Question Why are the lives of plants not considered ethically relevant, when there are more than a few people who think the lives of all animals, including the simplest insects, are? Plants, too, can whither and die. What's the difference between the ethical value of an apple tree and that of a termite?

Accepted:
May 3, 2012

Comments

You would probably appreciate this recent column in The New York Times on whether it is ethical to eat peas (and other plants): http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/28/if-peas-can-talk-should-we-eat-them/

I didn't. I thought it was pretty stupid. Why? Because the sort of "communication" that plants may be capable of does not seem relevant to being an object of ethical concern (which is not to say that we may not have ethical duties to protect the environment, including animals and plants).

I'm not sure you are right that more than a few people think insects have ethical value. Heck, given the way we treat and eat factory farmed animals, I'm not sure many people think mammals and birds (other than their pets) have ethical value or deserve ethical consideration.

Personally, I think people are wrong about the mammals and birds, probably right about insects (and maybe fish), and certainly right about plants. Why? Because for me, the main reason (and minimal threshold) for a being to deserve our ethical concern is that it can suffer. And all current evidence suggests that suffering requires having a complex enough nervous system to experience pain and other aversive feelings (such as fear and sadness), and that mammals and birds can experience such feelings, while insects probably cannot, and no way peas can. I'm talking about having conscious experiences here, not just showing aversive response behavior (so the wriggling of the worm is not sufficient evidence). We may have end up having ethical duties to robots (or even virtual beings) in the future if they are able to experience these feelings. In my view, the ethical facts here will depend on the facts about the functional capacities of the minds of the relevant creatures--not easy facts to discover.

There may be further reasons to worry about our treatment of some animals--e.g., pigs are damn smart and so the suffering they experience in pork-raising factories may even involve distress over severed relationships or over future mistreatment. And the capacity to suffer is not the only thing that matters when it comes to ethical value--humans deserve much more ethical concern than animals, in part because of other capacities we have, such as the capacity to consider moral value, to construct life plans, and to form particular relationships with each other.

Finally, there may be other reasons we should avoid destroying insects and plants (e.g., we have lots of reasons not to destroy endangered species, rain forests, etc.). But I don't think those reasons include that those living beings are individually proper subjects of ethical concern.

Peas can be raised for slaughter. Pigs cannot.