Swatting a mosquito generally doesn’t induce suffering, if it’s done quickly. And since they are not social animals other mosquito probably won’t suffer from the loss.

This is like saying it is okay to kill a lonely person with no friends and family, as long as it is an instant death.

The point is about suffering.

I don’t agree with you that suffering is the single center concept to base your moral judgement on these issues. Not all living things that i care about are able to suffer, and I do not care about all living things that do suffer. I do not care that i cause a mosquito suffering by killing it (wounding it), if it is sucking my blood, or even just being annoying when flying around me, because I value my comfort above its existence (and suffering). I expect you do the same? This is speciesism.

That’s like saying people have a good reason to beat people who don’t look like them: racism.

Except we both agree that racism is wrong. We do not both agree that speciesism is wrong.

Your math is not correct on this. You have stated the rate of deaths per mile, not the probability of not dying per mile, e.g. if 2 people died per mile, then the probability of dying per mile is not 200%.

I believe this should follow a Poisson distribution, i.e.f(k;m) = ((rm)^k * e^-(rm)) / k!, where k is the number of deaths, m is the miles traveled, and r is the deaths per mile. Then, the probability of dying after traveling m miles is 1 - f(0;m), i.e. the probability of no deaths occurring. Thus, the probability of dying when traveling 10^6 miles is 1 - e^-(7.3 / 10^9 * 10^6) = 0.727%.

That’s a lot of rationalization with no facts to back it up.

I, honestly, have no idea what you are talking about. Which facts would you find relevant in a philosophical discussion on morality?

I’m getting a “well ackchually” vibe from your comment.

I am sorry you feel that way, that was not my intention.

If I put a mouse on the ground next to a flower and told you to stomp one of them to death, You would be comfortable with either option equally?

Honestly I find this example a little comical because I think most people would definitely choose to rid themselves of the pest and keep their pretty flower. However, I do understand your sentiment. I don’t think my personal views really matter, but I have some rough hierarchy of living organism ordering how highly I value their interests. For example, I think a human is more important than a mouse to me, so I would rather kill a mouse than a human, if I had to choose. Similarly, I think a hare is more important than a flower, so I would rather kill a flower than a hare.

You’re making a lot of assumptions about my beliefs in your comment.

I am sorry, I have incorrectly conflated your comment with that of the original.

I do not believe any animal has more right to life than any other animal. With that said if you are in the woods trying to survive like our ancestors then your biological needs take priority, you can’t survive on plants in winter.

These to statements are completely contradictory. You are more important than other animals, thus you sacrifice them for you own survival. If you have no more “right” to survival than a hare, how is it ethical to kill it to ensure your own survival?

Scientific papers usually define what they are studying.

When I say concrete meaning I mean that sentience is an abstract concept of which we can observe evidence of, but we cannot define clearly what it is. In the report you mentioned, you will see that they give 8 criteria for scientific evidence of sentience, i.e. these do not define what sentience is, but they are criteria that we presume sentient beings should satisfy. They even require several pages to explain the complications of how to define sentience and how to observe it.

I do admit that the extent of study on sentience of animals is greater than I initially thought, and I can see that one might have reasonably sufficient knowledge to judge, with some certainty, which life organism might be sentient (under definitions such as the one used in the report). But it seems to me nearly all animals fall under this umbrella of “some level of sentience”, I found this paper highlighting that many insects seem to have cognitive abilities, and might be capable of feeling harm. So to what extent must this go, can you not swat a mosquito in fear of its suffering?

If I throw a rock to the ground, it doesn’t make sense to say I harmed the rock, because a rock can’t experience being harmed

But a rock is not alive, there is no evolutionary force driving its interest, as with all other living organisms. A sea cucumber has no proper nervous system (as I understand from a quick search), and thus could not “feel” pain. Yet, if you cut one in half, I would say that you have harmed it. But this is really just discussing the semantics of the word “harm”, the real point is that you are doing something to the organism that goes against its natural interests.

If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans. Indeed meat eaters don’t really have good reasons to exclude human meat.

Yes they do, speciesism. A quite natural reason.

I don’t think it is disingenuous at all. You may draw the line at sentience, but you have provided no argument for why this is correct. Why must we consider the harm exactly up to sentience? Why must we only consider conscious pain resulting from harm, and not nociception? It is easy to dismiss people as disingenuous, especially if you don’t really have any arguments for your case.

I don’t see how there can exist any good arguments for where to draw the line, which is why it bothers me when people claim the moral high ground, but cannot offer any arguments on why their behaviour is most morally correct. You can say “reduce suffering of sentient beings”, and most people probably agree, but I think it is completely natural to prioritise yourself, your family and friends and your species above other animals. So how much suffering of yourself is as important as the suffering of a chicken. Probably substantially less. I don’t think you will ever convince anyone of your beliefs by simply denying that their weightings of human-to-animal suffering is wrong and yours is right.

You are misunderstanding my argument. I am not arguing against their conclusion, “it is morally wrong to kill animals”, I am arguing against the validity of their argument, “If something does not want to be killed, it is morally wrong to kill it”. Therefore, I am not restating their claim, I am saying that their argument leads to this absurd conclusion, thus it must be wrong. I have already explained this in a previous comment. You appear to be ignoring what I am writing.

A straw man argument is when the other person believes A and you act like they in fact believe B, so you argue against B.

I am not claiming they believe it immoral to kill plants. Quite the opposite, I don’t think anyone believes this in general. Therefore, it is not a straw man.

I don’t believe this is a straw man argument, I never claim that they believe these conclusions. Quite the opposite, I am showing how their argument, not their conclusion, is not good. As I understand their argument, it is basically this:

(i) If something does not want to be killed, it is morally wrong to kill it. (ii) Animals do not want to be killed. Thus, it is morally wrong to kill animals.

I do not agree with (i), which I try to explain by reductio ad absurdum, arguing that if (i) is true it leads to obviously incorrect conclusions, thus (i) must be false.

Sure, so then they should instead be arguing that sentience is the morally correct line to draw.

I don’t agree on your analysis of sentience. The term sentience has no concrete meaning, so how can you base your moral judgements on this? Plenty of plant life has senses and are able to “feel” things.

If something (living or not) cannot experience suffering then you can’t harm it, by definition

This follows no definition of harm that I am aware of, and I do not agree with it. If you are not aware that you have been harmed, you are still harmed. So you should also be able to be harmed even when you could not be aware of it. Therefore, I do not accept this sentiocentric (just learned this word) argument.

There are good reasons to treat different beings differently but they should be based on the beings’ interests, not their species

And this is one of those reasons. A human’s (or any other animal’s) continued existence is mutually exclusive with the food’s continued existence. If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans.

This argument also implies that “dominionism” is wrong, i.e. all life has a right to not be killed or abused. Yet human life is impossible without killing and consuming other living organisms, be it plants, animals og fungi. Thus it is unethical to continue living.

This argument is bad, because for human life to be possible, you must draw the line between life that you consider ethical to kill and life that you consider unethical to kill.