[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.

[mlspector]

You've understood me perfectly. No counter-arguments from me; what follows are just some thoughts that your comment inspired.

> 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.

I love this framing.

> 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.

Whenever this thought comes to my mind, I can't help but think about the Christian idea the human beings are inherently sinful (I may not be getting this exactly right -- I'm not a Christian). As you point out: we're forced to "destroy" expressions of the universe in order to survive. Maybe this is OK, and their destruction is part of that expression -- or maybe we're inherently sinful, and the best we can do is damage control.

> 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.

This is fascinating. I'll be doing some reading on this.

> 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.

Fully agreed. Something I was trying to express in my first comment is that I find this conclusion perfectly acceptable (i.e. that we exclude plants from our moral framework, because of their incomprehensibility), but that it's important to recognize that it's grounded in our own ability to comprehend the experience of others (as opposed to something inherent to the "other" itself).

[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.

[mlspector]

Yes, this captures the essence of what I'm saying.

I would just add for clarity that I don't think that it's "wrong" for us to elevate life that's more like us, and so I don't think it's "wrong" for animal rights activists to behave in the way that you're describing. I only take issue with justifying that behavior by pointing to specific biological features, when to me, it feels closer to the truth to say that we behave this way because it feels right, and it feels right because of something inherent to the human experience. I believe this is an important distinction because it helps us realize that human experience is context-dependent, and so our sense of morality will be, too. (E.g. one could argue that it's less moral to eat meat now than it was 500 years ago.)