Ok it feels like you’re just starting to spam answers without even taking the time to argument on why you think something. I try to take the time to justify my position and you just answer with small sentences that don’t do anything for an interesting discussion.
Let’s stop there, have a nice day.
What’s your morally relevant argument for killing for example cows for taste pleasure and not humans then? What’s this special trait humans have that other sentient being do not possess that allows us to do that to them?
Yes I agree in principle that it’s a discrimination. They way I used discrimination was implying that someone on the “bad” side of the discrimination could be discriminated against. My bad I should have clearly defined the way I used this term. Sorry English is not my first language as well.
In any case a discrimination that does not hurt the discriminated or another sentient being is of no consequence for me.
But you would agree that the rocks themselves cannot have an issue with it? That’s the gist of the sentientist position. Sentient beings have an interest in living, not being exploited and thus the sentientist position goes further and say that for the same reasons we say that humans have a right to live (i.e.: not being killed) or being exploited, we should extend the same rights to sentient beings because there is no morally relevant difference between us and other sentient beings that would justify killing them when you would not kill a human being in the same position.
Note that this does not mean all sentient beings should have exactly the same rights. Obviously giving the right to vote to a cow does not make sense, the same way we don’t give the right to abortion to cis men because they cannot make use of this right.
Ok let me unpack your two points:
The difference with the sentience criteria is that a non-sentient being by definition cannot be hurt by actions taken against their being as there is quite literally no subject, no one, to experience anything. Would you say that someones that likes smashing rocks is discriminating against rocks? Of course not because it makes no sense to speak about discrimination for a non sentient being/object. The only time where you can make an argument that doing something to a non sentient being is an issue is when it affects a sentient being.
Again as I’ve literally stated in my earlier comment the discrimination is not based on species but on sentience. If you want a more concrete example, let’s imagine a philosophical zombie or in other terms a non-sentient human. I would not include such a being in my moral circle by itself as it would lack sentience.
I guess we all have our blind spots :)
Again that’s a misunderstanding of the position. The discriminatory criteria is sentience. If a plant was found to be sentient, this plant would be included in the moral circle. You can make the same argument for things we consider animals but lack all of what we currently consider needed for sentience. An example would be a sea sponge. I personally do not include a sea sponge in my moral circle and I do not think they have any sentience even though they are considered animals. I would also consider someone that says sea sponge should be included in our moral circle just because they are part of the animal kingdom to be quite dogmatic.
And even if we want to debate on whether a sea sponge is sentient, there is absolutely no debate on most animals we currently kill for food or exploit for entertainment. They are clearly sentient.
There was a chapter in his book “Starry Messenger” dedicated to this subject. I unfortunately cannot reproduce the entire chapter here. However, here is a video essay on it that you can watch if you’re interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbXw13Npvlg (25min)
One of his dumbest argument imho was trying to claim that vegans were specist towards plants, even though no scientific existence of sentience in plants exist which is the moral criteria used in most anti-specist philosophy. I will add that even if plants were all found to be sentient, we’d still kill less sentient beings by eating them directly rather than feeding them to non-human animals and then killing them.
Here is another video of him talking about this very chapter for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9HrMdNEKPA (6min). I think this shows a complete misunderstanding of what veganism and anti-specism is about. To me it seems like he does not even consider the sentience of the animals and considers them as machines. He also seems to straw man the position to “vegans want to protect life”.
As long as he sticks to subjects he clearly understands. Everytime I’ve read or watched one of his take on veganism/anti-specism I was left dumbfounded and ashamed for him.
Yep that’s what I was alluding to :). Unfortunately the first DOI did not return a result. I’ll probably email the contact author. They usually are quite willing to send the PDF.
Thanks, that’s really interesting. I’ll try to find the opened paper somewhere else, but the abstract already gives a lot of interesting informations :)
Do you have a source for that? As I have close friends affected by MS I’d be really interested in reading a paper about it and sharing it with them.
From my initial searches I can’t seem to find anything else than this being a proposed theory among others.
Edit: I’ve found this article https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/study-suggests-epstein-barr-virus-may-cause-multiple-sclerosis suggesting it’s at least one of the factor but not the source of it.
Thanks I might give the movie a try :)
I went into it hoping to capture the nostalgia of discovering and reading SCP when I first discovered them many years ago.
Unfortunately, Even though the premise looked really cool I found myself bored after the first book and never read the rest of the series.
Are the following books different? Is the film worth it?
As I’ve stated above, even if we found plants to be sentient, you’d be killing less sentient beings by eating them directly rather than feeding them to other animals and eating these animals. Just because lives must end for us to live does not mean you have to maximize the suffering caused.
I’m clearly making a judgement on which life is more important, because something non sentient literally cannot have a judgement on life and thus cannot miss its life or be wronged when its life is taken.
I mean plants to our knowledge are not sentient, so no harm done to “someone” when killing them, in the same way as there are no harm done to the rock when you throw it on the ground. Animals we eat on the other hand are sentient so there is clearly someone that is harmed. I really think non-human animals should be included in our sphere of moral consideration.
Even if plants were somehow found to all be sentient, by eating them directly instead of feeding them to animals then eat the animals you would minimize the harm done.
In real life cows are sentient as well.
Just as it still makes it not right for cows and chickens it makes it not right for monkeys. Or would you be OK if I was breeding humans for slavery purposes?
How about you stop exploiting donkeys all together for your personal gain?