Yeah, what you just described is a moral compromise. “Eating the plants is cruel, but less cruel than letting more get eaten to feed animals to eat instead.”
I don’t think vegans argue that sentience is what makes it cruel, either. Otherwise they’d be fine with eating fish, bugs, and probably chickens. If plants are capable of suffering then that would probably be enough to at least make the argument about eating them being cruel. You’d basically have to follow the diet of the alien hive mind from Pluribus; foraging windfall, scavenging, and autocannibalism.
Are mixing up sentience and sapience? Fish and chickens are definitely sentient, e.g. they have a subjective experience of their existence. Bugs as well, I’d guess.
Maybe! I used sentience because you used it in your comment and can never keep the two straight. If sentience is a subjective experience then plants would have that by having feelings and intelligence, wouldn’t they?
Yeah I don’t think they can either, but we were speaking hypothetically as if they could. That’s why I got confused by you saying “actually sentient animals” as if the plants weren’t also sentient in this context. I assumed you meant sapience and thought I had conflated the two again.
Yeah, what you just described is a moral compromise. “Eating the plants is cruel, but less cruel than letting more get eaten to feed animals to eat instead.”
I don’t think vegans argue that sentience is what makes it cruel, either. Otherwise they’d be fine with eating fish, bugs, and probably chickens. If plants are capable of suffering then that would probably be enough to at least make the argument about eating them being cruel. You’d basically have to follow the diet of the alien hive mind from Pluribus; foraging windfall, scavenging, and autocannibalism.
Are mixing up sentience and sapience? Fish and chickens are definitely sentient, e.g. they have a subjective experience of their existence. Bugs as well, I’d guess.
Maybe! I used sentience because you used it in your comment and can never keep the two straight. If sentience is a subjective experience then plants would have that by having feelings and intelligence, wouldn’t they?
Plants don’t have feelings and can’t suffer.
Yeah I don’t think they can either, but we were speaking hypothetically as if they could. That’s why I got confused by you saying “actually sentient animals” as if the plants weren’t also sentient in this context. I assumed you meant sapience and thought I had conflated the two again.