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.
If you truly believe that knowing an action will incidentally result in some deaths makes it morally identical to premeditated killing, you just criminalised the entire modern world.
By your logic, there is no difference between a doctor knowing a certain percentage of patients will have a fatal allergic reaction to a life-saving vaccine, and a doctor intentionally injecting a patient with poison. You are saying those two things are morally the same.
Moving the goalposts again, you claimed I would be “hard-pressed to find a professional philosopher who agrees”, I gave you three prominent ones.
Your claim that their positions are “novel and lack entrenchment” is factually incorrect. Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights is literally a foundational textbook taught in nearly every university applied ethics course in the world. Christine Korsgaard is one of the leading scholars at Harvard.
And your point that they are “directly disputed by their peers” can be said for the whole of philosophy? Kant is disputed. Utilitarianism is disputed. If being “disputed by peers” means an ethical framework is invalid, then literally no ethical framework exists.
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.
You are confusing absolute mystical certainty with empirical probability.
what is ethics of not a discipline seeking mystical certainty? consequentialist ethics suffers from an epistemic flaw, and it’s well known, and often the reason it is rejected. my approach isn’t unique. most people who reject consequentialism do so for this reason, or because it can also be summed up “the ends justify the means”.
since our discussion started from the deontological objection to treating animals as ends, surely, you’re not now telling me you don’t believe in deontology, and were just making bad faith arguments.
You’re confusing ‘debating’ with ‘adopting a school of thought’. I’m using multiple ethical frameworks because you’ve failed to maintain a consistent position across any of them.
When I point out the Deontological error (that intentional slaughter is not the same as an accidental farming death), you deflect.
When I point out the Consequentialist reality (that meat production causes more ‘incidental’ crop deaths than plant-based diets), you call it an ‘epistemic flaw.’
You are not arguing for a refined, consistent ethical system; you are arguing for moral nihilism. You are using the ‘epistemic flaw’ argument, the idea that because we can’t know everything, we are responsible for nothing, to absolve yourself of all responsibility.
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”.
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”.
this isn’t analogous to how most people get meat. the person who did the killing is paid long before most people walk into a grocery store or restaurant. and so has everyone else along the supply chain.
You are describing a static transaction, but the food industry is a continuous cycle. You are pretending the grocery store is a one-time clearance sale, rather than a rolling inventory system.
You are confusing a legal transfer of currency with the economic reality of market incentives.
Yes, technically the money belongs to the grocer once you hand it over. But the grocer is not a charity. They are a capitalist business that operates on data. You didn’t just hand them money; you handed them money in exchange for a specific product.
By making that exchange, you sent a clear financial signal that procuring a dead animal was a profitable choice for them, so if they procure another one, their profit will likely increase.
Saying “no, I’m not” isn’t an argument; it is just denial. You are arguing against the basic mechanics of retail inventory.
How exactly do you think grocery stores operate? Do you think store managers just randomly guess what to put on the shelves, completely ignoring what customers actually buy?
If you ran a bakery and nobody bought your blueberry muffins on Monday, you would bake fewer of them on Tuesday. The meat industry operates on the exact same principle, just on a massive scale. To claim that consumers refusing to buy meat has zero impact on how many animals the industry breeds and slaughters is to deny the foundational premise of how every business on earth operates.
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.
if you know your actions will result in killing, even if it is incidental instead of the intention, the morality is the same. it’s not an accident.
If you truly believe that knowing an action will incidentally result in some deaths makes it morally identical to premeditated killing, you just criminalised the entire modern world.
By your logic, there is no difference between a doctor knowing a certain percentage of patients will have a fatal allergic reaction to a life-saving vaccine, and a doctor intentionally injecting a patient with poison. You are saying those two things are morally the same.
you found literally 3 people, and their positions are novel, lacking entrenchment. In fact, they’re directly disputed by their peers.
Moving the goalposts again, you claimed I would be “hard-pressed to find a professional philosopher who agrees”, I gave you three prominent ones.
Your claim that their positions are “novel and lack entrenchment” is factually incorrect. Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights is literally a foundational textbook taught in nearly every university applied ethics course in the world. Christine Korsgaard is one of the leading scholars at Harvard.
And your point that they are “directly disputed by their peers” can be said for the whole of philosophy? Kant is disputed. Utilitarianism is disputed. If being “disputed by peers” means an ethical framework is invalid, then literally no ethical framework exists.
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.
what is ethics of not a discipline seeking mystical certainty? consequentialist ethics suffers from an epistemic flaw, and it’s well known, and often the reason it is rejected. my approach isn’t unique. most people who reject consequentialism do so for this reason, or because it can also be summed up “the ends justify the means”.
since our discussion started from the deontological objection to treating animals as ends, surely, you’re not now telling me you don’t believe in deontology, and were just making bad faith arguments.
You’re confusing ‘debating’ with ‘adopting a school of thought’. I’m using multiple ethical frameworks because you’ve failed to maintain a consistent position across any of them.
When I point out the Deontological error (that intentional slaughter is not the same as an accidental farming death), you deflect.
When I point out the Consequentialist reality (that meat production causes more ‘incidental’ crop deaths than plant-based diets), you call it an ‘epistemic flaw.’
You are not arguing for a refined, consistent ethical system; you are arguing for moral nihilism. You are using the ‘epistemic flaw’ argument, the idea that because we can’t know everything, we are responsible for nothing, to absolve yourself of all responsibility.
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”.
this isn’t analogous to how most people get meat. the person who did the killing is paid long before most people walk into a grocery store or restaurant. and so has everyone else along the supply chain.
You are describing a static transaction, but the food industry is a continuous cycle. You are pretending the grocery store is a one-time clearance sale, rather than a rolling inventory system.
no, it doesn’t. it funds the grocer, who can decide what to do with it since it’s now their money. it’s not mine.
You are confusing a legal transfer of currency with the economic reality of market incentives.
Yes, technically the money belongs to the grocer once you hand it over. But the grocer is not a charity. They are a capitalist business that operates on data. You didn’t just hand them money; you handed them money in exchange for a specific product.
By making that exchange, you sent a clear financial signal that procuring a dead animal was a profitable choice for them, so if they procure another one, their profit will likely increase.
no, i’m not.
Saying “no, I’m not” isn’t an argument; it is just denial. You are arguing against the basic mechanics of retail inventory.
How exactly do you think grocery stores operate? Do you think store managers just randomly guess what to put on the shelves, completely ignoring what customers actually buy?
supply and demand is a theory about price discovery. it is not an immutable law that drives production.
If you ran a bakery and nobody bought your blueberry muffins on Monday, you would bake fewer of them on Tuesday. The meat industry operates on the exact same principle, just on a massive scale. To claim that consumers refusing to buy meat has zero impact on how many animals the industry breeds and slaughters is to deny the foundational premise of how every business on earth operates.
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.
and I refuted your refutation. I am not defending their claim, I’m attacking yours.
Which claim exactly are you attacking then?