vegans were specist towards plants
they are. they’ve identified a whole group of species and decided to treat them differently.
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tekila@lemmy.world 11 months agoThere 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. 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: www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9HrMdNEKPA (6min). I think this shows a complete misunderstanding of what vegans 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”.
commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
tekila@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
The discriminatory criteria is sentience.
that’s as arbitrary as any other criteria. and you’re still treating all members of a class differently because of their membership in that class. it’s discrimination. discrimination based on species is speciesism. it’s just a speciesism you agree with.
tekila@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Ok let me unpack your two points:
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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.
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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.
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TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
That is actually pretty hilariously stupid.
He 100% just doesn’t like vegetarians and worked backwards, coming up with some half-baked nonsense to back himself up.
Not exactly following the scientific method there.
tekila@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I guess we all have our blind spots :)