Where's an Environmentalist when you need one

[JohnDonne]

Our justification is simple: we are animals too, and the human diet is omnivorous, which is why vegans so often look terrible. Eat a proper diet for your species.

Sure, if that's your justification then why all the contempt and hatred and ridicule and pain minimization at the animal's expense?

Can you rephrase that in a coherent sentence?

Your explanation for your behavior doesn’t fit with your behavior. If you justified killing animals merely by admitting you’re an animal too you wouldn’t need to pretend animals are worse than yourself, but that is central to the premise of your behavior. And if humans being animals is an excuse, why bother with any judgment of any human behavior?

[heydaralon]

Not to mention, the only reason that human beings even got a large increase in brain mass was because of eating animal protein. Without animal meat, it is unlikely our cognition would have evolved to the point of wringing our hands over steak.

[Speaker to Animals]

Sure, if that's your justification then why all the contempt and hatred and ridicule and pain minimization at the animal's expense?

Can you rephrase that in a coherent sentence?

Your explanation for your behavior doesn’t fit with your behavior. If you justified killing animals merely by admitting you’re an animal too you wouldn’t need to pretend animals are worse than yourself, but that is central to the premise of your behavior. And if humans being animals is an excuse, why bother with any judgment of any human behavior?

Where the hell did you get that from?

[heydaralon]

It's a complicated question, it has to do with plants not being physiologically analogous to other beings that display sentience, the fact that plants show no analogous expression of sentience, the fact that they lack known causal structures (brains) for sentience, nor is there any analogous potential causal structure in them to theorize about. You could say they might be sentient, I could also say my eyebrows might be sentient based on the same evidence. It's not really a comparable study to animals, nobody in philosophy seriously thinks plants have sentience, though many philosophers that study sentience admit that animals do.

It sounds like you are setting an arbitrary anatomical distinction to make your belief system tenable. Again, if plants are capable of sending chemicals to communicate with one another, and physically move their roots toward water, if they can physically move their leaves and branches in a defensive posture, this all points to some form of feeling and a very basic sentience. Shit, I read somewhere that scientists used chloform (more like bore-a-form) to put plants to sleep in the early 20th century. You can look up a video of someone doing this to a venus flytrap. There are some scientists that say this indicates a form of consciousness. If eating animals is wrong, then you shouldn't be able to eat plants for the same reason.

It’s not arbitrary, it’s how we establish consciousness in anything, including ourselves, you’re using the same standard of analogous evidence to talk about the plant being “put to sleep.” It’s just there’s not anywhere near as much of that analogous evidence in the case of plants as the case for animals. A brain dead comatose patient’s body on life support may display similar chemical and. hormonal activity as the plant, you wouldn’t call that body “conscious” necessarily.

If plants can be put to sleep, that at least suggests that in their awake state, they are aware of their surroundings and capable of interacting with their environment. If they are messaging one another, this also suggests a rudimentary consciousness. If you want to get into a philosophical debate about consciousness, and defining your terms, that is fine. All I'm saying is that this is problematic for Veganism. I am fine with eating animals. But Vegans do not make distinctions between animals and their varying degrees of intelligence, and see them all as things that it is immoral to eat. If you are arguing that a plant is not conscious, I could argue the same for a crab using the criteria you put forward, and I would challenge you to prove that a crab is "conscious."

[JohnDonne]

Can you rephrase that in a coherent sentence?

Your explanation for your behavior doesn’t fit with your behavior. If you justified killing animals merely by admitting you’re an animal too you wouldn’t need to pretend animals are worse than yourself, but that is central to the premise of your behavior. And if humans being animals is an excuse, why bother with any judgment of any human behavior?

Where the hell did you get that from?

Your past posts on the dcf and here of course

[SuburbanFarmer]

Uh oh.

[Speaker to Animals]

Your explanation for your behavior doesn’t fit with your behavior. If you justified killing animals merely by admitting you’re an animal too you wouldn’t need to pretend animals are worse than yourself, but that is central to the premise of your behavior. And if humans being animals is an excuse, why bother with any judgment of any human behavior?

Where the hell did you get that from?

Your past posts on the dcf and here of course

I really have no idea what you are talking about.

[heydaralon]

Uh oh.

Flagged for animal cruelty/Nazism

[JohnDonne]

It sounds like you are setting an arbitrary anatomical distinction to make your belief system tenable. Again, if plants are capable of sending chemicals to communicate with one another, and physically move their roots toward water, if they can physically move their leaves and branches in a defensive posture, this all points to some form of feeling and a very basic sentience. Shit, I read somewhere that scientists used chloform (more like bore-a-form) to put plants to sleep in the early 20th century. You can look up a video of someone doing this to a venus flytrap. There are some scientists that say this indicates a form of consciousness. If eating animals is wrong, then you shouldn't be able to eat plants for the same reason.

It’s not arbitrary, it’s how we establish consciousness in anything, including ourselves, you’re using the same standard of analogous evidence to talk about the plant being “put to sleep.” It’s just there’s not anywhere near as much of that analogous evidence in the case of plants as the case for animals. A brain dead comatose patient’s body on life support may display similar chemical and. hormonal activity as the plant, you wouldn’t call that body “conscious” necessarily.

If plants can be put to sleep, that at least suggests that in their awake state, they are aware of their surroundings and capable of interacting with their environment. If they are messaging one another, this also suggests a rudimentary consciousness. If you want to get into a philosophical debate about consciousness, and defining your terms, that is fine. All I'm saying is that this is problematic for Veganism. I am fine with eating animals. But Vegans do not make distinctions between animals and their varying degrees of intelligence, and see them all as things that it is immoral to eat. If you are arguing that a plant is not conscious, I could argue the same for a crab using the criteria you put forward, and I would challenge you to prove that a crab is "conscious."

Crabs have causal structures, plants don’t, that’s a big hole in your argument.

[JohnDonne]

Not to mention, the only reason that human beings even got a large increase in brain mass was because of eating animal protein. Without animal meat, it is unlikely our cognition would have evolved to the point of wringing our hands over steak.

Sure, that could be true, doesn’t work as an argument against using our brains to figure out how to be ethical.