It’s Not OK to Eat Vegetables
It’s not okay to eat plants — at least according to the underlying moral logic of vegetarianism and animal rights. Despite our natural intuition that plants are “less alive” beings, there are very good reasons to think that plants deserve the same moral status as any other living beings. Reasons to favor animals over plants—such as capacity for pain— do not hold up under scrutiny. If we believe that it is logically morally wrong to kill and eat animals, we may be forced by that same logic to also believe it is morally wrong to kill and eat plant life. This leads us to some potentially absurd conclusions, such as believing it is morally wrong to eat anything at all.
The “Animal Rights 101” page on the website of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals features a quote from utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham: “The question is not ‘Can they reason?’ nor ‘Can they talk?’ but ‘Can they suffer?’”. Ethical vegetarians care about the treatment of animals because animals are conscious beings capable of feeling pain. Animals can experience suffering, and at the factory farms from which the vast majority of our meat comes from they suffer quite a lot. Cows, pigs, chickens and other animals are kept indoors without light or ventilation in extremely crowded cages in which they cannot even stand. They spend their lives lying in darkness covered in their own urine and feces, pumped full of hormones and antibiotics and awaiting slaughter. When these highly stressed creatures lash out at their cages or at one another, they are quelled by beatings and electric shocks. Moral disgust at these conditions is a big motivator for people who adopt vegetarianism.
Plants, meanwhile, are intuitively considered to not have conscious experiences such as pain. Plants have no nociceptors, which are the class of nerve cells that trigger the sensation of pain. They have no brains or central nervous systems that could process such sensations anyway. A carrot will grow more robustly in good soil conditions than in poor ones, but this does not mean that a carrot in poor growing conditions truly experiences suffering as we understand it. So, if capacity for pain is what matters regarding what we can or cannot morally eat, then vegetarianism is a good solution.
However — there is a problem with this logic: it equates the potential for suffering with suffering. What matters morally is the suffering of beings, not whether or not the beings have the capacity to suffer in the first place. The implication of this is that eating animals is morally acceptable if the animals do not suffer. By this logic, humane farm conditions in which the animals live healthy and safe lives are morally acceptable. There are movements in the United States and elsewhere to improve living conditions for farm animals and to label the products made from such animals with ‘humane’ certifications.
An immediate objection to this line of reasoning might be that slaughtering is an unavoidable source of suffering. Regardless of how happy the lives of the animals were, those lives end violently and prematurely. There are two morally relevant factors to consider here. The first consideration is the pain of the actual act of slaughtering. The reality is that modern slaughter techniques, when executed correctly, cause the animal no pain. The animal is stunned unconscious before death. It is true that in practice the stunning is not 100% effective, depending on the care and skill of the slaughterer. But in theory, even if modern stunning techniques were deemed insufficient, we could devise even ways to peacefully euthanize the animals such that they never experience suffering.
The second moral consideration is whether or not the ending of life itself is causing suffering, regardless of whether the killing is painful. Farm animals’ lives are ended well before they would die of natural causes. Intuitively the answer is yes: we harm a living being by deliberately ending its life. “Do not kill” is a staple of human ethical systems across time and geography. If we morally object to harming living things by killing them, then we may never eat animals, including those raised in humane conditions. But if we commit to this principle, we are faced with a very serious problem: “living things” applies to more than just animals and people.
No matter what we ultimately conclude about their moral status, plant life is certainly life. Primitive living organisms first developed the ability to photosynthesize 3.5 billion years ago. The first complex multicellular photosynthesizing organisms that we would consider “plants’’ arose 850 million years ago during the Precambrain era, a full 650 million years before the first mammal walked the earth. If we want to morally justify favoring some forms of life over others, we must do so based on specific criteria that distinguish their status, such as sentience or degree of complexity. The reality is that while their biological structure differs greatly from animals, plants are highly sophisticated living beings in their own right. Plants are born, grow and reproduce. They actively seek resources and avoid harms. They respond to sounds and smells that signify threats. Plants can communicate with one another and demonstrate preferential treatment for their close genetic relatives, such as the case of older trees using their root systems to spread nutrients and information to nearby offspring and to strangle competitors.
Evolutionary biology disputes the intuition that complexity is equivalent to superiority. The struggle for survival is fundamentally a struggle for energy, and complexity is energy-expensive. Plants and other so-called “primitive” organisms do not lack brains because they are simply inferior beings, but because for them brains are a waste of energy. The most successful organisms on earth both in terms of population number and biomass are bacteria, who are simple unicellular organisms. Plant life has succeeded by taking advantage of the most abundant energy source on Earth: sunlight. Plants avoid wasting energy on luxuries like moving and thinking so they can survive on this slow but steady stream of light energy. Favoring certain types of life based on degrees of complexity seems to be an absurd position.
Even if we agree plants are sophisticated living things, we may maintain that their lack of brains and inability to have subjective experiences means they are not worthy of moral consideration. Perhaps the strongest rebuke to granting plants a moral status comes from philosopher Gary Francione, a champion of the ‘abolitionist’ model of animal rights which considers animals free beings that are unethically treated as property. On the Abolitionist Approach website, Francione writes the following:
“The difference between the animal and the plant involves sentience. That is, nonhumans — or at least the ones we routinely exploit — are clearly conscious of sense perceptions. Sentient beings have minds; they have preferences, desires, or wants.”
On the same page further down:
“Plants are qualitatively different from humans and sentient nonhumans in that plants are certainly alive but they are not sentient. Plants do not have interests. There is nothing that a plant desires, or wants, or prefers because there is no mind there to engage in these cognitive activities. When we say that a plant ‘needs’ or ‘wants’ water, we are no more making a statement about the mental status of the plant than we are when we say that a car engine ‘needs’ or ‘wants’ oil.”
Francione is correct to point out that plants’ lack of brains mean they do not experience subjective consciousness in any way similar to the consciousness of humans and intelligent animals. But we might question why humans’ and animals’ particular way of processing and responding to the world gives them a superior moral status. After all, consciousness evolved through natural selection, as did all types of intelligence, as a tool for survival and reproduction. Pain receptors do not trigger arbitrarily; pain is a type of information which can be processed and reacted to. Consciousness synthesizes that information with other types of information — visual, auditory, olfactory, memory and so on — into a single stream which the organism’s rational faculties then use to make decisions. The complex neurological hardware that synthesizes all types of subjective experiences into a single stream of willful consciousness is truly incredible, but it is fundamentally the same process as other organisms’ methods of processing the external world. A plant that senses sunlight and then orients its leaves towards the light is fundamentally undergoing the same biological process as a hungry human who drives to their favorite restaurant.
“Speciesism” is a concept popularized by philosopher Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation and cited as a core ethical concept by PETA. It refers to an arbitrary and immoral preference for humans over other animals, deliberately echoing other “isms” like racism and sexism. It also insists that all animals have equal moral status regardless of factors like intelligence, sociability or resemblance to humans, so as to avoid preferential treatment for cute animals like rabbits over ugly spiders. It is unclear why speciesism — for those who support it — ought to stop with the animal kingdom. Why should mosquitos and sea urchins have a higher moral status than trees and flowers? The latter have a more obvious positive effect on human lives. Plants are born, live and die struggling for resources just the same as all life on Earth. Gary Francione’s statement that “there is nothing that a plant desires, or wants, or prefers” ignores this fundamental fact. Regardless of its relative simplicity and its inability to communicate, a plant certainly “wants” to live and reproduce. This is the very definition of living versus non-living things.
Despite the title of this essay, the final thesis here is not that it is morally wrong to kill and consume plant life. Rather, my point is that there is no moral reason to favor animals over other non-human beings such as plants. Morally conscientious people ought to abandon vegetarianism and consider two other types of ethical diets, depending on whether their primary concern is suffering or is killing.
Many (including this writer) accept that killing other living things for consumption is natural, but believe we are morally obligated to minimize the total amount of suffering this process inflicts. Killing is unavoidable but suffering is. In terms of dietary practice this has two major implications. First, it means that what species we eat is irrelevant. We are free to consume animals as well as plants. Secondly, special care must be taken to ensure that sentient animals do not experience suffering. This means that humane farming conditions are morally very important, and we should not accept anything less than the highest standards for animal welfare (this is unfortunately a very difficult and expensive process in reality, but for now we are in the hypothetical realm of philosophy). People who practice this diet call themselves “humaneitarian” (not to be confused with human-itarian, which raises its own set of moral quandaries). More information about this diet can be found at humaneitarian.org.
A different, very extreme diet may be considered by someone who absolutely objects to killing any living things. It may seem that if we ethically object to eating plants as well as animals, we are doomed to either sin or starvation because we must kill to eat. This is not technically true. A small subset of foods can be acquired without killing or harming. Fruits, seeds and nuts can be harvested from plants with no harm to the plants themselves. Milk and eggs from domesticated animals can be freely consumed, presuming the animals lived in humane conditions. Anything that dies of natural or accidental causes could also be consumed. Restricting oneself to this small group of truly ethical foods could be called “fruititarianism”, both because it includes fruits and to demarcate consuming the “fruits of nature” versus consuming nature itself. Though “fruititarian” is already a term used to describe people who eat primarily fruit for its supposed health benefits, we could still distinguish ethical fruititarians from that other type. It is easy to imagine the practical challenges of actually adopting such a diet. But in ethical terms, the logic is sound if one is absolutely committed to not killing any living beings.
When considering the ethics of eating, it is vital that we articulate our exact moral concerns. Do we object to suffering, do we object to killing, both or neither? These are two distinct problems. Despite being the classic quintessential ethical diets, vegetarianism and veganism do not logically address either of them. We ought to rethink how we approach ethical eating so that our practices can live up to our principles.
Sources & Further Reading
Humaneitarianism: https://humaneitarian.org/
“This is What Humane Slaughtering Looks Like” by Mac McClelland: https://modernfarmer.com/2013/04/this-is-what-humane-slaughter-looks-like-is-it-good-enough/
Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach: https://www.abolitionistapproach.com/
Michael Marder and Gary Francione Debate Plant Ethics: https://www.cupblog.org/2012/06/05/marder-and-francione-debate-plant-ethics/
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals: https://www.peta.org/about-peta/why-peta/why-animal-rights/
Animal Liberation by Peter Singer: https://www.amazon.com/Animal-Liberation-Definitive-Classic-Movement/dp/0061711306
There’s No Such Thing As Humane Meat or Eggs by Jacy Reese: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2018/nov/16/theres-no-such-thing-as-humane-meat-or-eggs-stop-kidding-yourself
Fruititarianism: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/fruitarian-diet-is-it-safe-or-really-healthy-for-you/
