I'm never really sure what the point of things like this are. I've grown enough plants in my life to understand they're at least 'aware' in some way when bad things happen to them.
But in the end, it's a basic biological fact, unless a form of life can photosynthesize, it likely consumes some form of matter that was likely from something living. Extremophiles that eat sulphur and minerals and such aside, the majority of non-photosynthesizing life consumes organic matter. Said matter was at one time from something that was alive.
In the end debates about whether plants or animals suffer the same or more seem sort of moot. Life involves suffering of some kind for every living thing on this planet. It's another one of those inescapable facts.
I agree we should all try and minimize the amount of suffering we directly cause, but every day something somewhere suffers because each of us exist. Trying to pretend we can erase any and all suffering we may cause ever is a fruitless effort.
Personally debates like these make my head hurt, but I am grateful for philosophers and others who mine these topics and proffer summaries. I do think they are important topics [for some people] to think about.
> Life involves suffering of some kind for every living thing on this planet. It's another one of those inescapable facts.
So when plants consciously grow edible parts to themselves in exchange for seed dispersal, are they suffering? Do they suffer when they drop leaves every autumn?
>So when plants consciously grow edible parts to themselves in exchange for seed dispersal,
Depends on the plant and the kind of life cycle they have, in some cases, yes they slowly die after.
Even if they don't, think of human pregnancy and childbirth. Human mothers suffer a fair amount even during pregnancy as their nutrients are shared between their young and they grow inside them.
When plants produce fruits and seeds, they stop vegetative growth for the duration of this, the send any available nutrients to the seeds and fruit, thereby depriving the rest of the plant of needed nutrients. Post fruit production, it typically takes at least a season before vegetative growth begins.
>Do they suffer when they drop leaves every autumn?
Yes, they go dormant and can't feed themselves or grow. Sometimes overwintering trees or plants will die from the stress.
When I say suffering, I mostly mean, show visible signs of either stress or delayed growth, or other things plants typically 'suffer' from when mistreated or grown in poor conditions.
Whether it's the same as an animal suffering, I don't know and I doubt anyone could know or if it even matters. Animals and plants are fundamentally different, the way they display their 'suffering' is not really comparable. What we see as suffering in animals comes from our own experiences with suffering. We have no possible way to empathize or experience plant suffering so we have no actual way to ever truly understand how they may or may not 'feel' the same way we ever will with animals.
the cells that makeup those structures suffer the consequences of being sacrificed but the genes of that being have "decided" that the cost is worthwhile.
Fair. In the end, we'll find "well, _everything_ is suffering!" and be forced to just embrace it or pretend we never asked.
However, I do see the unpacking/evaluation of assumptions inherent in the debate as valuable … "why is ending a life that can experience suffering the way humans do more ethical than a life that doesn't?" and "what does it say about us that we want to prevent animals from suffering?" and so on …
Absolutely, I still think it's important to deeply meditate on suffering and to ask ethical questions like the ones you've pointed out. The alternative is to be sort of nihilistic, shrugging the creation of suffering off as inevitable and to keep on causing unnecessary harm.
I mean, an entire religion was formed around insights around suffering, so clearly people have been thinking about this for a long time!
This is a common feature of critiques of Schopenhaur; Philipp Mainländer advanced the position that God created the universe to end its atemporal suffering, exploding and binding itself temporally in order that its suffering should eventually cease.
It's frustrating that your article brushes off the philosophy as "unimaginably wrong" so easily with some hand wave of techno-utopian "genetic engineering". Benatar's writing takes pains to address why the situation cannot fundamentally be solved, especially via naive scientism.
That sort of implies trying to blow up the universe wouldn't be a fruitless effort in and of itself. You'd have better luck just waiting for the heat death of the universe at that point I think.
This seems like a rabbit whole, at some point there's no objective ethics, you pick your line. Are you going to include bacteria, yeast, common viruses, dust mites, there's plenty to choose from.
I think one thing that seems relevant to humans, is we seem to be bothered only once we can relate to the other being in a more explicit way. This is true even between our peers. Maybe as we understand more and more of other creatures so will our empathy.
Jainism takes this pretty far, I've been learning a bit about it recently and it's pretty interesting as far as ancient religions go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism
Thanks for sharing, I'm in the same boat. I love the logical consistency of Jainism, as I've always found vegans drawing the line at animals but not plants to be a bit arbitrary. Setting the goal as avoiding harming all life and then getting as close to that as you can without just starving to death is something I deeply admire. Not to mention the attention to microscopic life is particularly impressive and science-aware imo.
I would just like to point out that the existence of (what I assume you mean when you say) "objective ethics" isn't a sure thing. I don't mean to imply that ethical nihilism (basically saying ethics aren't "a thing") is the only way forward though. We can probably assign ethical value to human action even (some would say especially) if "objective ethics" don't exist.
Speaking of yeasts, I guess it's not something that's on everyone's minds, but the reason bread rises is because yeasts die in the heat of the oven and, reacting to the deadly environmental conditions, radically increase their rate of fermentation of the carbohydrates in the dough thus releasing abnormally large amounts of CO2 in a very short time.
Essentially, bread rises because of the the death throes of tiny, microscopic unicellular fungi.
No? They produce alcohol and CO2 during rising/proofing, and that gas has nowhere to go: it's trapped in the dough. Once heated, that trapped gas then expands during baking. The yeast dies, yes, but bread doesn't rise "because of the death throes of [yeast]", it rises because heating a gas increases in pressure, and the dough expands because of that pressure. Yes, the heat also kills the yeast, but that has nothing to do with oven spring.
(And of course, the spring only "sticks" if the dough is both elastic enough to permit that expansion -for example because it has a gluten network- and developed enough that, in that expanded state, the dough can set well enough to support its own shape, rather than deflating once we remove the heat, and the high pressure gasses cool down and contract, pull the now baked bread in on itself)
My impression was that fermentation outside the oven causes most of the rising, with a bit of "oven spring" from the vaporization of water in the dough.
The yeast obviously die in the oven, but I don't think the death per se is critical for the leavening.
Are you sure? I think the yeast produces CO2 before cooking and during the initial part of the cooking (while the drought temperature is below 40°C(???)). Most enzymes a cells have a temperature where they have an optimal efficiency, so I expect the yeast not to be so efficient when the drought is too hot.
But when the drought get hot the tiny bubbles of CO2 expand and when it's too hot and the drought get cooked and the structure around the bubbles is fixed like in a sponge.
Replying to all sibling comments: oh, well. Maybe I know that wrong. I'll have to go back to find the source where I took this. I don't remember what that source was.
I've yet to get a satisfying answer to why it matters - life is suffering. Is there any organism that can survive without the expense of something else?
construction kills animals, eating animals kills animals, using computers promotes industry which kills animals. what activity can a human participate in that doesn't kill animals?
of course, one can say fewer animals could be killed by doing [other things], but that's besides the point. I'm not sure you can win, nature will always find an equilibrium that will result in the same amount of death - you save the goats and they'll ruin the land and eventually all die. you kill the predators and overpopulation of the prey will run rampant resulting in eventual famine, etc.
and of course, if you're lucky things are in a stable state until something evolves and figures out efficient ways to wipe everything out - I suppose that's where we come in.
Not sure why I'm sharing this, but I saw a hawk kill a squirrel yesterday. It was standing on top of the squirrel (still alive) on my neighbor's lawn.
Three other squirrels were screeching and they made futile charges at the hawk to try to free the other squirrel.
The amount of distress / suffering / chaos was far more disturbing than I would have expected to see on a suburban lawn. I even considered intervening and trying to scare the hawk away.
There's a video I saw on youtube of a bear eating a deer alive in someone's backyard. The video is filmed from behind a sliding glass door or something, basically front row seats. It's quite horrifying; the deer screams and sounds just like a human screaming. I've gotta say, one thing I'll say about hunting is there's almost no way the animal will suffer as much from being shot as they would if they were eaten by bears or wolves instead.
My fun anecdote: I watched a hawk swoop down and land about 5 feet from a squirrel in my yard a few weeks ago. I thought to myself, "That squirrel is toast." The hawk just sat there and the squirrel charged it _and chased it off_. First time I've ever see that in my life. I'm assuming the hawk wasn't hungry or was ill, so the squirrel got lucky.
In theory wouldn't that cover any organism that subsists directly on a non-living energy source (forgot if there's a word for that). Plants with the sun, deep-sea life with thermal vents. If you go full sci-fi, I imagine a human could survive without the expense of another living thing if we could synthesize all the nutrients etc that a human needs.
As to why it matters in a philosophical sense, I'd say it doesn't. Everything's just matter and energy. But it matters to some people so they try to reduce their impact, just like violence matters to most people so most people try to avoid injuring or maiming people, even if it doesn't matter in the end.
If you spend enough time watching nature videos like I do, you will notice that the vast majority of animals are eaten alive by their predators. It's slow, and exceedingly painful and it is ubiquitous. So even if plants were conscious, I honestly don't care. A bear would eat me alive in the most painful way possible and they wouldn't even think a second about it. Neither will I.
That's not a very clever argument. Animals also routinely rape each other, fight and sometimes kill rivals, engage in cannibalism, etc.; that doesn't excuse humans committing murder and sexual assault anymore than natural predation excuses factory farming.
I mean sure it's perfectly natural, sure, whatever, it's also perfectly natural if the rest of us decide to ostracize and/or throw you in jail for it.
There are potentially interesting questions here about The Limits of Obligation.[0] If killing animals is wrong, do humans have a moral duty to bring about the extinction (or at least genetic engineering) of all carnivorous animals?
Probably not, but that begs the question: is killing animals wrong (given that it would continue to occur at roughly the same rate even if there were no humans in the world)?
One way to approach questions of moral obligation is to consider the actions of the median person. As an example, we could simplistically say that someone who emits more than the median amount of CO2 is responsible for anthropogenic climate change, whereas someone who emits less is not responsible for it.
In the case of animals and humans eating each other, though, the set of agents being considered might have to be the set of all animals on Earth. Under that analysis, since there are apparently 21 quadrillion spiders alive on the Earth today[1], the vast majority of which are exclusively carnivorous, any human who obtains some of their calorie intake from plants is less carnivorous than the median animal.
> killing animals... would continue to occur at roughly the same rate even if there were no humans in the world
Would it? Maybe in absolute terms when you include insects, but it's less clear if you talk about specific taxa. >50e9 chickens per year are slaughtered (and most don't have great lives before that), which is comparable to low-end estimates of the total number of wild birds on the planet (https://www.dw.com/en/50-billion-birds-live-on-earth-new-stu...). It seems likely that humans kill more chickens pa than non-humans kill all other birds combined.
It's true that nature is pretty red in tooth and claw, and very, very cruel.
But nature documentaries aren't really the best way to learn about it. They're designed to entertain rather than inform. They show an exceedingly skewed view of nature.
They're also not a great source of morality. You're not a bear. In particular, you don't live among bears. You have a sense of conscience that's different from a bear's, as a consequence (both nature and nurture) of living a very different life from a bear.
> Anything you do on non-human is fair game to me.
It might be wise to moderate that position by also objecting to people taking pleasure in seeing/causing the suffering of animals. You may not care about the experience of those animals, but you should still care what effect it has on the human who indulges that side of themselves.
Similarly you should also care that humans are not excessively exposed to scenes of "necessary" animal suffering, whether that be abattoir workers or veterinarians. Having psychological counselling mandated and freely available for these professions would be an ethical improvement for the world even if it didn't reduce the amount of animal suffering at all.
> Worse, the production of one animal protein requires 7 to 10 plant proteins. The argument is a strictly accounting one. Even if plant suffering were of the same intensity as animal suffering, omnivores would produce seven to ten times more suffering than plant lovers alone.
So, seven proteins make seven ... sufferings? Proteins are a measure of suffering?
No, the point is that the process of generating meat requires the animal eat plants. So even if plants suffer, eating animals is still worse, since the animal suffers along with 7-10x the number of plants.
It's a purely mathematical counter to the argument that if plants suffer, people (who consume a roughly fixed amount of protein) could just eat animals instead. That's a contradictory position, because animal protein comes from animals eating plants.
The article is a little vague on why killing plants is bad. Whether it's because you believe that destruction is intrinsically bad, because they have souls, because they feel suffering, or because there's some potential for growth that's aborted, the various reasons are harder for me at least to understand and to build a coherent argument around.
It's philosophically very obvious why killing people is bad, this is so self-evident it's almost nonsense to write it down and inadvertently equivocates it with killing plants: it's trivial to imagine oneself in the position of the victim, or to enumerate the harms being perpetrated, the goals and values being denied, and the rights being violated in the transaction, and conclude that it's wrong. No reasonable person can reach a different conclusion.
It's a little more difficult to extend this empathy towards an especially intelligent animal being killed; while humans have vastly richer communication and more advanced tool use, some animals can have mental and emotional processes not that much different than us. In that case, measuring suffering is more difficult and sometimes leads to surprising conclusions when you do the math. (I said a couple days ago [1] that a reasonable metric for suffering is the number of cortical neurons possessed by the victim, see also [2]). People can disagree about the scale of the suffering or what behaviors are appropriate in light of this problem, but it's easy enough to consider.
Of course, plants, lacking a brain or any neurons at all, are undefined by this criteria. And it's really difficult for me to anthropomorphize a carrot.
This book changed how I viewed plants. I always thought of plants as seemingly inert matter until then. It is similar to how people who never owned pets or a farm or lived closely with animals changes their view on non-human intelligence when they adopt a dog or cat etc. The spectrum of life is infinite. Humans like categories to aid our understanding but we define the categories and are error prone.
Vegans would be in trouble. I'm eating almost only fruits and legumes, but the "animal pain" argument is a bit ridiculous (there are way better arguments like health and environment) above all with this article. Plants also have senses like touch, they feel gravity (else they wouldn't grow vertically, even in the dark)
Readit News
But in the end, it's a basic biological fact, unless a form of life can photosynthesize, it likely consumes some form of matter that was likely from something living. Extremophiles that eat sulphur and minerals and such aside, the majority of non-photosynthesizing life consumes organic matter. Said matter was at one time from something that was alive.
In the end debates about whether plants or animals suffer the same or more seem sort of moot. Life involves suffering of some kind for every living thing on this planet. It's another one of those inescapable facts.
I agree we should all try and minimize the amount of suffering we directly cause, but every day something somewhere suffers because each of us exist. Trying to pretend we can erase any and all suffering we may cause ever is a fruitless effort.
So when plants consciously grow edible parts to themselves in exchange for seed dispersal, are they suffering? Do they suffer when they drop leaves every autumn?
Depends on the plant and the kind of life cycle they have, in some cases, yes they slowly die after.
Even if they don't, think of human pregnancy and childbirth. Human mothers suffer a fair amount even during pregnancy as their nutrients are shared between their young and they grow inside them.
When plants produce fruits and seeds, they stop vegetative growth for the duration of this, the send any available nutrients to the seeds and fruit, thereby depriving the rest of the plant of needed nutrients. Post fruit production, it typically takes at least a season before vegetative growth begins.
>Do they suffer when they drop leaves every autumn?
Yes, they go dormant and can't feed themselves or grow. Sometimes overwintering trees or plants will die from the stress.
When I say suffering, I mostly mean, show visible signs of either stress or delayed growth, or other things plants typically 'suffer' from when mistreated or grown in poor conditions.
Whether it's the same as an animal suffering, I don't know and I doubt anyone could know or if it even matters. Animals and plants are fundamentally different, the way they display their 'suffering' is not really comparable. What we see as suffering in animals comes from our own experiences with suffering. We have no possible way to empathize or experience plant suffering so we have no actual way to ever truly understand how they may or may not 'feel' the same way we ever will with animals.
However, I do see the unpacking/evaluation of assumptions inherent in the debate as valuable … "why is ending a life that can experience suffering the way humans do more ethical than a life that doesn't?" and "what does it say about us that we want to prevent animals from suffering?" and so on …
I mean, an entire religion was formed around insights around suffering, so clearly people have been thinking about this for a long time!
I wouldn't be so sure. Eduard Hartmann came up with a solution in the 19th century.
https://theconversation.com/solve-suffering-by-blowing-up-th...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead#Role_in_the_philos...
It's frustrating that your article brushes off the philosophy as "unimaginably wrong" so easily with some hand wave of techno-utopian "genetic engineering". Benatar's writing takes pains to address why the situation cannot fundamentally be solved, especially via naive scientism.
Is that any better? That sort of thing makes me think first of the horrifying disorder where people are unable to feel pain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pa...
And Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands" which is sort of a story of another kind of paperclip maximization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands
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I think one thing that seems relevant to humans, is we seem to be bothered only once we can relate to the other being in a more explicit way. This is true even between our peers. Maybe as we understand more and more of other creatures so will our empathy.
Particularly good if you're interested in diving in more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c33XPyljUiw
Essentially, bread rises because of the the death throes of tiny, microscopic unicellular fungi.
(And of course, the spring only "sticks" if the dough is both elastic enough to permit that expansion -for example because it has a gluten network- and developed enough that, in that expanded state, the dough can set well enough to support its own shape, rather than deflating once we remove the heat, and the high pressure gasses cool down and contract, pull the now baked bread in on itself)
My impression was that fermentation outside the oven causes most of the rising, with a bit of "oven spring" from the vaporization of water in the dough.
The yeast obviously die in the oven, but I don't think the death per se is critical for the leavening.
But when the drought get hot the tiny bubbles of CO2 expand and when it's too hot and the drought get cooked and the structure around the bubbles is fixed like in a sponge.
construction kills animals, eating animals kills animals, using computers promotes industry which kills animals. what activity can a human participate in that doesn't kill animals?
of course, one can say fewer animals could be killed by doing [other things], but that's besides the point. I'm not sure you can win, nature will always find an equilibrium that will result in the same amount of death - you save the goats and they'll ruin the land and eventually all die. you kill the predators and overpopulation of the prey will run rampant resulting in eventual famine, etc.
and of course, if you're lucky things are in a stable state until something evolves and figures out efficient ways to wipe everything out - I suppose that's where we come in.
Not sure why I'm sharing this, but I saw a hawk kill a squirrel yesterday. It was standing on top of the squirrel (still alive) on my neighbor's lawn.
Three other squirrels were screeching and they made futile charges at the hawk to try to free the other squirrel.
The amount of distress / suffering / chaos was far more disturbing than I would have expected to see on a suburban lawn. I even considered intervening and trying to scare the hawk away.
But the hawk's gotta eat, too.
Plus, it probably would've kicked my ass.
*edits for better phrasing.
As to why it matters in a philosophical sense, I'd say it doesn't. Everything's just matter and energy. But it matters to some people so they try to reduce their impact, just like violence matters to most people so most people try to avoid injuring or maiming people, even if it doesn't matter in the end.
Things that photosynthesize, before some resource limit is reached.
I mean sure it's perfectly natural, sure, whatever, it's also perfectly natural if the rest of us decide to ostracize and/or throw you in jail for it.
Probably not, but that begs the question: is killing animals wrong (given that it would continue to occur at roughly the same rate even if there were no humans in the world)?
One way to approach questions of moral obligation is to consider the actions of the median person. As an example, we could simplistically say that someone who emits more than the median amount of CO2 is responsible for anthropogenic climate change, whereas someone who emits less is not responsible for it.
In the case of animals and humans eating each other, though, the set of agents being considered might have to be the set of all animals on Earth. Under that analysis, since there are apparently 21 quadrillion spiders alive on the Earth today[1], the vast majority of which are exclusively carnivorous, any human who obtains some of their calorie intake from plants is less carnivorous than the median animal.
[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2215174
[1] https://www.allthingsnature.org/how-many-spiders-are-there-i...
Would it? Maybe in absolute terms when you include insects, but it's less clear if you talk about specific taxa. >50e9 chickens per year are slaughtered (and most don't have great lives before that), which is comparable to low-end estimates of the total number of wild birds on the planet (https://www.dw.com/en/50-billion-birds-live-on-earth-new-stu...). It seems likely that humans kill more chickens pa than non-humans kill all other birds combined.
But nature documentaries aren't really the best way to learn about it. They're designed to entertain rather than inform. They show an exceedingly skewed view of nature.
They're also not a great source of morality. You're not a bear. In particular, you don't live among bears. You have a sense of conscience that's different from a bear's, as a consequence (both nature and nurture) of living a very different life from a bear.
Journey to the Microcosmos - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBbnbBWJtwsf0jLGUwX5Q3g
For example - a Paramecium hunter - https://youtu.be/yXiJ__5-tI8
Technically the truth, because insects and fish are mostly eaten alive. But mammal predators generally kill their prey before they start eating it.
The only reason I may care about animal suffering is because the other human can get angry can cause me trouble.
It might be wise to moderate that position by also objecting to people taking pleasure in seeing/causing the suffering of animals. You may not care about the experience of those animals, but you should still care what effect it has on the human who indulges that side of themselves.
Similarly you should also care that humans are not excessively exposed to scenes of "necessary" animal suffering, whether that be abattoir workers or veterinarians. Having psychological counselling mandated and freely available for these professions would be an ethical improvement for the world even if it didn't reduce the amount of animal suffering at all.
So, seven proteins make seven ... sufferings? Proteins are a measure of suffering?
There's a quantification of suffering according to which the suffering of one animal is equal to the suffering of 7-10 plants, correct?
The article is a little vague on why killing plants is bad. Whether it's because you believe that destruction is intrinsically bad, because they have souls, because they feel suffering, or because there's some potential for growth that's aborted, the various reasons are harder for me at least to understand and to build a coherent argument around.
It's philosophically very obvious why killing people is bad, this is so self-evident it's almost nonsense to write it down and inadvertently equivocates it with killing plants: it's trivial to imagine oneself in the position of the victim, or to enumerate the harms being perpetrated, the goals and values being denied, and the rights being violated in the transaction, and conclude that it's wrong. No reasonable person can reach a different conclusion.
It's a little more difficult to extend this empathy towards an especially intelligent animal being killed; while humans have vastly richer communication and more advanced tool use, some animals can have mental and emotional processes not that much different than us. In that case, measuring suffering is more difficult and sometimes leads to surprising conclusions when you do the math. (I said a couple days ago [1] that a reasonable metric for suffering is the number of cortical neurons possessed by the victim, see also [2]). People can disagree about the scale of the suffering or what behaviors are appropriate in light of this problem, but it's easy enough to consider.
Of course, plants, lacking a brain or any neurons at all, are undefined by this criteria. And it's really difficult for me to anthropomorphize a carrot.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27492230 [2] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moral-costs-of-chicken...
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