| > We can't know what "suffering" feels like to less intelligent and "simpler" animals so why make our sentience a criterion for the morality of eating? Using the power of the scientific method, we can form hypothesis. Take a bite out of a few hundred people, give them IQ tests. Give surveys. Use induction. As our ability to communicate with more and more animals improves with technology, start giving them surveys after taking a bite out of them. My hypothesis is that every animal along the questionnaire wave front will overwhelmingly self report that they prefer not to be eaten. At some point, we'll all have to wring our hands about an arXiv preprint where somebody convincingly lets us know that the corn doesn't like being eaten either. We'll find a few really depressed plants and animals that are ready to be eaten, and some people will propose we make the world a more depressing place so there's more consent in all this. That's a bad take, but the argument will last 1000 years. All the while everyone and everything will keep on eating and eating. Have you ever sat and thought about all the eating that has gone into making this moment for you? Like, all the eating you've done, all the eating of the creatures and plants that you've eaten have done. All your ancestors. So on and so forth back to the simplest primordial chemical reactions. Life is the tip of the spear atop a long cone of death and teeth gnashing. It's quite horrific. The universe would be a lot more chill if we could just leave the clouds of fluorine to meditate. They're quite serene when they do that. |