Question
Don't plants have feelings?
Alternatives
Carrots scream when you cut them. Eating plants kills more animals than 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 animals to endure industrial agriculture and slaughter. Also, and somewhat obviously, farm animals are fed tremendous amounts of plant material. 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 is little surprise because humans and plants evolved from a common ancestor over a billion years ago. We still share roughly 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?” to vegans, however, are unlikely to be someone interested in the science for its own sake, much less will they be seeking the next level of compassionate consideration in their lives. Instead, 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 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 has to do with moral seriousness and having dark triad personalities, 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 pyramid is constructed of, so long as they are near the top of it. People seek ethical status even if they aren't too concerned about living ethically; it is just another of myriad facets of comparison that can be incorporated within the statement "They think they are better than me". There are broadly two ways we can acquire ethical status: one is to live a compassionate and selfless life; the other is to live however we want and use our intellectual resources, including specious arguments, to try to justify it. The question about the feelings of plants is generally 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, integration in those same schools passed without comment. We have been raised in a consumerist, wasteful culture, one in which we are largely defined by how we acquire and spend money. Most people have not been raised to ask too many questions about what goes on in the world to bring products to us, or what happens to them once we are done with them. The global market is highly dependent on sweatshops, forced labour, inequality, factory farms, slaughterhouses, global conflict, and countless forms of environmental destruction and pollution. To become ethically conscious of such things forces the realisation that, if we are even to begin to minimise our contribution to the negative aspects of our consumerism, we must put much more care into our lifestyle and choices. The system we are in, however, does not encourage or reward such care, and it certainly doesn't always make it easy. It spends billions of dollars every year marketing and normalising consumerism to us, lobbying and funding political leaders to keep the system going. We can even feel like we are constantly pushing against the flow of consumerism.
Why take on this ethical burden? There are not many compelling social or economic reasons to rail against the global beast of consumerism. A much easier path is conformity with it, to continue to follow whatever way of consuming and eating our upbringing happened to churn out. There is, of course, the nagging problem of an ethical, considered life. The human mind, in all of its subtlety and creativity, can help us here if we need it to. It can find plausible justifications and loopholes for almost anything it wants, certainly plausible enough for minds that are prone to confirmation biases. So people will argue that, by an unlikely coincidence, without much thought to an ethical life at all, they already happen to be living in the most practically ethical way. The opposite of what such people would like is introspection, to cast a critical eye over their own beliefs or behaviour. The unearned status they desire is not achieved by raising uncomfortable questions about themselves, questions they fear the answers to. To ask if plants have feelings creates a smoke screen that helps divert an uncomfortable conversation about our personal contribution to the suffering of other highly sentient beings.
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. We must confront some personal discomfort and be able to imagine a different self if we wish to live more ethically.
Sophistry and truth
Using edge cases to brush away the immense scale of suffering in animal agriculture is a misuse of our intellect. 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 their flaws in their own logic, grow through mutual discourse, or search for deeper truths. When confronted with humanity’s often brutal treatment of billions of animals, responding with questions like “What about plants?” is a Sophist tactic. No one of any spiritual intensity could wave away the unnecessary suffering of billions of highly sentient beings with a trite comment or a clever quip; this would be beneath them.
Cognitive bias
Conveniently, many people’s logic and ethical opinions align with and justify 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 bends reason around our self-interest as surely as gravity bends light around a celestial body. None of us is above this bias, and it can only be 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 flows from their religious texts and beliefs. Whatever fact or piece of knowledge about the world they encounter must either be reconciled with their existing beliefs or denied as a threat. Instead of religion, many people place their faith in their own habits and prejudices. It is a form of personal and philosophical hubris, but we must understand that it is rarely deliberate or intended as such.
Pushback
In making society better, we should always expect pushback from the status quo, especially if it requires some level of individual change. Every time humans have tried to ethically evolve beyond some horror, like our current treatment of animals, those most powerfully agitating for the change have faced resistance. Opposition has come not just from elites invested in 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, 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 any alternative; that the only real problem was the people trying to change and upset the current order of things. In our current societies, living ethically is unfortunately rarely so simple as lazy conformity or habit. Instead, the interwoven complexity of our lives requires an ethical journey of constant re-evaluation, most importantly of our shared cultural frames of reference. Moral character is grounded in following the truth wherever it leads, to defy social norms where necessary, and sometimes requires us to raise a defiant fist in the face of the irrational mob. Moral character requires embarking on an open, honest and introspective dialogue that fearlessly seeks out our moral oversights and failings, especially in relation to those we have power over. Above all, moral character requires us not to fear 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 it. Justifying the suffering and slaughter of sentient beings for unnecessary 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 the ethical mirror; that we fear questioning our treatment of the lives we affect, lives we have been involved in taking the power and agency from. In our current culture of distraction and mindless consumerism, it is heroic to stare unblinking into the ethical mirror.
Moral seriousness
Many questions vegans are asked stem from a lack of moral seriousness. People will argue about things, but ultimately, they aren't really 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.
All of the land-based animals humans most often eat are herbivores, fed from the same farming system that we use to feed humans. Something like a third of the grain eaten in the world, and a higher percentage in many countries such as my own, is used to feed livestock. Animals, especially larger ones, are inefficient converters of plant foods into edible human protein. Eating animals fed on plants means many more plants are needed to feed us than if we just ate plants directly. This is related to another similar question, about whether more animals are killed in harvesting grain and other farming practices than in eating animals directly. The same logic follows. Because so much grain is fed to farm animals, vegans also kill fewer of these animals. This is all because vegans avoid inefficiently cycling nutrients through other animals. It is revealing that carnists only begin caring about plants or the animals killed as a byproduct of their food system when they think it might be a useful tool with which to intellectually beat other people. Vegans actually do care about these animals, for their own sake. 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, with non-vegan farming practices. Especially in our current world, a vegan diet cannot be perfect, cannot be entirely without animal death, but it can and does involve far fewer deaths. Every vegan life is another vote for a better world, however, for a more compassionate outlook on the ramifications of our farming system.
Weighing sentience
Again, to take the question about plants with more seriousness than it is 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 different to animals. Plant biology is many and varied, and there is a lot more nuance than I can cover here or even know. 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, we need to continually question what our ethical duties are 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. History teaches us that questioning the received wisdom we were raised with is often a requisite precursor to ethical progress. For many societies in human history, cannibalism, human sacrifice, slavery, class, caste and many other things we now think are unethical were cultural norms.
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 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, concerned as it is with the requirements of our body, perceiving the 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 may always be up for debate and questioning, but not 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, and most importantly, what Jeremy Bentham called "their ability to suffer". This is opposed to the dominant paradigm of speciesism, a way of looking at non-human life as of lesser worth, not because of any rationally justified innate capabilities or sensations, but purely because they are not human. Other aspects of speciesism include 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 that people often lavish affection on and generally consider members of their family. If someone agrees it is cruel not to walk a dog regularly, but then unquestioningly eats an intelligent pig whose life has been one of confinement in the factory farm, to then face the slaughterhouse, then the 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 positions to most ethically sustain ourselves. Right now, 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 our answer, on which their entire 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 some individuals, and also that if we collectively ate fewer animals, it would be of major benefit to the flora and fauna on our planet. We can not let philosophical edge cases distract us from stating these obvious truths and improvements we could make in the face.
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 new thoughts and information. We can never have complete certainty about the intellectual and emotional lives of other beings, including other people. History teaches us, however, that when limited knowledge confronts expansive ethical questions, it is safest to err on the side of compassion.