What comes after veganism

A butterfly idea

Content warning: seriously a butterfly idea please don't be mean to me

I've been vegetarian for a hot minute and as discussed become slightly more vegan by the day. This is only relevant because if you're a member of the Straight Lines On Graphs crew (I'm not, but if you are) you could draw a straight line on the graph of "kinds of thing I ate at some point entering my circle of moral concern vs. time" and begin to speculate about what happens after "mostly vegan" becomes "entirely vegan."

I'm not a member of the Straight Lines On Graphs crew but if they drew that line on that graph I might resignedly admit to harboring some suspicions of my own. I have a certain argumentative family member with whom I was at some point discussing my dietary preferences, and during the conversation as is his nature he pulled out the "okay but if you don't eat X animal that's plausibly not a moral patient just to be on the safe side, why do you eat plants? are you sure it's not just that you're racist against plants?" (He probably didn't phrase it that way.)

Of course I snapped something back about relative likelihoods of sentience and consciousness and moral patienthood or whatever and the conversation moved on. However... It's not the freshest argument against veganism in the world, but it did kind of stick in my craw. I'm not a guy who goes around confident enough in my theory of sentience or consciousness or moral patienthood or whatever to really be confident in much of anything, except that I'm pretty sure that the kind of unconfident I am does not imply that I should be cavalier or uncaring.

So if I think about it, what is my answer?

Argument from plants aren't people

Starting from the ground up, while I was moments ago professing my unconfidence in the whole subject matter, I'm fairly certain that simple little algorithms don't have any particular moral worth not obvious on its face. Like, there's much you can say about the moral worth of the Minecraft Villager, but I think most of the conversation to be had is about the Villager as a facet of the artistic value of Minecraft, not because Villagers are somehow a kind of thing that I should think to care for in some meaningfully similar way, and for meaningfully similar reasons, to how I care for other people.

I think the next step up is bacteria. (Actually the next step up is probably various viruses, but I know even less about viruses than I do bacteria.) I don't know much about bacteria, really. They can clearly take specific actions to improve their chances of continuing to exist? Periodically some popsci headline informs me of some new ridiculous property of large masses of bacteria, I float awash in the popsci headlines? Anyway, skip.

The next step up I'm not even sure about. It could go to very small and simple insects, like maybe a gnat--I assume from lived experience that gnats are simple. Maybe they have a whole thing going on. It could also go to plants, which is the point of this, so let's say it goes to plants, but while acknowledging that that's already several levels of uncertainty.

In case it isn't clear, the thing we're tracking is something like net optimization power. To issue a very loose definition, let's say, fraction of all possible worldstates the agentic-seeming-thing can seem to convert into worldstates where the agentic-seeming-thing continues to... exist, let's go with exist. Preferences are much too complicated.

Minecraft Villagers, to the degree that they "exist," kind of walk away slowly when damaged. Bacteria traverse their environment in search of materials they can convert into more of themselves, and probably do a bunch of way more complicated stuff than that. Gnats--seem to kind of move at random, but maybe that's only when they're inconveniencing me in particular, and the rest of the time they follow a stochastic gradient towards food sources and away from obvious environmental hazards. And plants... are hard to evaluate on this scale.

Plants generally grow towards light; we've probably all seen at least one timelapse of plant growth that makes this behavior seem to demonstrate obvious intention. But then again, if I hold up an emerald the Villager will walk towards me; this behavior is not terribly robust and probably costs a dozen lines of code. And many plant behaviors seem to thus be very environmentally determined, almost automatic; if warm weather comes before the last frost of winter, buds will sprout and be frozen. At the level of atoms, proteins, and cells, this is all very biomechanically complex, but as algorithms go it's less to write home about than you could hope for.

So, given the section title I guess for the time being I'm equivocating between "(presumably high enough) net optimization power (by some unelaborated standard)" and personhood, to keep things simple, so let's Matrix-building-jump from this intermediate result to our conclusion: plants aren't people, QED. Good?

Argument from we're all God's creatures

I don't believe there's any kind of real, extant, literal thing that can be called "god" or "God" in the sense meant by most human religions, but "God" is nevertheless a useful rhetorical concept, because regardless of the implementation details of its referent we all *generally* agree on many of its properties. For example: God created the world, therefore all living things are created by God and are God's creatures as such; inasmuch as we share this common origin, we share some indissoluble bond of equality and respect that should be honored and upkept.

I observe that regardless of the implementation details of God, this is a founded assertion about the state of life on Earth. Of course, to claim that thereby we should not destroy our fellow creatures assumes a missing middle: "we share this bond, sure, but to what action or inaction does it specifically compel us?"

Unfortunately I believe we now have to talk about preferences. My own, at least, but that's cold comfort. I *prefer*, ceteris paribus, that lovely things not be destroyed without a purpose. I claim without evidence that this is not an uncommon preference among human beings, though by no means does it seem to be utterly prevalent. Furthermore, I claim that things to which I accord respect are, generally, lovely, by the natures of loveliness and respect, and that so far as you hold the (claimed) common intuition that all of God's creatures are worthy of our respect by their nature, that they are lovely, and that they should not be destroyed without purpose.

Okay sure fine but what is a "purpose"?? Some kind of human-standard-library concept, I guess, so it's complicated and probably gerrymandered to hell. Peering in, I observe about myself that forgetting about God's creatures and the rest, it strikes me as sad to smash an old rock for no reason other than to feel it break. I could say that: it demonstrates poor stewardship of the things in the world there are to see and observe and be with; more specifically it uses up a scarce resource to attain less value than could otherwise be had; there is a mismatch in gravity between the act of denouement and the inspiration to the act. These all seem to come together when I say that to smash a rock that way is "purposeless."

(Now, this introspecting raises far more questions than it answers, like what is "sad" or "old" or "stewardship" or "be with" or "gravity" or for god's (drink) sake "value." Put it all aside, you either know what I mean or I lose.)

Volition, beauty, purpose

When I sit in this frame I find myself thinking things like:

• Is it beautiful ("beautiful?" argh) to cultivate a living thing, capable of so much intricacy and of persevering through so much, only for the sake of its flesh?
• Is it more beautiful to cultivate a living thing that we can treat with in terms it understands, even if it can't understand that it's being treated with?

The apple tree surely does not know it is being raised, but it takes sup from the soil, and lives free from disease, and provides in its turn the apples it makes because it's the sort of thing that gives up more of what it has than it otherwise could, because when its ancestors did they prospered. *Camellia sinensis,* the tea shrub, is kept for many years, and the leaves it regrows are harvested each season to be used as inputs to almost innumerable deeply meaningful human cultural practices. Nevertheless, the leaves of *C. sinensis* have become something else; is what we made of them more beautiful than what they were before?

This is the obvious central question: how do we weigh the respect accorded to our fellow creatures with the uses we can make of the atoms that once were in their use for something else? If I ask myself the question in this frame, I think I care more about the entire human cultural edifice of tea drinking than I do about certain active biochemistries of a specific kind of shrub, but this may be a fully empirical matter.

If there was only one plant remaining in the universe and it was a single *C. sinensis,* with no hope of reproduction but also no concern to its longevity (for magical thought experiment reasons), I think I might think twice about trimming its leaves, for no other reason than respect for shared blood. At the same time, if that last plant was an apple tree, I would have no trouble eating its apples, and Theworld Pluribus is neurotic, you can pick the apples you don't have to wait for them to fall it's fine. (I think I have an argument for this but we're deep enough in it as it is.)

The distinction between the thing that gives of itself because that was what made it prosper, and the thing that merely can stand to be taken from, seems important to me. And we haven't even started talking about tubers, my god (drink).

The kanji of the day is 仕

• Its Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course keywords are SERVE and DO.
• Its readings are つか, シ, and ジ.

This is charismatic megafauna to me, mostly because of 仕える ("to serve") and 仕事 ("work, job"). Conning says this thing about it I don't totally understand:

Its primary *on-yomi* being シ, 仕 was chosen to stand in for the -ます base of the verb する (DO) in kanji compounds ... (...for example, する事 becomes 仕事).

I can't tell if this is 1. normative, 2. historical, 3. a galaxy brain mnemonic, or 4. some other kind of statement. Wiktionary notes that it is:

Used primarily as the first element in verb-verb and verb-noun compounds.

So I guess a combination of (1) and (2), where the idea is the meaning of the kanji was originally only SERVE, but it gained the additional meaning DO when it was used in Japanese as denoting the する in compounds. Sometimes I wish his little text blurbs were just a bit longer!