this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2026
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There is evidence that plants have some form of sentience. They react to their environment and stimuli, and communicate with each other. We honestly shouldn’t be eating anything that was previously alive.
Unless you are recommending synthesizing food from base chemicals, there isn't another option. All life, excepting that which can photosynthesize, consumes other life for energy and materials.
The best we can do is mitigate suffering and environmental harm - factory farming is abhorrent - but until we have the Star Trek replicator pumping out TV dinners from the ether, we have to eat something.
Damn I thought my sarcasm was obvious.
We are animals and part of the food web, there is nothing innately immoral about eating any other part of the food web to sustain ourselves.
There’s certainly stupid ways to sustain ourselves, such as practices that unsustainably harm the environment like factory farming, or practices that would spur other life forms to harm us, like eating other humans.
But my main point is that “sentience” is a really vague term that can’t be objectively measured.
Not saying it's the case here, but I've never heard this argument raised in good faith, like by someone who is interested in reducing the amount of suffering caused by humans to non-humans. It's always brought up as some thought-terminating catch-22 device to just keep doing wtf ever you want to do anyway.
I am genuinely curious what you think we should do with this information, though. Like how has it influenced your own actions?
I think my takeaway is that morality arguments for veganism based on subjective perceptions of sentience or suffering are not persuasive.
Many farms provide far better lives for animals than they would have in the wild. Many livestock species are far more successful and widespread because we eat them. Furthermore, if everyone was to become vegan, some livestock species would go extinct without human care. Do those who insist everyone should be vegan because animals are sentient and suffer think that we should just genocide the livestock?
Morality arguments totally depend on the perspective. I happen to agree with vegans on many points, but if your prime argument is moral, then yes I expect everyone to do wtf they want. Everyone’s morals are different.
The ethical argument was totally persuasive to me. I mean firstly it was a matter of challenge, but I also like opting out of cruel industries as much as I can handle.
I'm also not trying to universalise anything, but all your points so far are covered here. The use of inflammatory language to suggest I want you genocide animals is a new one I will admit.
You also didn't answer my question.
putting a phrase on a vegan bingo card is insufficient to rebutt the argument.
If you click them they expand to the rebuttal.
Also why do I need to rebut my eating decisions? I just eat what I eat. Why don't you rebut your own.
I didn't say anything about you rebutting your decisions. I'm talking about you're response to someone's own decisions.
Hmm I'm actually not sure what you mean. Maybe I've lost the script, do you mean like my response to the one commenter implying it's hypocritical to eat plant based or pointless or something (they didn't elaborate) because there's evidence plants have feelings?
this has to be the height of intellectual laziness and bad faith. you're not actually engaging with the person who typed the comment at all.
Do you really believe that? :(
I'll fill you in. Maybe you haven't heard these points before, but vegans hear them every time they talk about what they won't eat and why.
Is it intellectual laziness if the objections/rebuttals are so cliché that you can predict both sides with a bingo game? My hope was that would give readers pause about why they feel compelled to make the same points over and over again and again, expecting people on a PBD to justify their decision not to eat animal products.
It's not an interesting debate.
you're not engaging with the other person at all. you're treating them like they are a child to be taught. you have no idea whether they've seen these arguments before. you just threw a link at them.
I reread my responses and it's possible they see things as you do, but I think it's also possible you're reading into a my comments a tone that isn't borne out by the text or context.
Anyway, whatever it was, I guess it wasn't the right approach. I really don't think I "threw" a link at anyone, or said anything patronizing.
Also no one has answered any of my questions, so I'm not sure what I'm even doing here...
no one ever demanded you justify your decision to eat plants
You replied to the wrong comment.
no, I didn't
Rereading, rereading... Oh, I see it. Yeah that's an aside to their aside. That wasn't my core point, or even I think theirs... They were talking about how vegans could make a more compelling case by avoiding "the morality argument" how they already agree with them etc.
I can't believe that someone who's clearly thought about the vegan position believes that they want to bring about some kind of "animal genocide" ... I feel like I matched their tone pretty well.
so don't engage, but don't pretend you've rebutted anything.
I was hoping they would read the like three paragraphs on that website about their points and maybe come back with a bit more nuance.
At least you're actually engaging. The other one seems to have lost interest —maybe from me calling our back and forth cliché.
or because they recognized how lazy and dismissive your response was, and they don't care to be patronized.
Alright that's an answer, maybe I should be more conscientious of my tone. If that's what you honestly believe I'm not going to say your perspective is wrong just because I don't see it.
I saw your comments further down but I want to reply here because some people do sometimes make this argument in seriousness:
Like others said, if I could get all my nutritional needs met synthetically and/or photosynthetically (and still be healthy) I would be happy to. But as it stands, going entirely plant-based is the best and most practical way to minimize harm to all life - including plants. To consume animals you need to raise them, and it takes significantly more plants to raise an animal for food than it takes to eat the plants directly.
Salad is murder!