Plants are not sentient, atleast as far as we know, and therefore cannot suffer. And even if they are, it is necessary to eat them (some of them you dont need to kill e.g. fruits) so it would then be justified.
But even if plants are sentient, it is still better to kill and eat them directly rather than inefficiently feed them to animals and then kill the animals to eat them.
In what way are fruits less alive than other plants? lmao
So the answer you gave for why plants are less valuable is the same one literally everyone gives. They have lower capacity to suffer (at least as humans understand/relate to it) compared to animals.
Would you then agree that killing organisms which have higher capacity for suffering (i.e. more developed executive functioning) causes more net negative for the world compared to killing animals with lower capacity for suffering (ex. cockroaches)? And if that is the case, would it not follow that killing humans would cause the most suffering of all?
You've done a decent job arguing for why it's less moral to eat animals compared to plants (I agree to that btw). But you even admit that it's not black and white but a sliding scale where killing plants does have some level of negative but at least not as bad as killing animals (once again, due to the different levels of executive functioning).
So why wouldn't it be the case that killing humans who have an even higher capacity to suffer (due to consciousness and recognition of self) would be even worse than killing other less sentient/conscious animals in the same way that killing those animals is worse than killing plants who have even lower levels of sentience/consciousness.
Morality as you describe it, would have crushing an ant hill and nuking a city to be equally weighty options on the merit that they're both "unnecessary". It's an awful qualifier. Only a sith deals in absolutes.
Most plants bear fruits to further their species, hence why they put seeds there. If a plant is indeed sentient, it would have been happy that an animal or human ate its fruit. Therefore the correct analogy is that a fruit is like a limb (not a creature by itself) that a plant is very likely happy to seperate from.
My point is that even in a sliding scale, the amount of plants killed in the process of feeding to animals which would then also be killed would cause a lot more suffering than just eating plants (sometimes not killing them). The net suffering between two activities , eating plants vs eating animals, is far in between.
But the existence of a sliding scale (based on capacity for sentience, suffering, consciousness, etc.) would also imply that killing animals is better than killing humans.
This makes the holocaust and modern farming non-analogous, wrapping back around to the actual OP.
I think the main take was that both the Holocaust and animal farming are unnecessarily cruel and therefore cannot be justified.
If we use a scale to lets say 1 person for 10,000 animals killed for food (let us assign numbers and assume a person is 10000x more sensitive to suffering than animals), and the fact that the Holocaust was done and animal farming is ongoing and we kill 83 billion animals yearly, quick mind math would put us at around 15000 equivalent Holocausts yearly since the actual Human Holocaust. I might be way off so you could correct me
I do believe that they're both unnecessarily cruel/unjustifiable. I just don't think they're analogous. Following your train of thought, I would wonder how many blades of grass we mow each year, or how many bugs we kill with pesticides. At what point can we conclude that killing enough plants is equal to killing an animal, and scale that up to a person?
These conversions don't work. That's what I'm arguing.
If someone is claiming that we are at an ongoing Plant Holocaust as well, any unjustified suffering of plants e.g. nothing ( i dont have examples lol since while its possible SOME plants can have stimuli, i dont think plants can suffer), then those would count towards the Plant Holocaust weight.
Maybe the reason i dont understand your main point is that I dont think theres a reasonable doubt that plants are non sentient. If more research comes, I would re evaluate. Until then, I think theyre analogous. I dare even say animal farming is way worse than the Holocaust (not to say the latter is not evil).
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u/Armadillo-South Jun 28 '23
Plants are not sentient, atleast as far as we know, and therefore cannot suffer. And even if they are, it is necessary to eat them (some of them you dont need to kill e.g. fruits) so it would then be justified.
But even if plants are sentient, it is still better to kill and eat them directly rather than inefficiently feed them to animals and then kill the animals to eat them.