Ethan C. Terrill, Walter Veit (2024), Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 37, article 4 — DOI-10.1007/s10806-024-09922-4
Key takeaways
- If sentience comes in degrees and moral status comes in degrees, plants may be “quasi-sentient” and have partial moral status while animals still have prima facie more — so granting plants some moral status does not force treating eating plants and eating pigs alike.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-120. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Responding to Segundo-Ortin and Calvo’s case that plants should be taken seriously as candidates for sentience, the authors note that critics tend to assume that because plants matter less than animals they must not matter at all. They propose a gradualist alternative: sentience and moral status are both matters of degree, so plants may be quasi-sentient and carry partial moral status. That lets one hold both that plants and animals have moral status and that animals have prima facie more of it.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 20 seconds of active reading over 1 session. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-120 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Proposed — a coherent but unproven conciliatory position, useful as a clear template of the graded-sentience-to-graded-status inference. What would settle it is evidence for or against plant valenced states. Footnote 21 names the two gaps: the degree of plant-specific valenced states, and whether plants have high harm thresholds or harm-numbing mechanisms. The second author’s later work signals a move against plant consciousness (see LIT-105), so check his current view before citing it as his.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-120, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: low — t=20s, a short conciliatory position paper whose argument the skim captures.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-120 is that reading):
- The inference from graded sentience to graded moral status is the same one any AI-moral-status argument would need; check whether the paper argues for it or assumes it (it is flagged as an assumption).
- Check what evidence for plant valenced states the paper cites and what it concedes is missing (footnote 21 names two gaps).
Access when seeded: Springer’s page returned a bot challenge to curl; read the full published CC-BY PDF from the University of Reading repository (CentAUR, centaur.reading.ac.uk/115243). Read the abstract, Introduction, Background/Clarifying Concepts, “Between Sentience and Moral Status”, “Moral Status”, Table 1 and the Conclusion. Published online 2024-03-07 (article and Crossref agree); accepted 2024-01-30.