this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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Carnist, omnivore, speciesist. If the shoe fits π€·
To the best of my knowledge plants are not sentient. If they were I would take much better care of houseplants and still be vegan because eating other animals still kills way more plants (google trophic levels)
Disingenuous, ignorant, mentally deficient from years of choline deficiency. You're right. If the shoe fits.
Eating keeps things alive, only a vegan would think taking something out of its natural environment and subjecting it to worse living conditions and a shortened lifespan without the purpose of benefitting another lifeforms ability to survive as being less harmful.
We kill for survival, you kill for pleasure and ego.
Classist vegans only care for sentience, not life.
Why do non-vegans always have the stupidest takes wrapped up in some pseudo-intellectual bullshit. You obviously don't believe that someone killing your houseplant or lawn is as bad as someone killing your dog, so why say something so blatantly untruthful and dumb?
And how are vegans killing for pleasure when they have a more restricted diet than you?
Go out and continue the circle of life in your local Publix, you ferocious lion you!
Wow, do you even hear yourself? How lacking in compassion must you be to not have any care for plant life.
Nice to know that you don't have any arguments. Vegans are the dumb ones for sure! Continue trolling and pretending to be an idiot, that really shows how you have a point and they don't lol
I've got plenty of arguments, none you'd be able to get past your ego to accept though.
Saying killing plants is morally equivalent to killing animals is not only dumb, it's also an argument for veganism. It takes more plants to sustain an omnivore diet than a vegan one. All the animals you eat had to eat as well, and it's not an efficient transfer of calories. Look up trophic levels if you're actually arguing in good faith.
So I agree! Killing plants is murder! So you should go vegan and stop killing excessive plants for your selfish taste buds.
no, it's not
Great counter argument. Eating carcinogens is truly great for your mental facilities.
I think you're a troll, ignorant, projecting, or some combo of the above, so I'm going to stop responding to you now. Peace βοΈ
I'm going to assume you can't defend your position so you're going to curl up in your ego to keep warm. Enjoy!
this cannot be proven, but even if it's true, it doesn't matter. sentience is an arbitrary charcteristic on which to base your diet.
Sentience is what I base my ethics on (i'm a sentientist or sentiocentrist), which has implications on diet when considering whether to exploit and/or kill sentient beings for food. I don't think it's arbitrary, if someone is sentient, they are morally relevant because they can experience positive and negative valence (pleasure/pain, to put it more plainly but lose some nuance). If something is not sentient, I don't see how it can be ethically relevant except in cases where the nonsentient thing matters to a sentient being
if you're looking for arbitrary, the anthropocentrists are that way
Also I agree we can't prove that plants aren't sentient, that's why I said "to the best of my knowledge"
this is a moral virtue only to utilitarians.
there are other approaches to sentientism that aren't based on valence. I don't feel like writing a book on the different ones, but to give an example of a rights based one that I think is strong is that every sentient being has, at the very least, a right to their body, since that's the one thing they're born with and that is (almost certainly) what gives rise to their sentience in the first place. And to violate another sentient beings bodily autonomy is to forfeit your own (a sort of low level social contract), which allows for self defense and defending others
but to go back to utilitarianism, I think there's a strong argument that most ethical frameworks can be defined in terms of a sufficiently creative definition of utility. I don't really feel like getting into the weeds of that discussion though, and I don't think it's particularly relevant to the conversation anyways
I have to admit, I skipped the rest of this sentence on I don't foresee myself attempting to read it: I don't believe in rights as an objective phenomenon, either.
it is. your ethical position is highly relevant to any ethical argument you present.
Then present yours lol
Sentientism answers the question of "who/what matters?", not "what ethical framework should be used to care about who/what matters?". It can underly many ethical frameworks, personally I don't care that much what ethical framework you use as long as we can agree on who's included in the moral scope (although there are some utilitarians who I think have bad definitions of utility and/or do a bad job weighing the utility)
I'm not presenting an argument. I'm questioning yours.
this is a good reason to doubt the validity of the theory: it is constructed in a way that it is not disprovable.
this is just a tu quoque
I explained why it's not arbitrary, then pointed to a group that does draw arbitrary distinctions. That's not tu quoque because I'm not saying "you also"
you're saying it's not arbitrary. "no, you" is still a form of tu quoque. you haven't actually made a case that sentience isnt an arbitrary standard, and there isn't a case to be made: sentience isn't a natural phenomenon outside of human subjective classification. without people, there would be no concept of green or warm or sentient, and any of those attributes is an arbitrary standard to use to judge the ethics of a diet.
Are you saying everything we can talk about is arbitrary because everything we can talk about is with words and concepts?
Are you talking about meriological nihilism? (thanks alex oconnor for teaching me that term lol)
I know sentience is real based on the fact that I'm experiencing things right this moment. Based on my understanding of the brain and nervous system, and the strong evidence that those things give rise to my sentience, I think that it's reasonable to extrapolate that other, similar nervous systems/brains are also sentient and their experience is worth consideration in a similar way to how I consider my own experience (among the many other reasons to have a basic level of empathy)
why sentience and not DNA? or literally any other characteristic? your standard is absolutely arbitrary.
the same can be said of DNA. this is a completely arbitrary standard, and you would be better served to embrace that than pretending it's somehow objective.
I'm not saying it is objective, I'm saying it's not arbitrary.
If my dna was isolated in a test tube and it could experience things then I would also care about what it experiences. There isn't any evidence I'm aware of that that's the case. Dna is the instructions and tool to build the sentient being, not the sentient being itself. So no, the same couldn't be said of dna. Extrapolating from how much I care about what I experience, I think it's reasonable to care about what things that experience things experience
this can't be true. it's self-contradictory.
ok, taboo the word arbitrary. What do you mean when you say arbitrary?
I mean there is no objective reason to set the standard at sentience any more than any other standard.
Then based on the way you are using arbitrary, I see why you think my position is arbitrary. Do you think all positions are arbitrary?
all subjective opinions, like ethics or aesthetics, are.
Hell even to get past solipsism you have to subjectively assume to that your mind and senses accurately reflect the world at least a little bit, otherwise gathering any accurate data or reasoning about that data productively would not be possible
right....
Once you go to a deep enough layer I think you're right. But, the one subjective thing my argument rests on is that you care about your own experience. Anyone who flinches away from touching a hot stove because it hurts cares about their experience at least a little. The next step is recognizing that from an objective view, there's no reason to think your subjective experience is any more important than anyone elses (subjectively there is).
we are going to, once again, disagree on the relevant definition of "anyone".
That seems to bother you. Let's taboo the word. When I say "someone", "anyone", "person", etc, I'm referring to a sentient being, a subject of experience, an experiencer, one who is experiencing. Now you can interpret what I'm saying better, do you disagree with the actual points I'm making?
yes, I do: sentience is too broad a category, and not actually relevant to most people. if we are talking about people, then all of your statements are fine. but I don't agree that these axioms are or should be applicable to, say, mosquitos . or mice. or dogs or cats. or fish. or livestock.
Why is sentience too broad? afaik all humans are sentient, otherwise we'd be philosophical zombies (or there would be p-zombies among us)
it's too broad because it includes mosquitoes and mice and dogs and cats and fish and livestock. most people don't treat them the same way. most ethical systems don't treat them the same way. My ethical system doesn't treat them the same way. so I do not agree that it's okay to write an axiom about how you're supposed to treat sentient beings. treating people better than animals is a good thing.
are your ethical views based on what most people have done historically? Or how most ethical systems view something? What is your ethical system?
what is/are the difference(s) between human and non-human animals that justifies treating humans better than non-humans?
name the trait is a fallacious line of argument because it falls prey to the linedrawing fallacy.