this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2026
711 points (97.0% liked)
Lemmy Shitpost
41807 readers
3892 users here now
Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content.
Anything and everything goes. Memes, Jokes, Vents and Banter. Though we still have to comply with lemmy.world instance rules. So behave!
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means:
-No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
If you see content that is a breach of the rules, please flag and report the comment and a moderator will take action where they can.
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
1.Memes
10.LinuxMemes (Linux themed memes)
Reach out to
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules. Striker
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
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.
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.
Salad is murder!