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Comment by WaxProlix | Hacker News Reader

This is a lot of very commonly repeated speculative talking point soup when people are trying to rile up vegans. I'm not a vegan, and I'm not saying you're being disingenuous here, but if you use these lines to try and engage vegans at some point and don't get the level of engagement you're looking for, it's because this kind of both-sides moral equivalence between meat eating and plant eating is pretty common in the needling-vegans scene :)

That said, if we think there's a continuum with humans, dolphins, apes, and maybe octopuses on one side, and fungi & prokaryotes or something on the other, then plants (and maybe shellfish?) are certainly 'better' to kill and eat than cats, eg.

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I like the continuum idea.

Given that we cannot not kill something to live yet, the current local minimum would be to live by eating some kind of cultured microorganism?

Something like cultured algae or a genetically engineered organisms that expressed suitable proteins.

Fruit might be an acceptable minimal choice given that it’s “voluntarily given” to some point of views.

Strangely the thought of engineering an animal to make a meat fruit seems repugnant - imagine an animal modified to grow flesh that could be removed with little pain and no injury.

Vat grown meat is an interesting thought - if we can pull it off.

Ultimately only something like molecular nanotechnology could free us from killing to live.

Alternatively modified human beings.

What logic makes plants better to kill than cows, better than octopi, better than cats? because vegans might the argument uncomfortable doesn't render it invalid either

If I gave you a live chicken, a head of broccoli, what would happen when you tried to cut up each one with a carving knife?

You instinctively know what fear and pain are, and minimising those things is the point of veganism.

If plants feel their fear and pain far slower, then much less of it is happening.

It's also entirely implausible, from an evolutionary perspective, that plants should have developed the capacity to feel pain on a scale similar to other organisms given that they haven't developed the ability to move away from situations that might cause them pain (pain being a proxy for survival risk).

Keep in mind that instead of fight or flight plants have a range of internal chemical responses available to minimise damage and that this does make pain plausible:

Videos of plants calcium signalling response to damage:

https://news.wisc.edu/blazes-of-light-reveal-how-plants-sign...

Plants responding to sounds of herbivore (dare we say “predator”) insects:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00442-014-2995-6

Even plant “vision” is becoming more plausible:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/veggies-with-visi...

You can find a lot more material in this vein. My point is that we are “animalists” and not very well predisposed to recognising the true nature of plants given how different they are to us.

That's interesting, thanks for the links.

if I starve you for a week, what would you do then?

ethics are always the privilege of the well to do

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