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Alive and conscious/sentient are not the same. Something must be sentient to be harmed. Plants are alive. You eat salad, right?
by Elle_Benjamin 1y ago
Alive and conscious/sentient are not the same. Something must be sentient to be harmed. Plants are alive. You eat salad, right?
- BugsJustFindMe 1y agoMaybe they're a breatharian. You don't know.
- bobmcnamara 1y ago> Plants are alive. You eat salad, right? Yes. But I don't wander around saying that harvesting it doesn't harm the plant.
- cjbgkagh 1y agoI think you're defining harm based on sentience where as my definition of harm would include damage to not sentient objects.
- const_cast 1y agoBut if we follow that definition of harm we get to an untenable place. Big boys gotta eat, and broccoli is good for you. We have to draw the line somewhere, and I see no reason to draw the line so far back that we're considering clumps of cells on the same level as us. We can do that, sure, but what do we gain? More heartache, harder decisions, more prison time? What's the benefit?
- cjbgkagh 1y agoI wouldn’t use ‘harm’ as the moral delineator, depending on the context it’s very much ok to do harm. It isn’t sufficient context on its own. I think it’s the attempt to be moral by a simplistic definition of ‘doing no harm’ that leads to the contortions to the definition of harm. In this context we’re talking about if it’s ok to harm a small set of cells, and again it depends on context. Consider the act of assaulting a pregnant woman to harm the fetus, it’s the same fetus that has come to the same harm the only thing that is different is who made the choice.
- ImJamal 1y agoWhat does harm have anything to do with it? The person I was responding to said you wouldn't have existed which is false.