remote areas without enough access to healthy produce.

[cheese_goddess]

OK, thanks for explaining what you meant, I didn't understand you at first.

To be honest, I don't know what NutritionFacts.org is, exactly. I agree that most Californians, like most Americans (North and South) would do well to cut down on their meat consumption a bit, because it certainly looks like they eat way too much. But I don't think that needs to mean going vegan.

Traditional diets from places like the Mediterrannean or South-East Asia go a long way towards keeping people well-fed without excessive meat consumption, and there's no reason to not adopt, say, a vegetable- and pulses-heavy mediterrannean diet, rather than going vegan, if a healthy diet is the point. In fact, if that's the point, it's probably easier to eat healthy when _not_ going vegan, because of the missing nutrients that must be supplemented.

I grew up on a plant-based diet. Not "vegan" or "vegetarian" but "plant-based", meaning that most food I ate was made of plants: rice, pasta, potatoes, beans, chickpeas and lentils, green beans, okra and peas, tomatoes, aubergines and zucchini, tons of olive oil everywhere, garlic, onions, celery and carrots as the base of sauces and soups, liberal amounts of good cheese and yogurt, plenty of fish in the summer, and some meat once or twice a week as I was growing up, primarily chicken and pork (I don't like beef). I don't think there's anyone that can fault this way of eating for being either excessive or unhealthy and I still cook and eat that way today, the way my grandmothers cooked.

[TaylorAlexander]

You’re right that the American diet has gone way too far to meat, and eating a more Mediterranean or South-East Asian diet would be a big health improvement.

NutritionFacts.org is a non profit run by Dr. Michael Gregor, who runs a YouTube channel full of health advice. He looks at the latest scientific data and shares it on his channel. Based on his interpretation of the best available data a fully vegan diet seems to have a lot of health benefits. I became vegan for moral reasons so I haven’t researched what a more mixed diet would be like, but I’m glad my choice is a healthy one.

Here’s one of his full talks: https://youtu.be/7rNY7xKyGCQ

And here’s his channel: https://youtube.com/c/NutritionfactsOrgMD

[cheese_goddess]

Thank you for pointing those out. I'll have a look when I can. I have to say, given that I grew up on a Mediterrannean diet and I still eat this way I don't have a strong motivation to cut down on the amount of animal products I consume. I think this may be a nuance that is ofetn lost in discussions about eating meat between people from different cultures.