the most pressing problem with the meat/dairy industries is the extreme amount of suffering that animals go through in their lives, and the sheer scale of it (that 56 billion land animals die per year, most of them being tortured in horrible factory farm conditions)
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Replying to @gabrielamadej @chaosprime
there's another difference: giving up (or severely reducing) our meat and dairy intake is a trivial sacrifice to amend the suffering we cause, but giving up all food to save plant life is an extreme. suicidal sacrifice
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Replying to @gabrielamadej @chaosprime
so we can invoke a simple ethical principle: it is not right to cause extreme suffering to sentient beings for trivial benefits to us (such as our pleasure)
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Replying to @gabrielamadej @chaosprime
of course, we have no reason to accept the idea that plants are sentient because all we scientifically know about what causes mental states have to do with brains
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Replying to @gabrielamadej
"sentient" means "having senses". plants demonstrably have senses
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Replying to @chaosprime @gabrielamadej
popularly the word is used as if it meant what "sapient" means, but let's not feed into nonsense
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Replying to @chaosprime
i don't believe that's true. popular understandings of sapience has to do with sophisticated congition, whereas sentience has to do with being a subject of experience
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Replying to @gabrielamadej @chaosprime
plants do not have brains and are not subjects of experience. they do not have sensory experience. they might have 'senses' in a limit sense but that's not to do with sentience
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Replying to @gabrielamadej @chaosprime
the ability for grass to react to being cut could be construed as having a sense, but so long as it does not have sensory experience, it's not sentient in the at least in the morally relevant terms vegans are talking about
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Replying to @gabrielamadej @chaosprime
it doesn't matter how we define the terms though. so long as plants are not subjects of experience in the way described above, whether they 'have senses' or 'are sentient' is trivial
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but we don't know that they aren't and our only reasons for presuming they aren't are essentially chauvinistic
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