I have an excellent example to show what I mean.Originally Posted by Kentarou
In my left hand I have a gerbil. In my right hand I have a potted plant.
If I set fire to the gerbil, what will be your reaction?
What if I set fire to the plant? What if I set fire to a tree? Rip a sapling off the ground? Cover a plant in darkness?
Why is it morally neutral to mistreat plants? Cognitive Dissonance? I think so.
A fish could hardly be considered sentient.
The difference is that I can relate to the Gerbil's pain, and not the plant's. The Gerbil expresses things I can recognize, and cringe at the thought of. The Gerbil can produce desires, dislikes, and likes, while the Plant cannot make anymore meaning for itself, because it lacks sentience.I have an excellent example to show what I mean.The difference between eating a plant and an animal, to me, is that one is sentient, and one is not.
In my left hand I have a gerbil. In my right hand I have a potted plant.
If I set fire to the gerbil, what will be your reaction?
What if I set fire to the plant? What if I set fire to a tree? Rip a sapling off the ground? Cover a plant in darkness?
Why is it morally neutral to mistreat plants? Cognitive Dissonance? I think so.
that's you, kenta. Personally I feel sick to my stomach when trees get uprooted or flowers keeled over by frost. and that's just in the natural world, let alone razing land for housing developments.
I think it has to do with a girl telling me when I was six that wood can feel pain. I saw immediately that it couldn't be true, but it did open up the truth that plants need to be respected.
I guess ill say this now..
Some things are to be expected.. inevitable, one might say.
When you are living with millions of people on small pieces of land, it is impossible to keep nature the same way it is.
Animals are stored in small spaces so there is more meat to eat and cheaper, woods get cut to make place for houses..
The fact just is, that we are too overpopulated in most countries to be succesful vegetarians. Already woods are being cut by the football field to make place for coffeebean farms..
The thing about ranch meat is, is that the animals are kept in places where there is space. But with the way we just keep building and the population grows, those things will become more expensive and will eventually disappear.
I dont like it.. but thats just the way economics work.
I only eat vegetarian things.
Like cows.
hurr hurr hurr hurr
Completely false. The amount of land required to raise animals is far, fair higher than the amount of land required to grow crops for Humans. Crop farming is far more space-efficient than husbandry.
I just meant that the healthier the food, the more expensive its going to get..
America still has lots of space, but in the netherlands the farmers have trouble staying afloat, because of the lack of space(expensive machines, little crop in comparison) the price of the crop is high compared to whatever is exported from america(since they have lots of space) and the goverment has to buy up stuff..
Pig farmers dont seem to have the same problem though.
Naturally it has to be respected. Life itself can't be graded from life form to life form. Plants act as an important part of our world, in all ecosystems. But naturally, I'd have a lot more of a reaction from a burned alive gerbil than a small tree, because the gerbil is a more similar creature to me that I am able to relate to. The only justification I can have for that is that plants have less a mind than we do from what we can see.
You have to eat something that used to be alive in order to live.
Unless you eat fruits and drink water, that is.
Fruits were alive, though. Or do they not count for some odd and unknown reason?
Well fruits are more or less the eggs of plants. Their still technically a body part of a plant your eating.
Also I can't believe no one's touched on the sentience then. So unless the definition I use is wrong (and ergo the definition I've read about for ages) sentience is something only inherent to humans because only we are fully self-aware of our surroundings and ourselves unlike animals who just eat, sleep, and poop their entire lives.
But enough of silly definitions.
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I suppose that depends on your definition of alive. I can agree that the fruit is the egg of a plant, though.
To me, sentience has always been somewhat of an abstract word. I use the word sentience when referring to an animal that can have desires besides the will to live, but I never actually looked the word up.
Fruits are designed, evolutionarily, to be eaten. The animal then walks elsewhere, defecates, and thus 'pollinates' the plant.
So again, just eat fruits and you can be morally perfect.
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