Source
Terrill & Veit (2024), “Better to be a Pig Dissatisfied than a Plant Satisfied”, LIT-193, read in full in NOTE-120.
What was actually shown
A conditional argument, which the paper calls “our conditional argument” (p. 3) and whose goal it calls “modest” (p. 2).
- The premises (pp. 8–10). A1: sentience is “a spectrum that comes in degrees”. A2: plants may be “quasi-sentient”, with “such faint feelings that we could not even imagine them”. A3: moral status is a matter of degree, “determined by the strength and complexity of the degree of sentience” (p. 9). Behind them sits the assumption that “without sentience an entity would have no interests or welfare” (p. 9, after Timmer 2023).
- The conclusion. Plants may have partial moral status, “on a smaller magnitude relative to animals” (p. 3).
- Table 1 (p. 11). No sentience gives no status. Quasi-sentience gives partial status, with obligations that are “Some, but outweighed by animal interests in most cases”. Sophisticated sentience gives full status.
- Non-zero-sum (p. 12). Admitting plants does not lower animals’ status (Douglas 2013), so the view avoids treating eating plants and eating pigs alike. Ethical veganism stays “the best moral option” (p. 11).
- Weight (p. 13). Plants get “a very low value” that loses to animals “even when we compare a lot of plants against a few animals”, though “an entire forest” might outweigh one pig.
The inference from A1–A3 is valid. Nothing in the paper could have come out otherwise, since every premise is assumed.
What this does not say
- That plants are sentient. The paper says “Nothing we … have said settles the final question” (p. 13), and that the burden shifts to plant neurobiologists. The evidence for A2 is surveyed at second hand, mainly from Calvo & Lawrence 2023, and its auxin–neurotransmitter analogy is chemical similarity only, which does not bear on intensity.
- That graded sentience gives graded status. That is A3, assumed with citations to DeGrazia, Timmer and McMahan. Footnote 13 notes it is contested.
- How much plants weigh. The account is “coarse-grained” (p. 10). There is no scale, no aggregation rule and no mapping from degree to weight, so the forest-against-pig concession sits uneasily with “a very low value”.
- Which plant states are missing. Footnote 21 names them: the degree of plant-specific valenced states, and whether plants have high harm thresholds or harm-numbing mechanisms.
- That it is the second author’s current view. Veit’s later work (LIT-105) declines to count Paramecium or Chlamydomonas as conscious, calls plant “experiences” predictive control, and cites his forthcoming case against plant consciousness (NOTE-120).
Connections
- Rival. Bruckner (THEORY-699) gives plants welfare without sentience, by adaptive self-maintenance. This account assumes the opposite: no sentience, no interests. Footnote 2 sets such non-sentience grounds aside.
- The precaution it borrows. The step from a non-negligible chance to a pro tanto obligation (Sebo & Schukraft 2021) is the precaution that THEORY-677 says has no direction until an error preference is stated.
- Over-generation. Schwitzgebel (LIT-159) argues that criteria liberal enough to admit plants on behavioural and information-processing grounds over-generate. The paper does not address it.
- The map of grounds and weighing it relies on is the SEP entry (LIT-146), which is not neutral on weighing.