Comment by steve_adams_86 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steve_adams_86 | Hacker News Reader

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I went on a philosophy bent for some reason years ago and read a bunch of popular philosophy reads to get a sense of what that space is. I still read a lot of philosophy but much less obsessively.

One of the things it did to me was totally transform my perception of animals, humans as animals, our relationships, and cause to me to realize I have no way to verify that animals don’t experience life in a way that’s as meaningful or as sentient as mine. I can’t even properly define those things. I do know that I share a LOT with mammals especially and they appear to possess a lot of the faculties required to feel good, suffer, have temporal awareness, relationships with other animals, etc. That’s not what was taught to me as a child.

I like to go spear fishing and that’s a very changed experience. I learned how to originally so I could be more selective about food and where I harvest it, reduce bycatch, etc. So I cared before to some degree. Now shooting a fish involves this internal struggle of deciding if it’s necessary, if it makes sense, what it means about me, what the experience will be like for the fish. It feels a lot more like killing someone rather than something. I guess that sounds silly.

It’s a rabbit hole. You can go down so far and maybe not turn up much that’s very useful. I think animals aren’t very discernible from human animals in the big picture though. I’m basically a murderer, but the legally sanctioned kind. I bought the license.

I strongly prefer to eat the food I murdered myself now. I occasionally eat farmed meat, but it’s rare and comes from local farms with unscalable high standards. I’m fortunate that I can do that. I mostly do it to appease my family - they feel weird when I skip dishes at special meals.

Anyway I wanted to share that because this thought experiment about the experience of animals in farms means a lot to me lately, and I find it all fascinating but important as well. Like you, I’m increasingly uncomfortable with it.

> It feels a lot more like killing someone rather than something. I guess that sounds silly.

No it does not. Animals and fish are sentient beings with their own set of perceptions, feelings, thoughts, desires, and more.

I do not think there is a defensible way to consume animals if you're living on above-poverty wages in a developed country and don't have some extremely rare health problem.

Killing is problematic (ending a life prematurely), but worse yet is the experience animals have on factory farms.

In your case of hunting your own fish seems less morally problematic than most animal consumption, but I understand the sentiment of "do I really need to eat that when there are plenty of non-sentient alternatives". Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

What about killing plants (ending a life prematurely)?

It's pretty easy to find examples outside of the animal kingdom where an organism's lifecycle depends on it being eaten at some point. So far as I know, there are no animals with this property.

Also, it's clearer to us (since we're animals) what sorts of events count as ending another animal's life. Elsewhere it's trickier (Is a field of grass one life, or is a blade of grass one life? How should mycelial networks be counted? etc).

For these reasons, I think it's that applying different logic to different kingdoms is a fairly defensible move.

I disagree. What organism are you talking about exactly? Any plant I can think of doesn't require being eaten to live.

The lifecycle of an organism includes reproduction and propagation.

Many plants have evolved specifically around being eaten by other animals.

>The lifecycle of an organism includes reproduction and propagation.

No, that would be different organisms.

Anything that bears fruit is relying on an animal to come by and eat that fruit so that the seeds will be spread (either because the pit is hard to eat and the animal drops it, or because the seeds survive the animal's digestive tract).

There are also several fungi and protozoans who migrate between the digestive tracts of animals that eat each other (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii for instance).

I'm not enough of a biologist to defend the point especially well, but doesn't it make sense that one would use different types of reasoning to manage relationships with different types of life?

> Anything that bears fruit is relying on an animal to come by and eat that fruit so that the seeds will be spread (either because the pit is hard to eat and the animal drops it, or because the seeds survive the animal's digestive tract).

Right, but that's not the plant, that's the fruit. If you eat the plant itself, it's dead. Same as a cow.

The example that I had in mind with the original comment was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii#Lifecycle

I'll grant that no plants come to mind that have a niche that requires them to be wholly eaten, but I still think that deciding whether to eat a plant requires totally different logic than deciding whether to eat an animal.

So what's your position? Are you here to suggest that "we shouldn't eat animals" is absurd by equating it to "we shouldn't eat plants?"

Or are you a vegan looking to take it a step further by not eating plants that have to die in order for you to eat them? Because I'd like to hear more about somebody who sincerely held that belief.

You mean Fruitarians? They certainly exist. I do enjoy how you seem to think that it's inconceivable. HN Favourite Steve Jobs was once a Fruitarian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruitarianism

I just don't understand how you can have a moral outrage to killing one thing but not another. People seem to do a little dance about plants being not as alive as animals to justify it, but it doesn't make sense to me.

Fruit is generally evolved to be eaten as a seed-dispersal and -fertilization technique. Not sure about other parts of the plant.

> It's pretty easy to find examples outside of the animal kingdom where an organism's lifecycle depends on it being eaten at some point. So far as I know, there are no animals with this property.

There are parasites for which being eaten is a part of their life cycle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leucochloridium_paradoxum

Black widow spiders are so named because the females eat their mates. Some spider mothers become food for their own children.

Not to mention that (while not exactly what you asked for, but I think it's important to recognize) carnivores kill other species as a means of survival, and even their own species at times. Wild wolves cannot feed their pups without killing other animals. Death is common in nature.

I thought of the parasite angle later, touche. But the parasite survives the transition between hosts, so it doesn't really count from an "end a life" perspective.

The spider thing is interesting though. It would seem that being eaten by her children is an adaptation, not just an unfortunate consequence of harsh reality. The strategy appears to be: give my nutrients to my offspring, for they carry a part of me, and the survival of that part is more important than the rest.

Given that most of the cells in a human body are passengers, and not cells with human DNA in their nucleus (if they have nuclei at all), it seems pretty likely that something, somewhere, is making the same kind of sacrifice, and using a hungry human as the vehicle. And I think that ending a life on those terms falls in a different domain--both from an ethics perspective, and from a "how adversarial of an environment do you want to create for yourself"-perspective, than mere predation.

Strategies of that sort are more popular outside of the animal kingdom than in it (I think), which I think justifies a "different rules for different things" approach.

> So far as I know, there are no animals with this property.

Ultimately, many grazing animals have their property. If their numbers grow too large from lack of predators, they'll consume all available food and then starve en-masse.

Yeah, but starving en-masse isn't some kind of adaptation that they've developed in order to survive. I was thinking more about plants whose seeds germinate in the digestive tract of an animal.

Plants are alive, in that they reproduce and react to stimulus, but I don't have any reason to suspect them of awareness, feelings, thoughts, or desires. Everyone's morals here will be different, but I have to eat something, and I'll choose to eat a lettuce over a puppy any day.

> I don't have any reason to suspect them of awareness, feelings, thoughts, or desires.

I don't have any reason to suspect that they don't.

Do you suspect rocks have conscious experiences?

With animals there's a clear connection: they have brains and brains is clearly the part that enables us humans to have conscious experiences.

The burden of proof of the claim "plants are conscious" is on you.

>brains is clearly the part that enables us humans to have conscious experiences

I didn't claim that plants were conscious, and we have no idea what causes the conscious experience. I personally wouldn't say that all humans actually experience consciousness. So no, no clear connection, and no burden either.

This question seems to be becoming more popular lately. My own understanding is that most people are apprehensive about killing because it involves denying another being self-actualisation and/or causing its suffering, both of which by our current understanding seem to require a central nervous system.

I would also add though that if you want to minimize plant death, the best course of action is to stop eating meat and animal products and aim for a plant-based diet, since (by thermodynamics!) the number of plants needed to feed these animals vastly outstrips what would deliver the same amount of nutrients to a human eating them directly.

Actually deeply thinking of plant lifecycle and morality of it all is interesting question. Is it morally more wrong to feed grass to cow after it has shed its seed than to eat fruits and prevent their seeds from spreading? Clearly in first case plant is already dying, but has done it's life and procreation. On other hand later case is clear exploitation comparable to abortion.

I mean fruit exist to be eaten so the seeds can be shat out somewhere else. It’s part of the reproductive cycle for many plants.

Probably should have been clearer about us eating them and shitting in toilet where it ends up in sewage treatment with no chances of ever sprouting...

Generally grazers don't kill plants though, they eat grasses that continue to grow.

sure, but if your rationale is that killing a plant causes suffering, then would damaging it not do the same?

Easy way I found is to admit the fact that we kill a lot of life just to live a day, and hope it was/is/will be worth it.

Else I might kill myself, except it is not allowed by my animal programming, which is out of my control, so I go back to that hoping phase.

I also wonder what’s the problem with killing sentient animals while we also kill fellow humans when “necessary”. We kill for our little ego, so let’s just keep fingers crossed that the sacrifices we force are worth something.

Maybe this is a bit Buddhism centric but it takes off my mental loads a bit.

Feeding animals for slaughter requires an order of magnitude more plant destruction, simply for the fact that you're passing those plants through another trophic level. If humans were to eat the soy that is typically used for feed, that would be a massive amount of harm reduction if you want to take into account the idea of "plant suffering".

>Feeding animals for slaughter requires

It doesn't require it at all.

Sorry, can you expound on this?

Most grazers don't actually destroy anything. They eat a bit of the plant not the entire thing.

Fobo's point wasn't about which parts of the plant get destroyed, it was just about how much food you have to put into a cow in order to get different food out of a cow.

It's a lossy conversion.

Additionally, lots of factory farmed beef doesn't involve grazing. Instead they feed them corn and soy. Factory farming makes up 98.66% of meat production comes from factory farms. 70.4% of beef comes from factory farms.

https://sentientmedia.org/factory-farms/

And along those lines, what if we only slaughtered animals for food consumption right at the end of their natural life? Would that not satisfy the morality issues?

This is done with dairy cows somewhere (I can't recall) but I found it nice in a sense. They put a lot of care into making the dairy cows' lives good by giving them pasture, caring for them, and having relatively low expectations for their output.

There are still inherent issues with dairy, such as forced impregnation and abduction and murder of the offspring, so it isn't great no matter how you slice it. But if we're to compare dairy operations, this one was pretty good I guess.

When the cows stopped producing much milk, they had some way of pasturing them for around 2 years before they'd then slaughter them for meat. In total the cows had quite long and low pressure lives. The dairy and meat was very expensive, though. I think that's the realistic outcome of treating animals more morally. It isn't cheap.

Why does sentience somehow imply value?

That’s the issue with vegetarianism. It’s not really about “the animals”, it’s about things that happen to resemble human beings. The more similar to a human, the more “sentience” it has. Isn’t that an odd coincidence? Or perhaps plants are just as sentient as humans but are a different form of life too distant from humans for us to empathize with.

The whole thing is a massive exercise in human myopia.

I think the focus on sentience is misplaced. Rather, the value should be rationality, meaning here the ability use one's mind to survive and to live by reason alone. This is valuable to any other rational living creature because rationality allows one to eschew violence and live cooperatively, so it is in the best interest of every rational creature to, at least on a basic level, value and respect the life of any other rational creature. The reason we don't apply and respect rights to animals and plants is because they are incapable of doing the same to us, or even being aware of the concept of 'rights'. You should interact with other forms of life on the highest level it is capable of interacting with you.

> Or perhaps plants are just as sentient as humans

The burden of proof is on you. Humans are animals. We have evolution linking us together at a more-recent junction than we do when compared to plants. Humans and animals have brains; brains is the seat of sentience.

Finally; even if you are right that plants are sentient, are you then claiming that there is no difference in the amount of sentience between humans, bees, and plants? If so, should we be indifferent whether I kill you or burn a dandelion?

No, it just means that sentience is a poor metric for determining whether we should eat something or not.

I think vegetarianism is about a whole lot more than sentience. I aspire to vegetarianism for energy reasons. It comes down to how many square meters of sunlight-on-chlorophyll is required to support a meat eater vs a vegetarian, vs how many are available.

But even if it were just about not wanting to kill things that resemble us--it still doesn't have to be a false elevation of human sentience.

If there are fungi that make decisions, I'd expect them to look out for their fungus-buddies more than they look out for me. If Jupiter's red spot can be asked, I'd expect that it cares more for the weird hexagon on the poles of Saturn than anything going on on earth. Seeking kinship with similar things and being indifferent to alien things is common in biology, and it gets along just fine without sentience in the mix.

I agree and I think your position is legitimate. My issue is just with those vegetarians who claim a universal moral superiority over meat eaters. This attitude is extremely prevalent, just reading the comments here. “No justification”, “no excuse”, on and on.

I think vegetarianism makes a ton of sense from an environmental and ecological point of view, but this has nothing to do with the moral one.

Nature is brutal. For animals in the wild, survival is a struggle on a whole different level. The predators hunt the young of other species, or their own children starve. The prey are in constant danger, and may be suffering their own shortage of food while trying to avoid being eaten. Species killing other species is the norm. Meanwhile, we hide from death, and we use words like "beef" to forget what it is. But the real wild treats animals much worse than a fishing hook or a conscientious local farm.

"I do not think there is a defensible way to consume animals"

No defense needed, all animals are ultimately consumed and to imagine an alternative is to indulge in fantasy.

We can debate the timing and manner of consumption, but not the idea of consumption.

Are you making the argument that decomposing in the ground is "consumption"?

We are animals too you know. If all animals are "ultimately consumed", so perhaps there is no problem if I kill and eat some close friend of yours?

When people start defending their meat consumption, they seem to make all sorts of bizarre claims. Could you explain yours?

You're asking me to defend a "bizarre claim" that all animals share the same fate after asking how I would feel about cannibalism? Hard pass.

You wrote "all animals are ultimately consumed".

So if an animal dies of a disease, is it "consumed"? Could you explain your claim?

> Now shooting a fish involves this internal struggle of deciding if it’s necessary, if it makes sense, what it means about me, what the experience will be like for the fish.

These considerations are originally critical to what it meant to be hunter. Hunters are shepherds to their prey, just from a distance. You can't kill with reckless abandon because of realities like supply and spoilage. Livestock can be seen as a practice of a hunter bringing their prey closer to home so as to protect them from harvest by other hunters.

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