It’s not circular reasoning; it’s inductive reasoning based on empirical observation.
We didn’t just sit in a room and arbitrarily decide ‘only animals get to be conscious.’ Instead, science looked at how consciousness actually behaves. We know from centuries of medical and neurobiological data that if you damage, anesthetise, or remove centralised neural networks, consciousness vanishes, even while the rest of the body’s cells remain alive and chemically responding to stimuli.
Furthermore, this baseline doesn’t just limit consciousness to mammals like us. Science actively recognizes consciousness in octopuses, which are invertebrates with a radically different, alien brain structure.
you can’t prove that something isn’t conscious, so you can’t know that there aren’t conscious rocks or gas clouds or whatever. but by defining consciousness in a way that precludes anything except animals, we have precluded ever discovering consciousness in non-animals, and therefore precluded other ways of being conscious from study.
You’re completely right that we can’t prove a negative. I can’t prove that rocks, gas clouds, or a laptop don’t have some silent, invisible consciousness. But in science, the burden of proof is on the person making the claim, not on everyone else to disprove it.
Your claim that our definition ‘precludes discovering consciousness in non-animals’ isn’t accurate. Science isn’t biased against non-animals; it is biased toward highly integrated systems.
The baseline for consciousness isn’t ‘it must be made of animal meat.’ The baseline is ‘it must possess an architectural framework capable of integrating disparate data into a single, unified internal state.’
the burden of proof is on the person making the claim, not on everyone else to disprove it.
right. and you’re claiming that consciousness requires some particular traits. all we really know is that observed consciousness has always accompanied these highly integrated systems, but we don’t know that it requires it. we also don’t know that, for instance, rhyzomes aren’t sufficiently complex even in such a definition.
ultimately, the truth is we don’t know. so we can’t base our decisions, ethical or practical decisions, on an unknown.
Saying ‘we don’t know for sure, so we can’t make decisions’ is a recipe for total practical and ethical paralysis. Science never deals in 100% absolute certainty; it deals in overwhelming probability based on empirical data.
While rhizomes are fascinating, structurally complex communication systems, they do not meet the definition of information integration. There is a profound functional difference between a network that distributes information and a system that integrates it.
We have an absolute mountain of neurological, chemical, and behavioral evidence that animals experience conscious pain and suffering. We have zero empirical evidence that plants do.
If we treat the high-probability suffering of a dog and the zero-evidence, purely speculative ‘suffering’ of a carrot as ethically equal because ‘the truth is we don’t know,’ then ethics becomes meaningless. We would be frozen in place, unable to eat a plant or walk on grass out of fear that it might be conscious.
We prioritise animal welfare over plant welfare because that is where the evidence of suffering actually exists.
if you are a consequentialist, you will never know what to do, because you can’t actually know all possible outcomes, or how your actions might turn out. deontologists don’t struggle with this. and since it’s acceptable that animals are killed no matter what method of food production we use, we must accept that killing animals for food (whether to eat them, prevent them from eating our crops, or just by accident through crop planting and harvesting) is acceptable. and if it’s acceptable that that we kill animals for food, eating them can’t be immoral. and none of this needs to consider consciousness at all.
You’ve moved the goalposts away from my original point of contention which was the premise that plants are as conscious as animals.
Nevertheless, your new ethical logic has some flaws:
To a deontologist, intentionally slaughtering an animal is a deliberate wrong. Accidentally running over a field mouse with a harvester is a tragic, unintended side effect of producing food. We don’t say ‘since people die in car accidents anyway, murder is morally acceptable.’ Intent matters, equating a freak farming accident with premeditated slaughter is a logical fallacy.
Even if we ignore intent and look strictly at the body count, livestock eat vast amounts of crops. By eating meat, one is responsible for the intentional death of the livestock plus the exponentially higher number of accidental field animal deaths caused by harvesting the crops to feed them.
Consequentialism doesn’t require you to be a psychic who knows every future ripple effect; it requires you to make choices based on predictable outcomes. I don’t need to know the fate of the universe to know that buying meat directly and predictably finances animal slaughter.
Actually, it’s incredibly easy to find professional philosophers who agree with this as it’s the entire foundation of modern animal rights philosophy.
While Immanuel Kant famously excluded animals from his moral framework in the 1700s, modern deontological philosophers have spent the last forty years correcting that.
Tom Regan: One of the most famous ethicists of the 20th century. His landmark book, The Case for Animal Rights (1983), is the definitive deontological argument for animals. He argues that animals are ‘subjects-of-a-life’ with inherent value, and intentionally killing them uses them merely as a means to an end, which is a direct rights violation.
Christine Korsgaard: She is currently one of the world’s leading Kantian philosophers, based at Harvard. She wrote an entire book (Fellow Creatures) arguing strictly from a Kantian, deontological framework that animals are ‘ends in themselves’ and that slaughtering them is absolutely a deliberate moral wrong.
Gary Francione: A leading philosopher and legal scholar whose entire ‘abolitionist’ approach to animal rights is built on deontological principles, arguing that animals have a fundamental negative right not to be used as human property.
So, no, I’m not hard-pressed at all. Deontology actively recognises the inherent rights of conscious beings. But even if you ignore modern philosophy and cling to 18th-century Kant, you still can’t escape the Doctrine of Double Effect. Under any version of deontology, there is a structural moral difference between an unintended accident and premeditated killing.
I don’t need to know the fate of the universe to know that buying meat directly and predictably finances animal slaughter.
it doesn’t directly finance it, and it doesn’t predictably finance it. The people who did the slaughtering were already paid and there’s no guarantee that they’ll be in business tomorrow.
Consequentialism doesn’t require you to be a psychic who knows every future ripple effect; it requires you to make choices based on predictable outcomes.
and since you can’t know the future, you can’t actually predict anything.
Saying “you can’t actually predict anything” is a complete abandonment of basic logic and common sense.
If you truly believe we can’t predict outcomes, then why do you look both ways before crossing the street? By your logic, since you can’t know the future, you can’t predict that a speeding car will kill you, so you shouldn’t bother looking. Why do you set an alarm clock? Why do you eat when you’re hungry? You do all of these things because you are perfectly capable of predicting high-probability outcomes.
You are confusing absolute mystical certainty with empirical probability.
By eating meat, one is responsible for the intentional death of the livestock plus the exponentially higher number of accidental field animal deaths caused by harvesting the crops to feed them.
I can’t be responsible for something that somebody else did in the past.
The ‘it already happened’ defense ignores basic supply and demand. When you buy a piece of meat at the store, you are casting a financial vote to restock that empty space on the shelf. Your money directly funds the breeding and slaughter of the next animal.
If I buy stolen goods, I am funding and incentivising theft, even though someone else already stole them in the past. If I pay a hitman after a job is done, I can’t stand in court and say, “I can’t be responsible for something somebody else did in the past”.
It’s not circular reasoning; it’s inductive reasoning based on empirical observation.
We didn’t just sit in a room and arbitrarily decide ‘only animals get to be conscious.’ Instead, science looked at how consciousness actually behaves. We know from centuries of medical and neurobiological data that if you damage, anesthetise, or remove centralised neural networks, consciousness vanishes, even while the rest of the body’s cells remain alive and chemically responding to stimuli.
Furthermore, this baseline doesn’t just limit consciousness to mammals like us. Science actively recognizes consciousness in octopuses, which are invertebrates with a radically different, alien brain structure.
you can’t prove that something isn’t conscious, so you can’t know that there aren’t conscious rocks or gas clouds or whatever. but by defining consciousness in a way that precludes anything except animals, we have precluded ever discovering consciousness in non-animals, and therefore precluded other ways of being conscious from study.
You’re completely right that we can’t prove a negative. I can’t prove that rocks, gas clouds, or a laptop don’t have some silent, invisible consciousness. But in science, the burden of proof is on the person making the claim, not on everyone else to disprove it.
Your claim that our definition ‘precludes discovering consciousness in non-animals’ isn’t accurate. Science isn’t biased against non-animals; it is biased toward highly integrated systems.
The baseline for consciousness isn’t ‘it must be made of animal meat.’ The baseline is ‘it must possess an architectural framework capable of integrating disparate data into a single, unified internal state.’
right. and you’re claiming that consciousness requires some particular traits. all we really know is that observed consciousness has always accompanied these highly integrated systems, but we don’t know that it requires it. we also don’t know that, for instance, rhyzomes aren’t sufficiently complex even in such a definition.
ultimately, the truth is we don’t know. so we can’t base our decisions, ethical or practical decisions, on an unknown.
Saying ‘we don’t know for sure, so we can’t make decisions’ is a recipe for total practical and ethical paralysis. Science never deals in 100% absolute certainty; it deals in overwhelming probability based on empirical data.
While rhizomes are fascinating, structurally complex communication systems, they do not meet the definition of information integration. There is a profound functional difference between a network that distributes information and a system that integrates it.
We have an absolute mountain of neurological, chemical, and behavioral evidence that animals experience conscious pain and suffering. We have zero empirical evidence that plants do.
If we treat the high-probability suffering of a dog and the zero-evidence, purely speculative ‘suffering’ of a carrot as ethically equal because ‘the truth is we don’t know,’ then ethics becomes meaningless. We would be frozen in place, unable to eat a plant or walk on grass out of fear that it might be conscious.
We prioritise animal welfare over plant welfare because that is where the evidence of suffering actually exists.
if you are a consequentialist, you will never know what to do, because you can’t actually know all possible outcomes, or how your actions might turn out. deontologists don’t struggle with this. and since it’s acceptable that animals are killed no matter what method of food production we use, we must accept that killing animals for food (whether to eat them, prevent them from eating our crops, or just by accident through crop planting and harvesting) is acceptable. and if it’s acceptable that that we kill animals for food, eating them can’t be immoral. and none of this needs to consider consciousness at all.
You’ve moved the goalposts away from my original point of contention which was the premise that plants are as conscious as animals.
Nevertheless, your new ethical logic has some flaws:
To a deontologist, intentionally slaughtering an animal is a deliberate wrong. Accidentally running over a field mouse with a harvester is a tragic, unintended side effect of producing food. We don’t say ‘since people die in car accidents anyway, murder is morally acceptable.’ Intent matters, equating a freak farming accident with premeditated slaughter is a logical fallacy.
Even if we ignore intent and look strictly at the body count, livestock eat vast amounts of crops. By eating meat, one is responsible for the intentional death of the livestock plus the exponentially higher number of accidental field animal deaths caused by harvesting the crops to feed them.
Consequentialism doesn’t require you to be a psychic who knows every future ripple effect; it requires you to make choices based on predictable outcomes. I don’t need to know the fate of the universe to know that buying meat directly and predictably finances animal slaughter.
You’re going to be hard pressed to find a professional philosopher who agrees with this claim.
Actually, it’s incredibly easy to find professional philosophers who agree with this as it’s the entire foundation of modern animal rights philosophy. While Immanuel Kant famously excluded animals from his moral framework in the 1700s, modern deontological philosophers have spent the last forty years correcting that.
Tom Regan: One of the most famous ethicists of the 20th century. His landmark book, The Case for Animal Rights (1983), is the definitive deontological argument for animals. He argues that animals are ‘subjects-of-a-life’ with inherent value, and intentionally killing them uses them merely as a means to an end, which is a direct rights violation.
Christine Korsgaard: She is currently one of the world’s leading Kantian philosophers, based at Harvard. She wrote an entire book (Fellow Creatures) arguing strictly from a Kantian, deontological framework that animals are ‘ends in themselves’ and that slaughtering them is absolutely a deliberate moral wrong.
Gary Francione: A leading philosopher and legal scholar whose entire ‘abolitionist’ approach to animal rights is built on deontological principles, arguing that animals have a fundamental negative right not to be used as human property.
So, no, I’m not hard-pressed at all. Deontology actively recognises the inherent rights of conscious beings. But even if you ignore modern philosophy and cling to 18th-century Kant, you still can’t escape the Doctrine of Double Effect. Under any version of deontology, there is a structural moral difference between an unintended accident and premeditated killing.
it doesn’t directly finance it, and it doesn’t predictably finance it. The people who did the slaughtering were already paid and there’s no guarantee that they’ll be in business tomorrow.
and since you can’t know the future, you can’t actually predict anything.
Saying “you can’t actually predict anything” is a complete abandonment of basic logic and common sense.
If you truly believe we can’t predict outcomes, then why do you look both ways before crossing the street? By your logic, since you can’t know the future, you can’t predict that a speeding car will kill you, so you shouldn’t bother looking. Why do you set an alarm clock? Why do you eat when you’re hungry? You do all of these things because you are perfectly capable of predicting high-probability outcomes.
You are confusing absolute mystical certainty with empirical probability.
I can’t be responsible for something that somebody else did in the past.
The ‘it already happened’ defense ignores basic supply and demand. When you buy a piece of meat at the store, you are casting a financial vote to restock that empty space on the shelf. Your money directly funds the breeding and slaughter of the next animal.
If I buy stolen goods, I am funding and incentivising theft, even though someone else already stole them in the past. If I pay a hitman after a job is done, I can’t stand in court and say, “I can’t be responsible for something somebody else did in the past”.
I never claimed that
I never claimed that you did, but you joined in on a comment chain in which that was the central argument.