Re:Lab chimps were dumped on Liberia's Monkey Island – their...
by colechristensen on Thursday December 12, 2019 @10:26PM
(#21778926)
There are people who won't eat plant matter which could lead to new life (seeds, tubers, eggs, etc.) as it is violence to plants. Consciousness isn't a binary feature you can sort things definitely into have and have-not, it's a spectrum. There is a spectrum of decisions to be made about harming other life to survive, and I've made my choice. I'm not telling anybody to make the same choice as me, but I think many people's choices are unreasonable and more importantly not based on reason or appreciation for life.
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Re:Lab chimps were dumped on Liberia's Monkey Island – their...
by koboll on Friday December 13, 2019 @12:14PM
(#21783393)
>Consciousness isn't a binary feature you can sort things definitely into have and have-not, it's a spectrum.
Of course. But while we can't draw an exact line where it begins, we can certainly categorize some obvious things as being on one side of it or the other.
In terms of thinking, feeling, and suffering, it's obvious that
1. pigs (for example) are certainly capable of these things, as least as much as a young human child, and
2. wheat is not meaningfully capable of these things.
So there is a moral cost to killing a pig that there isn't to killing a wheat plant.
This isn't something particularly revolutionary. It's illegal to torture and kill pigs outside of certain sanctioned contexts, so we recognize this intuitively as a society. We just choose to remain cognitively dissonant when it comes to our food sources.