How far does our ethical community extend / Do plants have rights?

[Alpha]

Most of us take it for granted that human beings are beings which hold ethical value in and of themselves. We don't do sick laboratory experiments on human beings without their permission. We don't cut off nerves to people's legs, and open their skulls to sever connections to spines, as is actually happening to three monkeys as I right this.

However, most of us eat animals. All of us eat plants. Most of us are willing to accept some degree of environmental degradation so that we can live what we consider to be materially-superior lives. Need paper, cut tree.

It's prima facie simple, and we operate by it. But it's worth deeper consideration. Why don't plants have ethical status in Western societies?

The oldest and most prevalent view of who has moral standing is the belief that only human beings have moral standing; only human beings ultimately count in matters of morality. This anthropocentric or "human centered" conviction is usually linked to the idea that only creatures with the capacity to reason (perhaps as expressed through language) have absolute value and consequently they are the only creatures whose well-being ought to be taken into account for their own sakes.

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, for example, viewed nature as a hierarchy, believing that less rational creatures are made for the benefit of those that are more rational. He wrote "Plants exist for the sake of animals, and brute beasts for the sake of man." In a similar vein, the seventeenth century philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote that "So far as animals are concerned, we have no direct moral duties; animals are not self-conscious and are there merely as a means to an end. That end is man." For these thinkers, therefore, only human beings have moral standing, so the welfare of other creatures matters only if they are useful to humans.

So let's say that you accept that only humans matter in a moral calculus. But which humans? Only the rational ones? Right, so cross off foetuses, babies, toddlers, the mentally-disabled, drug addicts, some elderly people from our list of ethically-considerable beings. Not to mention past and future generations of humans.

See how this is getting troubled already? You (probably) intuitively accept that some human beings without the capacity to reason are ethically-considerable. So why not plants/animals/nature more broadly?

In the eighteenth century the view that only humans count was challenged by several philosophers, including the utilitarians Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. According to these philosophers our only moral duty is to maximize pleasure which they claimed is the only fundamental good, and to minimize pain, the only fundamental evil. In making moral decisions, therefore, we have to take into account all creatures, rational or not, that have the capacity to experience pleasure or pain. As Bentham wrote, "The question is not, Can they reason nor Can they talk, but, Can they suffer?"

This sentience criterion is also the position taken by Peter Singer:

He says that being sentient is both necessary and sufficient for having interests. (In other words, the class of sentient beings and the class of beings with interests is the same class.) Compare a stone and a mouse. There is nothing I can do to the stone that matters to it. It can't feel pain. It can't be deprived of liberty. But a mouse can feel pain, and pain is bad, so what I do to the mouse matters to it. Since the mouse has interests (specifically, an interest in not suffering), it has moral status. This is not to say that the mouse has the same interests as a human.

...

Since plants are not sentient, they lack interests, according to Singer.

This perspective is troubled by the existence of non-sentient animals, like some species of jellyfish, oysters, worms... but also:

Some humans, on the other hand, such as fetuses and humans in a persistent vegetative state, are not [sentient]. Most controversially, this means that infants with anencephaly, a developmental disorder where the child is born with just a brain stem and no mid-brain or higher brain, have absolutely no intrinsic moral status. If the parents consented, they can be used as a source of organs for transplant, even though they are not dead. Hence the shocking aspect of Singer’s beliefs: it is wrong to eat a cow, but it is sometimes ok to kill a baby.

This perspective, of course, has been challenged.

Judge Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit debated the issue of animal rights in 2001 with Peter Singer. Posner argues that his moral intuition tells him "that human beings prefer their own. If a dog threatens a human infant, even if it requires causing more pain to the dog to stop it, than the dog would have caused to the infant, then we favour the child. It would be monstrous to spare the dog."

Singer challenges this by arguing that formerly unequal rights for gays, women, and certain races were justified using the same set of intuitions. Posner replies that equality in civil rights did not occur because of ethical arguments, but because facts mounted that there were no morally significant differences between humans based on race, sex, or sexual orientation that would support inequality. If and when similar facts emerge about humans and animals, the differences in rights will erode too. But facts will drive equality, not ethical arguments that run contrary to instinct, he argues. Posner calls his approach "soft utilitarianism," in contrast to Singer's "hard utilitarianism." He argues:

The "soft" utilitarian position on animal rights is a moral intuition of many, probably most, Americans. We realize that animals feel pain, and we think that to inflict pain without a reason is bad. Nothing of practical value is added by dressing up this intuition in the language of philosophy; much is lost when the intuition is made a stage in a logical argument. When kindness toward animals is levered into a duty of weighting the pains of animals and of people equally, bizarre vistas of social engineering are opened up.

Which entities have moral status, and why? Assuming that some entities have moral status and others do not, what's the morally relevant difference? What is it that all the entities with moral status have that all the entities without moral status lack?

Is it as simple as being a member of the species Homo sapiens? If so, would you deliberately harm an innocent cat? If not, do animals have rights? If so, why not plants? If it's because plants are not sentient, do non-sentient humans have rights? Is that because they are members of the species Homo sapiens...?

Disclaimer: I stole from blogs and stuff, yeah. What are you going to do about it? I listed the sources and this isn't a college essay. I'm not trying to prove a point, just start a discussion.

Disclaimer 1: Oh God. This is terrible. I'm sorry if this just comes across as ramblings. That's because it is and because I really haven't got the energy to write this at the moment. I know a few of you take an active interest in philosophy (and at least one other in 'the rights of nature'). I'm looking at you to save this