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The line Peter Singer draws, which I found quite elegant, is "things that can suffer". You can have aesthetic opinions about what we do to plants, but a major d
by Vinnl 4y ago
The line Peter Singer draws, which I found quite elegant, is "things that can suffer". You can have aesthetic opinions about what we do to plants, but a major difference with what we do to chickens is that the plants don't suffer.
- bee_rider 4y agoI’m not convinced the elegance here doesn’t derive from imprecision. I have some opinions about which sorts of life forms can suffer, but I don’t really have a justification for them, and there are people out there who honestly seem to believe that (for example) bugs don’t suffer, or lobsters don’t suffer. This seems like a fairly ridiculous proposition to me, but hey, it just depends on how we’ve anthropomorphized lobster thoughts, I guess.
- Vinnl 4y agoOh there is certainly imprecision, but I don't think that's where the elegance comes from. Especially given that most actual moral quandaries you might find yourself in are clearly not in the grey areas, and so the few that you do encounter can relatively easily be dealt with via either "better safe than sorry" or "worth the risk", depending on your personal inclination.