this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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I don't accept that, but even if I did, you should still act to minimize suffering as much as possible.
Do you really believe that killing a plant is the same as killing an animal?
under what ethical system?
I literally wrote this:
I guess you didn't actually read my entire post before you responded.
Honestly it just seems like you're trying to contort yourself into a knot that allows you to eat meat without feeling bad?
First four words of my initial post:
Did no one read it?
Ah my bad, I misread the original comment, just woke up lol.
No worries. My point was that I cannot make a claim at this point that plants definitely do not feel pain and suffering regardless of whether or not I am willing to eat them. There are other reasons good not to eat meat, such as environmental reasons, but I cannot honestly say for certain that when I eat a plant, harvesting it did not cause it pain and suffering because the more we learn about plants, the more we learn that they do have similar systems to animals in many ways even though they do it differently.
Does that make it more ethical in terms of causing pain and suffering to eat a plant rather than an animal just because their pain is not from same sort of nervous system as an animal's? Can we be certain that their reactions to being harmed or in trouble in some way, such as the chemical signals and the mother tree examples above isn't an expression of pain and suffering? I honestly do not know. We all have to eat to survive, so we have to make choices on this regardless of what the science tells us. The only way out of this, as someone else pointed out, is Star Trek replicators.
We also just don't know enough yet, so this discussion is more speculative because we just don't have good definitions for 'pain' and 'suffering' outside of our limited human perspective. It sure seems like all mammals feel pain. It's hard to tell if insects feel pain. It's really hard to tell if plants feel pain.
Pineapple tries to eat you back when you eat it, if that makes you feel any better. That painful sensation in your mouth that fresh pineapple causes is a digestive enzyme that the fruit releases to prevent animals from eating it. Works on humans about as well as capsaicin.
Like I said, I'm going to keep eating plants. It's just something to think about in terms of what suffering means and what people are willing to interpret as suffering and what they will accept when it comes to killing a living thing.