Question
Don't plants have feelings?
Alternatives
Carrots scream when you cut them. What about bacteria? 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. Given how inefficient this is in producing edible protein, if people are concerned about plants, they should 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?
Defying logic
Why do some people grab at such flimsy pretexts in conversations around a topic as important and consequential as animal suffering?
Now many people might think this is an absurd question that no one would ask in a serious conversation about the duties humans owe to other species. If you find it hard to believe anyone would bring up such an absurd point, you clearly haven't had enough conversations about veganism. Apparently, intelligent adults will bring carrots up as justification for the killing of highly sentient beings like cows and pigs and think they have made a knock-down argument. Their understanding of the natural world seems to be: there is human-level intelligence, and then everything else is roughly equivalent, including bacteria. Carrots are never raised regarding human slaughter. No one has ever sat in front of the International Criminal Court and used the carrot defence. Yet the human experience of sentience is more similar to that of pigs than of carrots, which are much less closely related to us in evolutionary terms.
Answering questions like the carrot defence is perhaps less productive than pondering the reasons behind someone repeating them. The main reason for such a question seems to be thoughtlessness and conformity. That carrots are always specifically brought up is some evidence for this: that a meme has infected people who are simply repeating it. Why are carrots invariably featured when there are hundreds of other root vegetables whose internal world we might wonder about? What about the doughy potato, humble beetroot or voluptuous turnip? There are many, many thousands of plant foods, but for some reason people always bring up the nefarious carrot. It is hard to comprehend that anyone would think the morality of how we treat carrots is relevant to how we treat, for example, a pig. One reason for the lack of critical thinking here is that because people believe the underlying premise - that the eating of animals requires no more moral justification than the eating of plants - they fail to inspect any statements that align with their bias. Because people consider the carrot and the pig to be food, the illogical nature of the moral comparison eludes them.
Another reason people might bring up the carrot defence is a lack of moral seriousness. This can have many causes; people could simply be unempathetic, or they could have dark tetrad personality traits - psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism and sadism. Such people probably can't see or care about the difference between low and high sentient beings. If you don't care about animals for whatever reason, it is consistent to group them in with another group of beings you don't care about, such as plants, or even other groups of people.
Something else that could be warping people's logic here is our need for status. As a part of our evolution as communal social beings, we can be incredibly attuned to our place in the social hierarchy. Many people seek social status of almost every kind. It doesn't really matter what the status pyramid is constructed of, some people want to place themselves at the top of it. Included within this is ethical status, which people can seek even if they aren't very concerned about living ethically. Perhaps the defining statement of such people, and how they interact with others, is "They think they are better than me". Ethical status is just another of the myriad facets of comparison that can be incorporated within that statement. There are broadly two strategies we can use to enhance our ethical status: one is to work on ourselves and live a more considered, compassionate and selfless life; the other is not to change, but instead use our intellectual resources to justify our existing attitudes and behaviours. Humans can, after all, justify almost any ridiculous thing if they are stubborn and don't care too much about objective truth. Questioning whether plants have feelings is part of this strategy.
Ethical status is inconvenient for people who have spent their lives living in a society that habituated them to unethical behaviours. People raised in the segregated American South virtually rioted when a 6-year-old African-American girl, Ruby Bridges, was enrolled in an all-white school. After a relatively short time, people saw sense, calmed down, and integration in those same schools is now commonplace and unremarkable. People feel compelled to defend a wasteful, materialist, destructive culture at least partly because they are intellectually immersed within it and can't imagine a world beyond. Defining people by how much money they have and spend has terrible ethical consequences for our world. 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. Becoming 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, while also lobbying and funding political leaders to keep the system going. Trying to live more ethically can even feel like constantly pushing against the flow of the consumerist culture we are embedded within.
Why should we take on this ethical burden? Why not just be selfish and 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 that the consumerist lifestyle is inconsistent with an ethical, considered and compassionate life. The human mind, in all its subtlety and creativity, can help us navigate around the problem of ethics if we want or allow it to. Self-interest and ego play a powerful, warping role in the logic and ethics even of the best of us. Allowed to run rampant, our ego can become a vampire squid on the integrity of our intellect.
Confirmation bias
Our minds can find plausible justifications and loopholes for almost anything we want. We do this without even being conscious of it, through a process called confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the human tendency not to properly evaluate truth claims if they align with our existing beliefs. 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. If a piece of knowledge cannot be reconciled with their religious beliefs, it becomes a threat to them. Again, they do not do this deliberately. Their brain is just much more receptive to things that fit in with their existing worldview than things that disagree with it. This logical bias is the reason that apparently normally intelligent people will seriously claim the Earth is only a few thousand years old, or that plants and animals were clearly designed by an invisible being. No one would reach these positions starting from first principles. Instead, you must have a certain, in this case religious, worldview implanted in you before you can accept them. Bias is not limited to religion. Many people place their faith in knowledge that confirms their existing habits and prejudices, the beliefs they were raised with, and so on. This is a form of personal and philosophical hubris, but we must understand that it is rarely deliberate or intended as such. It is problematic for our world though.
Scientific studies have often provided evidence of this sort of ethical displacement, sometimes called do-gooder derogation. The basics of this common trait are that when someone else acts more ethically than others in their own lives, it forces others into potentially uncomfortable ethical introspection. Faced with this discomfort, people tend to dislike the person who caused it, the do-gooder. This is a point where what are called "Ad hominem" attacks can occur, which is where someone doesn't try to counter a person's argument but instead focuses on attacking their character. When someone makes you feel bad about yourself, regardless of their intention, people will instinctively respond by trying to deflect their feelings somewhere else. 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 slightly different self.
Motivated reasoning
Utilising 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”. We might contrast it with the word "philosophy". Both come from the Greek sophia, meaning wisdom, but the philosopher is a friend or lover of knowledge, while the sophist is just someone skillful in using it. Socrates particularly disliked the Sophists, and felt they engaged 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 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 something of a Sophist tactic. It is possible that someone might ask this question from a sincere place, but odds are it is a form of evasion. No one of moral seriousness would 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, something closely related to the confirmation bias we discussed earlier. It is another 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. Millions of mugs with World's Best Dad, or the tendency for people to think they live in the best country in the world, are good examples of this. People often don't question ideas that serve their identity. People want to believe they already have ethical status, even if it's something they haven't put much thought into. The easiest way to gain ethical status without significant personal effort is to simply decide that, by convenient coincidence, they are already living the most practically ethical life. Such people can be highly intelligent, but the opposite of what they 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. Worse still are ethical questions that might require significant change. So some people create intellectual barriers to ethical questions. Asking if plants have feelings is such a barrier, creating a smokescreen that helps divert an uncomfortable conversation about our personal contribution to suffering.
People would like to think that animals don't suffer terribly in factory farming, because it serves their ethical purposes to do so. We can't entirely blame them for this, however, as things like confirmation bias and motivated reasoning are working against our ability to see our ethical failings clearly. People raised with an anthropocentric, carnist worldview have something obscured from them 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 than 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 any alternatives. They will posit that the real problem is 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 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, it has become a heroic stance to fearlessly question our own integrity and ethical status.
Moral seriousness
People will seem to argue about things vigorously, but it then becomes apparent that they aren't really invested in the conversation. They see an argument about the suffering of billions of animals as little different from an argument about which is the best sports team, or which local restaurant has the best pizza. Conversing with such people is like having a conversation with an ego rather than a deep inner self. Many questions vegans are asked stem from this kind of discussion, where someone seems to lack moral seriousness. Let us, however, give these people's level of compassion the benefit of the doubt, and try to answer these questions directly.
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. 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 grown 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, while getting some much needed fibre in our diets as well. Eating animals fed on plants requires dramatically more plants to be used to feed humans than if they just ate 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. For a start, people who eat meat also don't only eat meat, whatever death or suffering is in a plant based diet is also in the part of any diet that includes plants. When someone eats an animal product, they don't sidestep the deaths of field mice, insects and other animals with that part of their diet, but increase them. A vegan diet is not deathless, but it kills fewer of these collateral-damaged animals than any other common diet, 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 always 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 greater compassion. Vegans are sincere in caring about these animals. We argue for the sake of the animals not because they are defending 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 collateral deaths. Vegans must, unfortunately, exist in a largely 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 that involves far fewer deaths, far less suffering. Every person living a vegan life is another vote for moving the world in the direction of a more compassionate farming system.
Weighing sentience
To take another question with more sincerity than it is usually asked, what about plants? 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 like ours because it's not evolutionarily useful to spend 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 we can cover here. What species belong to the lineages of plants and animals is not always intuitively obvious. For centuries corals were classified as plants, until science recognised them as colonies of tiny animals in the 18th century. There have been similar errors going the other way, where microscopic life were thought to be animals but were finally identified as plants. In the web of evolution, the distinction between lineages and 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 consequences of human power on all other life, 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 stamp 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 average person 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 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 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 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 on Earth 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 align 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, an answer 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.