so, turns out that it's becoming increasingly awkward to ignore plant intelligence;
whereas before we sort of took them to be these weird, dumb things that grew out of the ground, more and more there's a reasonable argument to be made that they probably just operate on a longer timescale to the point where it's probably reasonable to attribute sentience to them
(they respond and make decisions according to their environment; they remember stimuli, they communicate with other plants, just on a timeframe of say days and weeks rather than a few minutes)
so fine so dandy, pretty neat, turns out we're really not all that special
my question then, tho, is what does this do to the question of animal rights/vegetarianism?
because my perception hitherto of the main arguments for vegetarianism is that animals by and large have been accorded this special class due to their status as feeling and sensing creatures (and whose qualia we increasingly discover may not be so totally alien compared to our own) and so it is morally abhorrent to treat them significantly different from how we would treat other fellow humans
maybe not "humans" but the distinction as a class to me has always centered around sentience; it is immoral to cause pain to a creature that can FEEL PAIN. But if we're allow that plants may also be sentience - and I'm remarkably unconvinced that it is meaningful to talk about degrees or classes of sentience; it may or may not resemble our own but to distinguish pain on a creature's ability to whimper seems disingenuous - then it seems to me that the moral case for according animals a unique and special status - such that their undue murder is ALWAYS immoral - falls apart
if only because we have to eat plants and murder vast quantities of plants for our own sustenance any way you cut it
you could restrict yourself to only eating leaves and fruits but wood remains the fundamental building block of society. and we can talk about say, wheat's evolutionary strategy depending on us finding it delicious - they WANT us to eat them so they will spread more - but cast in those terms it is identical to that of cows, to whom evolutionarily it was also useful that we found them to be delicious