[philipswood]

At some stage my son was wilfully damaging plants.

As part of the discipline to make him stop I showed him videos of plants sped up.

It becomes a bit harder to deny that they aren’t the inanimate objects we perceive them to be because they are slow when you see them react to stimuli and they show what seems to be intent.

Although it certainly isn’t a consensus opinion there is a real possibility that (given that the nervous system specialises what normal tissues can also do) plants are considerably more “conscious” than we give them credit for.

They have been proven to be able to communicate.

There are even suggestions that they could “see” without specialised eyes.

I’m not sure where this would leave moral vegans.

Besides attempting a diet of fruit - we clearly need to kill to survive.

PS: To clarify my own positioning on this - I eat meat. I occasionally go vegetarian for health or spiritual reasons. I do believe we can and should strive to minimise cruelty, waste and environmental damage and impacts.

The lives of some livestock are significantly better than that of many wild creatures and it can be a humane choice given that they would not exist without our intervention.

That said I don’t think that we are currently near the level of responsibility that we could be. Our levels of cruelty, waste and environmental impact are unacceptably high and will seem barbaric to our descendants.

[WaxProlix]

This is a lot of very commonly repeated speculative talking point soup when people are trying to rile up vegans. I'm not a vegan, and I'm not saying you're being disingenuous here, but if you use these lines to try and engage vegans at some point and don't get the level of engagement you're looking for, it's because this kind of both-sides moral equivalence between meat eating and plant eating is pretty common in the needling-vegans scene :)

That said, if we think there's a continuum with humans, dolphins, apes, and maybe octopuses on one side, and fungi & prokaryotes or something on the other, then plants (and maybe shellfish?) are certainly 'better' to kill and eat than cats, eg.

[philipswood]

I like the continuum idea.

Given that we cannot not kill something to live yet, the current local minimum would be to live by eating some kind of cultured microorganism?

Something like cultured algae or a genetically engineered organisms that expressed suitable proteins.

Fruit might be an acceptable minimal choice given that it’s “voluntarily given” to some point of views.

Strangely the thought of engineering an animal to make a meat fruit seems repugnant - imagine an animal modified to grow flesh that could be removed with little pain and no injury.

Vat grown meat is an interesting thought - if we can pull it off.

Ultimately only something like molecular nanotechnology could free us from killing to live.

Alternatively modified human beings.

[hackernewds]

What logic makes plants better to kill than cows, better than octopi, better than cats? because vegans might the argument uncomfortable doesn't render it invalid either

[dayglo]

If I gave you a live chicken, a head of broccoli, what would happen when you tried to cut up each one with a carving knife?

You instinctively know what fear and pain are, and minimising those things is the point of veganism.

If plants feel their fear and pain far slower, then much less of it is happening.

[FiberBundle]

It's also entirely implausible, from an evolutionary perspective, that plants should have developed the capacity to feel pain on a scale similar to other organisms given that they haven't developed the ability to move away from situations that might cause them pain (pain being a proxy for survival risk).

[philipswood]

Keep in mind that instead of fight or flight plants have a range of internal chemical responses available to minimise damage and that this does make pain plausible:

Videos of plants calcium signalling response to damage:

https://news.wisc.edu/blazes-of-light-reveal-how-plants-sign...

Plants responding to sounds of herbivore (dare we say “predator”) insects:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00442-014-2995-6

Even plant “vision” is becoming more plausible:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/veggies-with-visi...

You can find a lot more material in this vein. My point is that we are “animalists” and not very well predisposed to recognising the true nature of plants given how different they are to us.

[FiberBundle]

That's interesting, thanks for the links.

[throwaway98797]

if I starve you for a week, what would you do then?

ethics are always the privilege of the well to do

[FiberBundle]

> Although it certainly isn’t a consensus opinion there is a real possibility that (given that the nervous system specialises what normal tissues can also do) plants are considerably more “conscious” than we give them credit for.

Yes, that is a possibility, but it's also an entirely ridiculous argument to make to argue against veganism. If you want to argue that the nervous system is just a more specialized version of other tissue and consciousness could therefore, in principal, arise in any kind of organic matter, or inorganic matter even, then one obviously can't prove that statement wrong, but it also seems to entirely miss the point given our current scientific understanding. Obviously humans cannot live in a way that completely avoids any (theoretical) harm to our environment, but veganism is by far the dietary choice that minimizes suffering in this world (though there do exist differences in the kind of vegan diet with regards to its environmental impact).

[philipswood]

To be clear: I’m not arguing against veganism.

It’s a choice I respect even if I do not choose it myself.

It’s a ecologically sound choice and does clearly minimise “suffering” according to some measures (given the choices available today).

I’m personally not fully convinced that it is a healthy choice for humans over their whole lifespan, but I realise that this is something that can be debated.

I’m genuinely interested in the idea that we don’t “get” plants yet.

I’m curious as to the personal response of vegans if plants we’re to be shown more aware than we give them credit for.

I’ve also hounded my “moral” vegetarian friends (i.e. those who choose it as a moral stance) with questions about what they would do if vat-grown meat where to become viable.

People are fascinating: I know someone who is against eating “wild animals”. For some reason, to her, farmed crocodile and ostrich are still wild animals.

[hackernewds]

one could argue the need to displace grazing landmass, that could support free-range animals, with endless fields of low-throughput vegetables that need more land and water per capita-calorie/nutrient is far more damaging to the planet.

https://www.paesta.psu.edu/podcast/how-much-water-does-it-re...

[undersuit]

What do the humans eat in the first world?