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Some people love to use this information as a fallacious argument of futility against veganism, i.e. that suffering cannot be avoided because "plants suffer to

by spraak 8y ago

Some people love to use this information as a fallacious argument of futility against veganism, i.e. that suffering cannot be avoided because "plants suffer too!". But this misses the point. Plants can respond to stimuli, but it doesn't mean that they feel pain, suffer and have a consciousness and emotions like animals do. > Plants have no eyes, no ears, no mouth and no hands. They do not have a brain or a nervous system. That again, they respond to stimuli but don't feel pain like an animal.

13415 8y ago
If vegans were serious about stopping suffering, they'd create a machine that instantly destroys earth. Edit: While I'm perfectly fine with being downvoted for this and understand why - this was meant as a joke, and you shouldn't joke on HN - I need to point out that this Doomsday Machine Argument is a standard argument against Negative Utilitarianism, which was first published by R.N. Smart, and anyone with a negative utilitarian doctrine (incl. many vegans) needs to address this argument.
- jonmrodriguez 8y ago
  Speaking as a vegan: The reason I am vegan is for utilitarian reasons. Neuroscientists agree that there is firm evidence that all animals (NOT PLANTS) are sentient to varying degrees. I believe that in the future it will be possible to quantify exactly how sentient each species is (e.g. a dog is 1/4 of a person or a cow is 1/5 of a person). Furthermore, through technology such as EEG, fMRI, and intravenous monitoring of hormone levels, it will be possible to quantify whether a given species is, on average, happy more than sad. Speaking as a living being, I believe that life is on the whole vastly more positive than negative. The balance only tips for the worse when factors such as slavery and torture come into play, which is why I choose not to consume products produced in factory farms, which are the modern implementation of slavery.
  - ianai 8y ago
    I’m also a vegan. There wasn’t any singular reason that led me to this resolution, but many factors. For instance, I probably wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for modern medicines use of animals. But that’s more of a survival issue than killing an animal because it’s protein is preferable to a plants. To an extent, I realized how little enjoyment I got out of eating meat compared to the suffering animals face. I read of the health benefits of going first vegetarian and ultimately vegan. Why eat cholesterol if I don’t have to eat it? Having said that, there is often a benefit to plants from human cultivation - but it’s not an absolute benefit. Our love of fruit results in their trees/plants being cared for by humans. Many of the plant products we eat don’t result in the death of the plant. If those plants could speak I think they’d thankful of their caretakers. Sure we’re not planting most of their seeds, but they do have a maintained population. I wish no animals ever suffered at the hands of humans. This world is full of beauty, and it’s awful that so much of human activity results in life’s death and extinction - including deforestation for crops.
    - mirko22 8y ago
      > and it’s awful that so much of human activity results in life’s death and extinction What you mean is nature not just humans. Life death cycle is natural thing. World is full of beauty, but it is also full of suffering and pain, large portion of it not having to do anything with humans. Animals can starve in nature, get mutilated etc. Nature is both sides of the coin, not just the pretty one. As for what you eat, it’s very hard to scientifically prove what’s healthier for you. There are way too many outside factors that influence that. A lot of plants you buy in a shop are treated with chemicals in unhealthy way. Apple, carrots, tomatoes are all treated to ripe when they need to cos they are usually harvested before fully ripe. And third thing, just cos you don’t need something doesn’t mean humans won’t do it, that’s, once again, in our nature.
      - jllaneras 8y ago
        It's so easy to convince ourselves that eating meat is completely fine. Maybe it wouldn't be that easy if every time you wanted to eat meat you had to go yourself to the slaughterhouse and see the horrors caused by those you pay to. Second, is proven that growing vegetables is more sustainable that growing meat.
  - tempestn 8y ago
    How would you feel about raising (for example) cattle in a perfect, free range setting—giving them plenty of quality feed, as well as breeding opportunities—and then eventually slaughtering them painlessly in their sleep? So the cow would live what is presumably an excellent cow life, which would then, unbeknownst to it, be cut short. The alternative of course, without the farm, is that the cow would not have existed at all. From a utilitarian perspective, ISTM such a situation could only be considered a net good for the cow, let alone the people who eat the meat. A good but truncated life has to be better than no life at all. The counter-argument would appear to be one of moral absolutism rather than utilitarianism—that killing a sentient being unnecessarily is simply wrong. Which isn't to say that that argument is necessarily flawed; I'm not sure there's even an argument to be had once you get to the level of disagreement on moral absolutes. But I do think the utilitarian aspect is interesting to consider. Edit: As an aside, I recognize that the vast majority of farms (ie factory farms) are nothing like the idyllic farm described.
    - spraak 8y ago
      However good their life was before, you're still taking it against their will.
- rhn_mk1 8y ago
  You forgot that life could be outside of Earth too. It would be foolish to wipe oneself out before wiping them.
- ianai 8y ago
  I disagree. The doomsday machine “argument” is invalid - it’s probably some dual argument to solipsism based on the near zero thought I’m willing to expend.
marcv81 8y ago
"That again, they respond to stimuli but don't feel pain like an animal." I don't feel this is a valid argument. We only really know how pain feels to us, but we can guess it also applies to other humans, animals, etc. That we cannot imagine how it feels to respond to negative stimuli as a plant should not invalidate the possibility that it is unpleasant.
- chimprich 8y ago
  It seems vanishingly unlikely that a plant could experience pain. To the best of our knowledge, you need a brain of some sort to experience anything. Even that may not be sufficient: an unconscious human doesn't appear to experience pain. You could argue that plants may have some unknown structure that allows them to experience pain or other phenomena, but that's no very useful. You could argue the same about rocks. It's impossible to prove a negative.
- abdullahkhalids 8y ago
  A robot can be designed to respond to stimuli. For instance, an advanced robotic vacuum cleaner moves away when it hits an object that was not supposed to be there, or move away from a source of heat or from water. In what sense are these responses different from the response of a plant or an insect?
hirundo 8y ago
Plants struggle to survive and reproduce as animals do, with different strategies adapted to their circumstances. Pain is just a specific mechanism toward that end, as is sentience. Why should we privilege those mechanisms when deciding which organisms are worthy of our concern? It's as if birds decided that flight is the key feature important to determining interspecies concern. Chauvinism based on anthropoid characteristics is still chauvinism.
hw 8y ago
There are some people who don't feel pain (congenital insensitivity to pain). If there was a way to raise animals such that they lack the ability to feel pain and emotions, would it be acceptable to vegans to then consume animals?
- adrianN 8y ago
  Lab grown meat will hopefully become a thing in the next decade.
  - girvo 8y ago
    There’s an interesting contingent of vegans who don’t think lab grown meat is a good idea ethically. https://www.thoughtco.com/laboratory-grown-meat-is-not-vegan-127673 https://www.thoughtco.com/laboratory-grown-meat-is-not-vegan...
mirko22 8y ago
In my view, what’s futile about it is the fact that for many veganism has to do with moral choice against animal suffering but gets conflated with “living healthy”. Skin of an apple that you buy in standard shop is anything but healthy due to the amount of chemicals applied to it. Even the home grown plants can be treated in a way that is unhealthy. And thirdly, things like avocado plantations are anything but environment friendly.
- Thiez 8y ago
  Are you seriously suggesting that (all else being equal) a mixed diet is healthier than a vegetarian diet because in a mixed diet you consume less chemicals through fruit and vegetables?
  - mirko22 8y ago
    No, I am saying eating plants != healthy per se. I have seen people suggesting all meat diet is healthier then all plant diet, and to those people i also say depends how the meat was produced, treated and kept before selling. You give antibiotics to animals, take animal manure for you bio plants which take up some of those antibiotics and now you have plant that also has it... I have seen people put pesticides on fruits which usually takes 15 days to degrade and sell them in couple of days. That fruit is technically poisonous. So what I am suggesting that unless you know how you food was grown and treated you don’t know it is healthy. So moral choices does not mean healthy choices just cos.
cko 8y ago
Ok. What about: sea sponges, starfish, jellyfish, and octopi? (If you’re drawing a seemingly arbitrary line at “has brain / nervous system => able to feel suffering”) Which signalling molecules would qualify?
- thraxil 8y ago
  FWIW, among vegans, there is a bit of controversy over certain bivalves. Oysters and Mussels both lack a sophisticated central nervous system and likely are closer to plants than even higher invertebrates in terms of anything like pain perception. There's a reasonable case to be made that ethical vegans should be able to eat them, especially considering that oyster and mussel farming actually removes pollution from the water and has a positive environmental impact (unsurprisingly, there is plenty of disagreement though). I don't know much about sea sponges, starfish, or jellyfish so I won't comment on those. Octopuses though are actually very intelligent compared to most other invertebrates. There are examples of complex problem solving, observational learning, and even tool use. Their intelligence is very "different" than what we are used to and hard to compare apples to apples, but is probably closer to the level of mice/rats/dogs than to insects or fish.
AndrewKemendo 8y ago
You're shifting the burden of culpability to a specific and more concrete definition of "pain" and "suffering" than our current science recognizes. The neuroscience of pain and suffering isn't binary and is extremely complicated and multi-variate [1]. For example in humans, nociceptors [2] – tissue sensing nerve cells – respond to damaging or potentially damaging stimuli by sending “possible threat” signals to the spinal cord and the brain. This is interpreted on a spectrum of what we interpret semantically as "pain." What is shown in the videos of the plants, is effectively no different than the nociception process in humans, which could safely be classified as "pain." If you want to define a distinguishing point for pain/suffering differently, that's fine, but it wouldn't have much basis scientifically. [1] http://clbb.mgh.harvard.edu/pain/ http://clbb.mgh.harvard.edu/pain/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nociceptor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nociceptor
cwmoore 8y ago
What does veganism have to do with HN or the article? This seems like basically a political discussion hijacking a science post.
- spraak 8y ago
  A huge percentage of HN comments are only tangentially related to the link.
thraxil 8y ago
It's also a moot argument because animals that are raised for meat... eat plants. Lots of plants. Meat is incredibly inefficient in that sense. Most farmland in the US is for animal feed. So if someone really is worried that plants feel pain and wants to reduce the amount of plants being killed, the most effective thing they could do would be to stop eating meat.
lizknope 8y ago
In Jainism some of the more strict followers do not eat root vegetables (like potatoes) because it is considered violence against plants. If you eat an apple you are not killing the plant and actually helping it to spread its seeds. If you dig up root vegetables you most likely end up killing the plant. Mushrooms and other fungi are considered violence against plants as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism
bromuro 8y ago
I’ve grow plants the whole life and I’m pretty sure they feel pain. I know that, you start observing them and you understand with time their emotions. Pain is the easiest to spot. We don’t need to wait the scientists answer about that.

by spraak 8y ago

13415 8y ago

If vegans were serious about stopping suffering, they'd create a machine that instantly destroys earth. Edit: While I'm perfectly fine with being downvoted for this and understand why - this was meant as a joke, and you shouldn't joke on HN - I need to point out that this Doomsday Machine Argument is a standard argument against Negative Utilitarianism, which was first published by R.N. Smart, and anyone with a negative utilitarian doctrine (incl. many vegans) needs to address this argument.

jonmrodriguez 8y ago
Speaking as a vegan: The reason I am vegan is for utilitarian reasons. Neuroscientists agree that there is firm evidence that all animals (NOT PLANTS) are sentient to varying degrees. I believe that in the future it will be possible to quantify exactly how sentient each species is (e.g. a dog is 1/4 of a person or a cow is 1/5 of a person). Furthermore, through technology such as EEG, fMRI, and intravenous monitoring of hormone levels, it will be possible to quantify whether a given species is, on average, happy more than sad. Speaking as a living being, I believe that life is on the whole vastly more positive than negative. The balance only tips for the worse when factors such as slavery and torture come into play, which is why I choose not to consume products produced in factory farms, which are the modern implementation of slavery.
- ianai 8y ago
  I’m also a vegan. There wasn’t any singular reason that led me to this resolution, but many factors. For instance, I probably wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for modern medicines use of animals. But that’s more of a survival issue than killing an animal because it’s protein is preferable to a plants. To an extent, I realized how little enjoyment I got out of eating meat compared to the suffering animals face. I read of the health benefits of going first vegetarian and ultimately vegan. Why eat cholesterol if I don’t have to eat it? Having said that, there is often a benefit to plants from human cultivation - but it’s not an absolute benefit. Our love of fruit results in their trees/plants being cared for by humans. Many of the plant products we eat don’t result in the death of the plant. If those plants could speak I think they’d thankful of their caretakers. Sure we’re not planting most of their seeds, but they do have a maintained population. I wish no animals ever suffered at the hands of humans. This world is full of beauty, and it’s awful that so much of human activity results in life’s death and extinction - including deforestation for crops.
  - mirko22 8y ago
    > and it’s awful that so much of human activity results in life’s death and extinction What you mean is nature not just humans. Life death cycle is natural thing. World is full of beauty, but it is also full of suffering and pain, large portion of it not having to do anything with humans. Animals can starve in nature, get mutilated etc. Nature is both sides of the coin, not just the pretty one. As for what you eat, it’s very hard to scientifically prove what’s healthier for you. There are way too many outside factors that influence that. A lot of plants you buy in a shop are treated with chemicals in unhealthy way. Apple, carrots, tomatoes are all treated to ripe when they need to cos they are usually harvested before fully ripe. And third thing, just cos you don’t need something doesn’t mean humans won’t do it, that’s, once again, in our nature.
    - jllaneras 8y ago
      It's so easy to convince ourselves that eating meat is completely fine. Maybe it wouldn't be that easy if every time you wanted to eat meat you had to go yourself to the slaughterhouse and see the horrors caused by those you pay to. Second, is proven that growing vegetables is more sustainable that growing meat.
- tempestn 8y ago
  How would you feel about raising (for example) cattle in a perfect, free range setting—giving them plenty of quality feed, as well as breeding opportunities—and then eventually slaughtering them painlessly in their sleep? So the cow would live what is presumably an excellent cow life, which would then, unbeknownst to it, be cut short. The alternative of course, without the farm, is that the cow would not have existed at all. From a utilitarian perspective, ISTM such a situation could only be considered a net good for the cow, let alone the people who eat the meat. A good but truncated life has to be better than no life at all. The counter-argument would appear to be one of moral absolutism rather than utilitarianism—that killing a sentient being unnecessarily is simply wrong. Which isn't to say that that argument is necessarily flawed; I'm not sure there's even an argument to be had once you get to the level of disagreement on moral absolutes. But I do think the utilitarian aspect is interesting to consider. Edit: As an aside, I recognize that the vast majority of farms (ie factory farms) are nothing like the idyllic farm described.
  - spraak 8y ago
    However good their life was before, you're still taking it against their will.
rhn_mk1 8y ago
You forgot that life could be outside of Earth too. It would be foolish to wipe oneself out before wiping them.
ianai 8y ago
I disagree. The doomsday machine “argument” is invalid - it’s probably some dual argument to solipsism based on the near zero thought I’m willing to expend.

marcv81 8y ago

"That again, they respond to stimuli but don't feel pain like an animal." I don't feel this is a valid argument. We only really know how pain feels to us, but we can guess it also applies to other humans, animals, etc. That we cannot imagine how it feels to respond to negative stimuli as a plant should not invalidate the possibility that it is unpleasant.

chimprich 8y ago
It seems vanishingly unlikely that a plant could experience pain. To the best of our knowledge, you need a brain of some sort to experience anything. Even that may not be sufficient: an unconscious human doesn't appear to experience pain. You could argue that plants may have some unknown structure that allows them to experience pain or other phenomena, but that's no very useful. You could argue the same about rocks. It's impossible to prove a negative.
abdullahkhalids 8y ago
A robot can be designed to respond to stimuli. For instance, an advanced robotic vacuum cleaner moves away when it hits an object that was not supposed to be there, or move away from a source of heat or from water. In what sense are these responses different from the response of a plant or an insect?

hirundo 8y ago

Plants struggle to survive and reproduce as animals do, with different strategies adapted to their circumstances. Pain is just a specific mechanism toward that end, as is sentience. Why should we privilege those mechanisms when deciding which organisms are worthy of our concern? It's as if birds decided that flight is the key feature important to determining interspecies concern. Chauvinism based on anthropoid characteristics is still chauvinism.

hw 8y ago

There are some people who don't feel pain (congenital insensitivity to pain). If there was a way to raise animals such that they lack the ability to feel pain and emotions, would it be acceptable to vegans to then consume animals?

adrianN 8y ago
Lab grown meat will hopefully become a thing in the next decade.
- girvo 8y ago
  There’s an interesting contingent of vegans who don’t think lab grown meat is a good idea ethically. https://www.thoughtco.com/laboratory-grown-meat-is-not-vegan-127673 https://www.thoughtco.com/laboratory-grown-meat-is-not-vegan...

mirko22 8y ago

In my view, what’s futile about it is the fact that for many veganism has to do with moral choice against animal suffering but gets conflated with “living healthy”. Skin of an apple that you buy in standard shop is anything but healthy due to the amount of chemicals applied to it. Even the home grown plants can be treated in a way that is unhealthy. And thirdly, things like avocado plantations are anything but environment friendly.

Thiez 8y ago
Are you seriously suggesting that (all else being equal) a mixed diet is healthier than a vegetarian diet because in a mixed diet you consume less chemicals through fruit and vegetables?
- mirko22 8y ago
  No, I am saying eating plants != healthy per se. I have seen people suggesting all meat diet is healthier then all plant diet, and to those people i also say depends how the meat was produced, treated and kept before selling. You give antibiotics to animals, take animal manure for you bio plants which take up some of those antibiotics and now you have plant that also has it... I have seen people put pesticides on fruits which usually takes 15 days to degrade and sell them in couple of days. That fruit is technically poisonous. So what I am suggesting that unless you know how you food was grown and treated you don’t know it is healthy. So moral choices does not mean healthy choices just cos.

cko 8y ago

Ok. What about: sea sponges, starfish, jellyfish, and octopi? (If you’re drawing a seemingly arbitrary line at “has brain / nervous system => able to feel suffering”) Which signalling molecules would qualify?

thraxil 8y ago
FWIW, among vegans, there is a bit of controversy over certain bivalves. Oysters and Mussels both lack a sophisticated central nervous system and likely are closer to plants than even higher invertebrates in terms of anything like pain perception. There's a reasonable case to be made that ethical vegans should be able to eat them, especially considering that oyster and mussel farming actually removes pollution from the water and has a positive environmental impact (unsurprisingly, there is plenty of disagreement though). I don't know much about sea sponges, starfish, or jellyfish so I won't comment on those. Octopuses though are actually very intelligent compared to most other invertebrates. There are examples of complex problem solving, observational learning, and even tool use. Their intelligence is very "different" than what we are used to and hard to compare apples to apples, but is probably closer to the level of mice/rats/dogs than to insects or fish.

AndrewKemendo 8y ago

You're shifting the burden of culpability to a specific and more concrete definition of "pain" and "suffering" than our current science recognizes. The neuroscience of pain and suffering isn't binary and is extremely complicated and multi-variate [1]. For example in humans, nociceptors [2] – tissue sensing nerve cells – respond to damaging or potentially damaging stimuli by sending “possible threat” signals to the spinal cord and the brain. This is interpreted on a spectrum of what we interpret semantically as "pain." What is shown in the videos of the plants, is effectively no different than the nociception process in humans, which could safely be classified as "pain." If you want to define a distinguishing point for pain/suffering differently, that's fine, but it wouldn't have much basis scientifically. [1] http://clbb.mgh.harvard.edu/pain/ http://clbb.mgh.harvard.edu/pain/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nociceptor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nociceptor

cwmoore 8y ago

What does veganism have to do with HN or the article? This seems like basically a political discussion hijacking a science post.

spraak 8y ago
A huge percentage of HN comments are only tangentially related to the link.

thraxil 8y ago

It's also a moot argument because animals that are raised for meat... eat plants. Lots of plants. Meat is incredibly inefficient in that sense. Most farmland in the US is for animal feed. So if someone really is worried that plants feel pain and wants to reduce the amount of plants being killed, the most effective thing they could do would be to stop eating meat.

lizknope 8y ago

In Jainism some of the more strict followers do not eat root vegetables (like potatoes) because it is considered violence against plants. If you eat an apple you are not killing the plant and actually helping it to spread its seeds. If you dig up root vegetables you most likely end up killing the plant. Mushrooms and other fungi are considered violence against plants as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism

bromuro 8y ago

I’ve grow plants the whole life and I’m pretty sure they feel pain. I know that, you start observing them and you understand with time their emotions. Pain is the easiest to spot. We don’t need to wait the scientists answer about that.