[jorgesborges]

This actually makes sense to me in terms of logical coherence. I understand and support people who follow ethically-motivated diets but the fact is a line is always drawn somewhere. Plants are alive. Why is a carrot’s life less important than a rabbit’s?

I don’t think we’re good at making claims about where particular organisms sit along a gradient of consciousness we can’t even properly define.

I like to imagine other civilizations in the universe might use this basic distinction to evaluate how sophisticated a culture is — do they still needlessly eradicate life for more convenient consumption? Akin to asking, are they still a pre-warp civilization?

[aylmao]

I know a lot of people choose to draw lines, but I personally don't think it's necessarily a "line" one has to draw. I think this is best thought of as a gradient. A rabbit is more like us, than a carrot. It has eyes, a backbone, moms take care of their babies, etc. We look at a dogs and can clearly see loyalty, happiness, longing, etc— emotions we associate a lot with humanity.

Where these animals fall in the "they're similar to a human" gradient is highly subjective, especially since it may have an emotional component to it. But we don't have to all agree on the definition of this gradient when the consequences (what to eat) are very personal.

I will say though I admire this in humans. We have achieved plentifulness to the point we can attach moral and emotional meaning to our diet if we wish to. It's a pretty unique expression of our empathy.

[Waterluvian]

Where there’s a gradient and a binary decision, there’s absolutely a line.

[tripper_27]

Hey, will say your right about "seems similar to human", but behavior such as moms taking care of their babies is found in many plant species, as is loyalty. Probably happiness and longing as well.

Ask yourself how many of these feelings arise from the rational thinking part of your brain vs how they seem to be full body sensations, and realize that the central nervous system might allow such signals/awareness to propagate at mammal speed, but why would a plant need that speed?

There really is no reason why a CNS is needed for these emotions to be active, just a way to distribute hormones/chemical signals throughout the body.

[wruza]

In my book about distant civilizations they eradicate all life except the forms that are able to function as you described. Because it’s pointless to just avoid participating in a meat grinder that life itself is naturally. The point is to stop anything that suffers from suffering. They dream about visiting every world and eradicating unascended lifes there for that same reason.

[mmooss]

> it’s pointless to just avoid participating in a meat grinder that life itself is naturally.

We've revolutionized human life over a few generations, and even more over a few hundred years. One outcome is that you can communicate freely - politically and technologically - with people all over the world. And you use that to say how pointless it is to try to improve.

Think bigger and better. People did all that work to get us to this point; what will we do? How will we pull our weight?

The only thing you have to fear is trendy contempt itself.

[actionfromafar]

You haven't even read the book, yet it enticed such commentary. Not bad. :)

[otikik]

I think the distinction has always been between "alive" and "conscious", not between "alive" and "dead". A rabbit is more self-aware than a carrot, we think (because it has a central nervous system).

If you dig deep enough, the frontier between alive and death is actually blurry. Things like viruses challenge the intuitive understanding of what alive means.

The water cycle makes it so that any water that you consume today will probably have been part of some other alive being at some point in the past.

[flysand7]

Well according to biological taxonomy, viruses aren't "life", so the terms "alive" and "dead" don't quite apply to them

[jraph]

> Why is a carrot’s life less important than a rabbit’s?

A rabbit probably ate a lot of carrots, you are better off eating just the carrot directly if you want to reduce the killing :-)

[Terr_]

A trolley hurtling down the tracks towards a rabbit, and if you pull a lever it will go on to a different track that kills the same number of carrot plants that the rabbit has already eaten in its lifetime...

[labster]

And then the rabbit pulls the reverse lever, and the trolley is speeding back towards Elmer Fudd.

[PartiallyTyped]

I draw my line based on units of consciousness that I half-arbitrarily assign to different animals. I think most people do so, the assignment seems to be a sort of emergent property of the local society within which any individual is brought up.

[tialaramex]

Many years ago my lecturer, Professor Stevan Harnad drew the line at backbones, if you have a spine or similar arrangement it's not OK to eat you. These days Harnad is a Vegan, which entails prohibition against a much larger array of animals being eaten or indeed taken advantage of in any way for your benefit.

There is no reason to imagine that if there was alien life it would be able to comprehend us at all, for fictional convenience it has been usual to depict aliens as basically just humans in Halloween costume and there is every reason to assume they would be entirely incomprehensible instead. Even in soft SF, try say Iain M Banks' repeated reference to other forms of life which show essentially no interest in the scale of events that our human-like characters are engaged with. The Stellar Field Liner, a vast entity living in the magnetosphere of a star, the Excession, seemingly a living portal to other universes, or even just the Dirigible Behemothaurs which are island sized creatures that think a Galactic Cycle (225 million Earth years) is not very long.

[ben_w]

Mm.

So, are The Affront the literary equivalent of a human in a halloween costume? Extreme sadism as the only definiting trait I can recall, so they probably count as Planet of Hats* even if the physiology is too different to be a costume department's job in a TV show.

* https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlanetOfHats

[tialaramex]

Sure, it's really hard to do SF where you have aliens and keep them alien, because they no longer fulfil ordinary plot parameters. The key characters in the parallel story in Greg Egan's novel "Incandescence" aren't humans, never have been humans, and they live somewhere that humans would immediately die horribly and we'd need an XKCD "What if?" discussion to figure out how they die exactly 'cos they're much too close to a collapsed star and there's also no Oxygen and you can bet everything is totally saturated in radiation... They're probably... tiny? Nevertheless, they're our protagonists for fully half of a novel, so, they're going to get humanized.

[tayo42]

Some creatures are really weird too. Cutting up urchins for uni made me think what is really alive or what animals really are

[lkbm]

I'm pretty sure you draw the same line:

* Pealing a carrot: not cruel

* Skinning a rabbit alive: unnecessarily cruel

For all the nonsense about plants experiencing "pain", they, uh, don't. Animals do. Outside of bad philosophical arguments, everyone behaves broadly in accordance with that belief.

[ben_w]

I certainly behave as though plants do not experience pain.

However: plants are only noticeably animate in time-lapse footage, and have no mouth with which to scream.

I have no idea why the particular electrochemical properties of the neurotransmitter exchange membranes in my body are able to give rise to qualia, so without that I can't rule out plants doing that but very slowly.

Of course, if they do, then my skin may have an independent qualia to my kidneys let alone to what I call "me", so as you say, I don't live my life as if it were so.

[jorgesborges]

Yep, my argument isn’t grounded in whether a carrot feels pain — the comparison is to underscore the idea that in each case a living thing is extinguished from the world, and that they’re equivalent contrary to metrics like pain or “more like us”, simply for having experience.

[sharpshadow]

Well said a carrot and a rabbit are equal you can eat both.

[Terr_]

You can also take it in the opposite direction: Primitives don't have control over their own integrated ecological web.

[tzs]

> Plants are alive. Why is a carrot’s life less important than a rabbit’s?

Some have indeed wondered about plant rights. There is even a vegetable rights protest song, "Carrot Juice is Murder" [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmK0bZl4ILM