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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/eva

by gffrd 5y ago

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 …

mtalantikite 5y ago
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!
- grawprog 5y ago
  I think you and the parent poster missed the intention behind what I was saying. Not that we should have a nihilistic approach, but that the baseline for these conversations should be to assume suffering is a universal part of life and we should be focussing on how to minimize the amount of direct suffering each of us cause in our day to day life, rather than worrying about which suffers more, plants or animals. It's not comparable, they're two entirely different forms of life, suffice to say, they both suffer, discussions around how people can directly if not reduce suffering mitigate it. Telling people to only eat vegetables because suffering animals or it's cool eat meat because suffering plants is an utterly pointless topic of debate. A more useful topic for debate if we're going to talk about such things would be maybe something like mitigating the suffering on both plants and animals through industrialized agriculture by returning to small scale production of both. Or something like that anyway. The article as framed just didn't really talk in any useful way about the issue. Which, if you are serious about ending suffering, a plant or animal grown in a small scale way where it can be looked after properly is going to suffer significantly less, even if it inevitably will die to feed somebody.
  - mtalantikite 5y ago
    I definitely agree that we should focus on how to minimize the amount of direct suffering each of us causes. And yeah, of course, there are more productive ways to focus on these questions rather than "plants suffer too". Personally, I'm a vegetarian because I find it unethical to eat animals for many reasons. Their individual suffering, the environment, my personal health. Of course even within that you have to be careful, because going vegetarian but only eating food flown in from around the world isn't too great either.

by gffrd 5y ago

mtalantikite 5y ago

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!

grawprog 5y ago
I think you and the parent poster missed the intention behind what I was saying. Not that we should have a nihilistic approach, but that the baseline for these conversations should be to assume suffering is a universal part of life and we should be focussing on how to minimize the amount of direct suffering each of us cause in our day to day life, rather than worrying about which suffers more, plants or animals. It's not comparable, they're two entirely different forms of life, suffice to say, they both suffer, discussions around how people can directly if not reduce suffering mitigate it. Telling people to only eat vegetables because suffering animals or it's cool eat meat because suffering plants is an utterly pointless topic of debate. A more useful topic for debate if we're going to talk about such things would be maybe something like mitigating the suffering on both plants and animals through industrialized agriculture by returning to small scale production of both. Or something like that anyway. The article as framed just didn't really talk in any useful way about the issue. Which, if you are serious about ending suffering, a plant or animal grown in a small scale way where it can be looked after properly is going to suffer significantly less, even if it inevitably will die to feed somebody.
- mtalantikite 5y ago
  I definitely agree that we should focus on how to minimize the amount of direct suffering each of us causes. And yeah, of course, there are more productive ways to focus on these questions rather than "plants suffer too". Personally, I'm a vegetarian because I find it unethical to eat animals for many reasons. Their individual suffering, the environment, my personal health. Of course even within that you have to be careful, because going vegetarian but only eating food flown in from around the world isn't too great either.