Question
Don't plants have feelings?
Alternatives
Carrots scream when you cut them. Eating plants kills more animals than just eating animals.
Summary
Our moral responsibility towards a sentient being should be proportionate to their ability to suffer. While the science on plant sentience is evolving and often surprising, it does not yet ascribe to plants the high levels of sentience we find in vertebrates and closely related invertebrates. What science has known for over a century, if it wasn't already obvious intuitively, is that cows, sheep, ducks, pigs, chickens, horses, dogs, and many of the other animals people eat have complex senses, emotions, and internal worlds. If we want to cause less suffering in the world, the simplest change we can make is to stop paying for industrial animal agriculture and slaughter. Also, and somewhat obviously, farm animals are fed tremendous amounts of plant material. So, if people are seriously concerned about plants, again, the simplest thing they can do is eliminate or reduce their consumption of animal products.
Discussion
Plants are pretty amazing. They appear to have their own versions of many of the senses humans experience, including touch, smell, taste, sight and sound. This makes sense as humans and plants evolved from a common ancestor over a billion years ago. We still share something like 50% of our DNA with trees and bananas. Delving into the science of plant sentience is fascinating and challenging. People who pose questions like “Don't plants have feelings?” Vegans, however, are unlikely to be interested in science for its own sake, much less will they be seeking the next level of compassionate consideration in their lives. Paradoxically, they are less likely to care about plants, forests and ecosystems than the average person. What these people are actually seeking is an intellectual sideshow that helps avoid the more morally urgent question: Is the vast amount of unnecessary suffering we cause in animal agriculture morally acceptable?
Status and ethics
Why do some people grab at such flimsy pretexts in conversations around a topic as important and consequential as animal suffering? Part of this is a lack of moral seriousness or having dark triad personality traits, but perhaps the greater part has to do with status. As a part of our evolution as communal social beings, we can be incredibly attuned to our place in the social hierarchy. People seek social status of almost any kind; it doesn't really matter what the status pyramid is constructed of, so long as they are near the top of it. Part of this is ethical status, which some people seek even though they aren't too concerned about living ethically. Ethical status is just another of the myriad facets of comparison that can be incorporated within the statement "They think they are better than me". There are broadly two strategies we can use to enhance our ethical status: one is to live a more considered, compassionate and selfless life; the other is to continue living as we already do and use our intellectual resources to better justify ourselves. Questioning whether plants have feelings is part of the latter strategy.
Ethical status feels very inconvenient for people who have spent their lives being habituated to unethical behaviours. White people raised in the segregated American South virtually rioted when a 6-year-old African-American girl, Ruby Ridges, was enrolled in an all-white school. After a relatively short time, people calmed down, and integration in those same schools became commonplace and unremarkable. We have been raised in a consumerist, wasteful culture, one in which we are largely defined by how we acquire and spend money. We have been taught to judge the "good life" in material rather than ethical terms. Most people have not been raised to ask about what goes on in the world before products are brought to us, or what happens once we are done with them. The profits of the global market are highly dependent on sweatshops, forced labour, inequality, factory farms, slaughterhouses, political manipulation, global conflict, and countless forms of environmental destruction and pollution. To become ethically conscious of such things forces the realisation that, if we are to even begin to minimise our contribution to the negative aspects of our consumerism, we must put more care into our lifestyle and choices, especially our consumption choices. The system and society we are in, however, do not encourage or reward such care, and they certainly don't always make it easy. Billions of dollars are spent every year on marketing and normalising profligate consumerism to us, lobbying and funding political leaders to keep the system going. Trying to live more ethically can even feel like we are constantly pushing against the flow of the consumerist culture we are embedded within.
Why should we take on this ethical burden? Why not just go with the flow? There are few compelling social or economic reasons to rail against the global beast of consumerism. A much easier path is conformity to it, to continue to follow whatever way of consuming and eating our upbringing happened to churn out. There is, however, the minor, nagging problem of this way of living being inconsistent with an ethical, considered and compassionate life. The human mind, in all its subtlety and creativity, can help us avoid this nagging problem if we want or allow it to. Self-interest and ego can play a powerful, warping role in our logic and ethics. Our minds can find plausible justifications and loopholes for almost anything we want, certainly plausible enough for our minds that are prone to confirmation bias. So people will argue without much thought to an ethical life that, by an uncanny coincidence, they are already living the most practically ethical life. The opposite of what such people would like is to live what Socrates called the examined life. Introspection, after all, raises the possibility of casting a critical eye over one's own beliefs or behaviour. The status many desire is not achieved by raising uncomfortable questions about themselves, questions they fear the answers to because they might require significant change. So they create intellectual barriers to ethical questions. To ask if plants have feelings creates a smoke screen that helps divert an uncomfortable conversation about our personal contribution to suffering.
Scientific studies have often shown this sort of character displacement, sometimes called do-gooder derogation. As part of this common human trait, when someone else acts ethically in their own lives, it forces us into potentially uncomfortable ethical introspection, and we instinctively don't like them for it. We might then try to shift the conversation to any foolishness, duplicity and immorality of the other person that we feel is "showing us up", even though this is unlikely to be their intention. As those fond of gossip have always, at least subconsciously, known, conversations pointing out other people's ethical or intellectual shortcomings feel much better than sincerely pondering or acknowledging your own.
What about plants? What are your shoes made of? What about people? What about bacteria? What about a fairytale farm where the animals have great lives? Such questions are fairly transparent displacements from much more important and obvious questions about our reality and the consequences of our choices in it. This is at least partly understandable. We all fear judgment and self-judgment. We fear self-doubt, painful thoughts, being uncertain about our choices in life, and changes we don't understand fully. Ultimately, though, if we wish to live more ethically, we must confront some personal discomfort and be willing to imagine and create a different self.
Sophistry and truth
Using edge cases to brush away the immense scale of suffering in animal agriculture is a misuse of our intellectual potential. The ancient Greek philosophers had a word for bad-faith intellectualising: “sophistry”. It described the engagement with important and serious questions at a trite and superficial level. A Sophist's main priority is to win the argument, not to uncover flaws in their own logic, to grow through mutual discourse, or to search for deeper truths. When confronted with humanity’s often brutal treatment of billions of animals, responding with questions like “What about plants?” is usually a Sophist tactic. No one of any moral seriousness could wave away the unnecessary suffering of billions of highly sentient beings with a trite comment or a clever quip.
Suspiciously, many people’s political and ethical opinions align with what they want to do, what they have always done and what they perceive to be in their self-interest. This tendency to bend reason to the shape of our habits and desires is called motivated reasoning. It is a deep cognitive bias we all share, one that shapes reason around our desires as surely as gravity bends light around a celestial body. None of us is above this bias, and it can only be partially mitigated by sustained effort. The way the religious zealot thinks is a clear example of this. For them, truth starts not in doubt, in epistemology or philosophy, but rather it emerges from the starting point of their religious texts and beliefs. Whatever fact or piece of knowledge about the world they encounter must be reconciled with their religious beliefs or else denied as a threat to those beliefs. This logical bias has made people seriously claim the Earth is only a few thousand years old, or that animals were designed by an invisible being. No one would reach these positions starting from first principles. Instead, you must have a religious worldview implanted in you before you can accept them. This logical bias is not confined to religion. Many people place their faith in their existing habits and prejudices, the way they were raised and so on. It is a form of personal and philosophical hubris, but we must understand that it is rarely deliberate or intended as such. It is problematic though. People raised with an anthropocentric, carnist worldview, will find that this obscures something that should be obvious: the way we treat animals is one of history's great moral failures.
Pushback
It's not just that people raised with a carnist worldview will find it hard to imagine themselves eating fewer animal products, but they will often object to anyone even raising the idea. Add to this the entrenched economic, cultural and political interests in animal agriculture, and we see there is a huge amount of inertia we must overcome in making a kinder world.
In changing society, even to make it better, we must expect pushback from the status quo. We can expect resistance from individuals even if for no other reason that people are often lazy, fear new things, and don't like change. Every time humans have tried to evolve beyond some ethical horror, those most powerfully agitating for the change have faced resistance, including violence. Opposition has come not just from elites profiting from the status quo but also from large sections of the population, often seemingly invested in little more than habit and conformity. The wider social narrative around social change, pushed by politics, the media and many people, has often been that the current levels of injustice were not only tolerable, but ethically superior to alternatives; that the real problem was the people trying to foment change and upset the order of things. In our current societies, living ethically is unfortunately rarely as simple as lazy conformity. Instead, the interwoven complexity of our societies requires an ethical journey of constant re-evaluation, most importantly of our shared cultural frames of reference. Moral character requires us to follow the truth wherever it leads, to defy social norms where necessary, and sometimes requires us to raise a lonely defiant fist in the face of an irrational mob. Living ethically requires embarking on an open, honest and introspective dialogue that fearlessly seeks out our moral oversights and failings. This is especially true in relation to freeing ourselves from the corruptions of our own power. Above all, moral character requires the strength to look unblinking into the ethical mirror.
There is an often cruel world that farm animals inhabit beyond our sight that we are part of creating, and therefore, we must bear our part of the moral responsibility for. Justifying the suffering and slaughter of sentient beings for luxury food items must be held to an exceptionally high ethical and philosophical bar. Using our intelligence to displace our uneasiness about the treatment of animals is a sign that we fear a true reckoning with ourselves; that we fear questioning our part in the sentient lives we affect, lives that have unjustly had power and agency taken from them. In our current culture of distraction and mindless consumerism, the heroic stance is to fearlessly question our own integrity.
Moral seriousness
Many questions vegans are asked stem from a lack of moral seriousness. People will seem to argue about things vigorously, but ultimately, they aren't ethically invested in the conversation. They see an argument about eating animals as little different to an argument about which is the best sports team, or which place has the best pizza. Let us, however, give these people's level of moral seriousness the benefit of the doubt. We've moved a long way away from plants, so let's return and answer their question.
Does eating a plant-based diet cause more suffering? Perhaps paradoxically, when humans eat more plants, fewer plants overall are eaten. The land-based animals that humans most often eat are herbivores, and over the course of their lives they must be fed a large amount of plant material to help them grow. Around a third of the grain we grow globally, and a higher percentage of grain in many countries such as my own, is used to feed livestock. Animals, especially larger animals, are inefficient converters of plant foods into protein. For a bovine to produce 1kg of meat, it needs to be fed 25 kg of soybeans. 25kg of soybeans contain 9.5kg of protein, whereas 1kg of beef contains about 260 grams of protein. If soybeans were eaten directly by humans, we would remove all of the inefficiency and environmental concerns of feeding them through the intestines of animals. Eating animals fed on plants requires dramatically more plants to be used to just feeding the human animal on plants.
Related to this is the question of animals being killed during the harvesting of grain and other farming practices, and a similar logic applies. When someone eats an animal product, they don't sidestep the deaths of field mice, insects and other animals, but increase them. A vegan diet kills fewer of these collateral-damaged animals. Again, because eating plant foods avoids the waste of inefficiently cycling nutrients through other animals. Whether you want to see fewer plants or animals killed, the solution is generally to eat more plants.
So we've treated their questions seriously, but it is revealing that carnists only begin caring about the death or suffering of these plants and animals when they think it might be a useful tool with which to undermine people arguing for more compassion. Vegans actually do care about these animals, for their own sake, not because they are useful in our arguments or for our egos. It is probably only a farming system underpinned by the ethics that vegans espouse that will start to look more seriously at how to minimise these unfortunate deaths. Vegans must, unfortunately, exist in a non-vegan world, which includes non-vegan farming practices. Especially in our current world, a vegan diet cannot be perfect, cannot be entirely without animal death, or 100% cruelty free as a t-shirt I once had said. We can, however, eat a diet which involves far fewer deaths, far less suffering. Every person living a vegan life is another vote for a more compassionate farming system.
Weighing sentience
To take the question about plants more seriously than that with which it is usually asked: just like all life on this planet, plants have their own evolutionary journey that deserves respect. It is an interesting and evolving question of what our duty is to these beings we share our very distant evolutionary origins with. Plants don't have a central nervous system because it's not evolutionarily useful to waste energy creating receptors for pain that you can't do very much about. They do react to stimuli in their environment, even resisting attack, but this is done via a biochemical system very different to animals. Plant biology is many and varied, and there is a lot more nuance than I can cover here. There aren't even really distinct, easily identifiable separate kingdoms of plants and animals. In the web of evolution, the distinction between species is often subtle and very much part of a continuum of different evolutionary strategies, a web of interrelated life stretching out over time and space. Amid this complexity and given the power of human agency, for all other life in the universe, we should continually question where our ethical duties lie and on what basis we make our judgments.
Some people take animal suffering as seriously as any vegan, but they think it is ethically justifiable to eat very simple creatures, bivalves like oysters and mussels, or to eat insect products like honey. Vegans may not agree with this, but we generally have greater respect for people who have thought through things and followed through with ethically motivated changes than those who blindly conform to whatever ideas they grew up with. Someone may not get the official vegan badge if they eat honey, or the occasional oyster, but if the rest of their diet is predominantly plant-based they will be causing a fraction of the suffering of the people around them.
Darwin and most eminent biologists since him have understood that the common evolutionary heritage we share with other creatures expresses itself through us. This includes the fact that we share the core of our sentience with other beings. Humans are not a wholly different kind of being; instead, we are similar beings with some differences and additions. Most of our conscious awareness is actually probably quite similar to other animals, concerned as it is with the requirements of our body, having and dealing with emotions, perceiving and navigating the physical world and so on. We do not experience existence completely differently from them and thus do not exist in a separate moral universe. What overlap there is between humans and other animals may always be up for debate and questioning, but we should not question that there is significant overlap, certainly far more than we have hitherto acknowledged with our magical and religious ideas of ourselves.
Many vegans follow a philosophy called sentientism, which holds that sentience is the important thing that we should consider in our treatment of others. Most importantly, we should consider what Jeremy Bentham called "their ability to suffer". This way of thinking is opposed to the dominant paradigm of speciesism, a way of looking at non-human life as of lesser worth. Often this is held not because of any rationally justified innate capabilities or sensations that other animals lack, but purely because they are not human. Other aspects of speciesism relate to how differently humans treat different animal species. The question of why animals on factory farms are treated so inhumanely when they are just as sentient and able to suffer as the cats and dogs is a confusing one. Many people who have pets lavish affection on them and generally consider them members of their family. If someone agrees it is cruel not to walk a dog regularly, but then unquestioningly eats a pig whose life has been one of confinement in the factory farm, then that person clearly lacks ethical consistency and is guilty of speciesism.
Duty of care
Other life exists with us, not for us. Humanity is failing in the duty of care our higher sentience and power give us over other beings on this planet. All life has its own story and place in evolution that should not be considered automatically subservient to human desire. As our science and understanding of sentience evolve, we will have to re-evaluate our behaviour and positions to ensure our ethics aligns with the evolving world. In today's world, however, a deep, obvious and uncontroversial question is staring back at us from behind barbed wire and metal bars, from within cages and fishing nets, from the confines of the factory farm and the slaughterhouse. They wait huddled, waiting for an answer from us, on which their experience of this life and world, and their very lives themselves depend. We know without question that these beings think and feel deeply, share many of our emotions and have similar senses of pleasure and pain. We know that if we ate fewer of these animals, it would bring a dramatic change to their lives, and also that if we collectively ate fewer animals, it would be of major benefit to our natural ecosystems. We can not let discussions of philosophical edge cases from people who are morally unserious distract us from stating these obvious truths.
It is the lot of a finite mind in this infinite universe to have to think and act with incomplete knowledge and information. We will inevitably make mistakes, practically and ethically. It is not making mistakes we should fear, but the mindset that refuses to grow, to learn and then change when confronted with deeper thoughts and better information. We can never have complete certainty about the intellectual and emotional lives of others, whether they be plants, other animals, or even other people. History teaches us, however, that when limited knowledge confronts expansive ethical questions, it is safest to err on the side of compassion.