As far as I can tell, they are saying that asking if plants can feel pain is akin to asking if gas molecules in a bottle want to get out of it or not. That means that if you are concerned about plants being eaten, you should also be concerned about gas molecules getting out of that bottle. It would mean that consciousness didn't need the information system that we currently associate with it.I guess there is room to further look into the subject of Plant pain.
And, I would argue, that would put us in a dangerous situation. If people started to believe that rocks and plants were sentient, many of them could come to the conclusion that there's no point in being vegan. Cows, rocks and sunflowers would be considered to belong to the same category, so what would be the point in refusing to eat meat?
It's very similar to the kind of animism professed by Francis of Assisi, when in his Laudes Creaturarum talks about fire and water as if they were real people. San Francis is, luckily, still associated with the patronage of animals and the environment, but was probably neither vegan (of course), nor vegetarian, and I have personally seen his philosophy used, by theists and atheists alike, to justify their consumption of meat. That's unfortunate.
This article covers many of the studies that have been carried out to demonstrate that plants are sentient: skepdic.com/plants.html The conclusion is that, although plants display many remarkable 'behaviors', speaking about plant neurobiology is speaking metaphorically.
I am not sure. They don't seem to believe that life is sacred, for example. Otherwise, they could have argued that giving birth to a cow, regardless of whether it will be slaughtered or not, is always a good thing. And they didn't, they said quite the opposite.It seems to me this is a vote for the Life Loving approach
Deontology and consequentialism are just ethical frameworks. One could use a consequentialist approach and establish 'life' as their aim, as one could, deontologically, say that life is sacred and taking a life is always wrong. The conclusion can be the same, but it would result from two different ways of thinking.
This becomes more visible if we talk, for example, about animal testing.
Let's say we want to compare a consequential approach whose aim is the preservation of life, against a dentological approach according to which life is sacred. Let's then suppose that we can develop a cure for cancer, but, in order to do so, we need to kill a monkey.
Now, If you are a consequentialist and 'life' is your goal, killing that monkey is the right thing to do; you would lose one life, but you would develop something that could potentially save thousands of people. If you are a deontologist and consider life to be sacred, however, killing that monkey is always wrong, no matter how many lives you could potentially save.
As you can see, both these two hypothetical people care about 'life', but they come to the opposite conclusion.
So, first we should establish whether we should take a deontological or a consequential approach to the question and then see if 'life' should be our goal or not.
