Plant rights vs. animal rights

In the 8 October isssue of New Scientist, Gary Francione argues for animal rights by saying that animals, like humans, should have the right not to be owned (essay here). As usually happens when I hear animal rights arguments, I find myself saying, "What have you got against plants?"

With this in mind, I took Francione's essay, changed the word "animal" to "plant" throughout, and made a couple of other cosmetic changes, just to see how it would read. I'm not holding my breath for a big "plant rights" movement to happen, but ecosystem rights might be a different matter.

Anyway, here's my essay on plant rights:

One right for all living things.

We treat plants how we used to treat human slaves. What possible justification is there for that, asks an evolutionary theorist?

Do plants have moral rights? What kind of legal status should we afford them? Some animal rights campaigners maintain that we should allow animals the same rights enjoyed by humans. That is, of course, absurd. There are many human rights that simply have no application to non-humans.

I would like to propose something a little different: that a sensible and coherent theory of rights for living things should focus on just one right for living things. That is the right not to be treated as the property of humans.

Let me explain why this makes sense, particularly for plants. At present, plants are commodities that we own in the same way that we own automobiles or furniture. Like these inanimate forms of property, plants have only the value that we choose to give them. Any moral or other interest a plant has (in avoiding being eaten, in controlling its reproduction) represents an economic cost that we can choose to ignore.

It is a fallacy to suppose that we can balance human interests, which are protected by claims of right in general and of a right to own property in particular, against the interests of plants which, as property, exist only as a means to the ends of humans. The plant in question is always a “crop” or a “houseplant” or a “decorative plant” or a “weed” or some other form of plant property that exists solely for our use or disposal.

There are parallels here with the institution of human slavery. While we tolerate varying degrees of human exploitation, we no longer regard it as legitimate to treat anyone, irrespective of their particular characteristics, as the property of others. In a world deeply divided on many moral issues, one of the few norms steadfastly endorsed by the international community is the prohibition of human slavery. We recognise all humans as having a basic right not to be treated as the property of others.

Is there a morally sound reason not to extend this single right – the right not to be treated as property – to plants? Or to ask the question another way, do we deem it acceptable to eat plants, harvest them, confine and display them in farms and gardens, use them in experiments or vegetable-growing contests, or otherwise treat them in ways in which we would never think it appropriate to treat any human or animal irrespective of how “humane” we were being?

The response that plants lack some special characteristic that is possessed solely by animals not only flies in the face of evolutionary theory, but is completely irrelevant to whether it is morally permissible to treat non-animals as just commodities – just as differences among animals would not serve to justify mistreatment. Is moral consideration of how we treat a living thing to depend only on whether that organism has neurons? This is an animal-centric view. Plants have a genetic interest in their own reproduction and survival. They take action to avoid being eaten. They sense predators and competitors in their environments, process information (though not with neurons), and respond in ways to avoid being eaten, by releasing chemicals into the air or elevating their own toxin levels. How would any of us like to be corralled in a field to be killed or to have our reproductive organs torn off every year? Also of no use is the response that it is acceptable for animals to exploit plants because it is “traditional” or “natural” to do so. This merely states a conclusion and does not constitute an argument.

The bottom line is that we cannot justify human domination of plants except by appeal to neuro-centric scientific faith or religious superstition focused on the supposed superiority of animals. Sentience is not a well-defined enough quality for science to be certain that it applies only to organisms with neurons. Our “conflicts” with plants’ interests are mostly of our own doing. We bring billions of plants into the world in order to kill them for reasons that are often trivial. Does our desire for sweets justify the breeding and slaughter of sugarcane plants? By bringing these plants into existence for reasons that we would never consider appropriate for humans, we have already decided that plants are outside the scope of our moral community altogether.

Accepting that plants have this one right does not entail letting rice, corn, soybeans and millet grow wild in the streets. We have brought these plants into existence and they depend on us for their survival. We should care for those currently in existence, but we should stop causing more to come into being to serve as our resources. We would thereby eliminate any conflicts we have with plants. We may still have conflicts with wild plants, and we would have to address hard questions about how to apply equal consideration to animals and plants in those circumstances. If plants or indeed, even ecosystems, could not be treated as property, these conflicts would change.

Recognising plant rights really means accepting that we have a duty not to treat non-animals as resources, or else it means recognizing that life feeds on life, and that as animals, we have to live. The interesting question is not whether the corn plant should be able to sue the farmer for cruel treatment, but why the corn plant is there in the first place.

I could try the same trick substituting "ecosystem" instead of "plant." Indeed, where in our economy are there any arguments about the rights of ecosystems? Where are the arguments about the rights of living systems who don't happen to have neurons? I don't know whether individual plants are intelligent. Certainly, they take in information about the world and respond to it. As a neuroscientist studying the intelligence that happens when a few billion units interact, I do think there's a reasonable argument to be made that any complex system of interacting units is intelligent. Ecosystems, meadows or forests, certainly process information and change and adapt to stimuli. But even if they don't, they still have a right to thrive. A moral system that would deem the ownership of any living thing illegitmate would completely undermine our current economy, and require a new model of economics. Of course, just such a view has been espoused by many indigenous peoples.

Intelligent Design? What about Intelligent Falling?

OK, this isn't really a post. It's just a link to somebody else's amusing idea: the Theory of Intelligent Falling will soon replace the godless theory of gravitation.
Click here to find out more.

Dumb-Ass Design Theory

I'm having a crisis of faith. First, creationists convinced me that the complexities of life could never be explained by mere “blind” Darwinian evolution. Consider the perfect aerodynamics of a bird’s wing, designed in just the right shape so that air flow over the front edge of the wing will create lift, allowing the bird to soar in the Intelligent Designer’s beautiful skies. The fibers in the bird’s feathers and the way they grow to overlap are designed for both warmth and aerodynamic efficiency, minimizing drag in flight and allowing warmth when the bird lands and folds its wings around its body. Such perfection! Such beauty! Surely no blind process could produce this, it had to have an Intelligent Designer. Only a divine intelligence could do such superb work. Anything else is just too improbable for me to believe.

And what a designer! Everywhere in the world, we can see evidence of the Designer’s divine wisdom. Ah, the majesty of a redwood forest, that natural cathedral, with the branches and needles designed to collect and condense fog, dripping it onto the spongy ground below to be absorbed by the trees’ shallow roots. And the exquisite beauty of a cherry blossom, trembling and beckoning in the spring breeze, the perfect bait for a bee’s visual and olfactory system. The flower tickling and dusting the bee’s body with pollen as it feeds, and moves on to another flower, cross-pollinating and creating more flowers: nature’s most holy threesome. And all of these creations are so lovely to our own human eyes. My faith in the Intelligent Designer was made deeper and sweeter with each observation. The Designer had made the world with ultimate intelligence expressed in each act of creation. I saw its marvelous design, and worshiped the Designer for these miracles.

How happy I was then! How carefree! Consider the eye, said the creationists, How the muscles surrounding the lens expand and contract to focus light through the lens from different distances. How could that have evolved by chance?

The wonders of eyes don’t stop there. Consider those strange and miraculous creatures, the fish who live in the ocean’s depths, where it is always night: their electrical senses and huge jaws, so perfectly designed for the conditions in those depths where no light reaches. They don’t have eyes, because they don’t need them. Wait, what? Many of them still have eyes? Scientists call them “vestigial” eyes, left over from a past ancestor who lived further up in the ocean where there was light. The fish just don’t use them. Why would the Intelligent Designer create vestigial eyes? It’s a waste of metabolic energy for those fish to grow them, and food is quite scarce in the ocean’s depths. What was the Designer thinking?

Well, perhaps the Designer put more effort into the human eye. We are, after all, the chosen beings of the Creator of the universe. Consider the retina, those light-sensitive cells on the back of the eye, those little miracles that register photons and then send signals back to the brain to be processed further. Such marvels of good design they are. Some can respond to a single photon; some can differentiate color. The light comes in at the front of the cell, and the signal leaves out the back… Wait, what was that you said? Retinal cells are on backwards? The nerve cells/axons that leave the light-sensitive cells actually project out from the front of the cell, and have to loop around to go back to the brain, blocking some light from the light-sensitive parts of the cell? I can’t believe that. Excuse me, Intelligent Designer, but this is the human eye we’re talking about. Did you do this? It’s a hugely inefficient design! What, were you busy doing something else that day? Giving the tiger its stripes or something? Why did you fall down on the job of designing our eyes? We were made in your image! Don’t we rate a little extra care with product design?

OK, how about another input system to the brain: human genitalia. So perfectly designed to create more people, and to give great pleasure while involved in the sacred act of procreation. The female clitoris, that tiny pink bud near the urethra that grows in a girl fetus’ development out of the same tissues that produce the penis in a male fetus. That blossom of female pleasure, so beautifully designed to make sex enjoyable to women so that they will want to procreate with their husbands. Wait, what’s that you say? The clitoris is shaped and placed in such a way that only a small percentage of women can get sexual satisfaction from intercourse? How can the Creator motivate women to procreate if intercourse is not the most fun sexual activity for them? I’m taking this one personally. Had the Intelligent Designer been hitting the communion wine when He designed this thing? What a kluge!

The troubling thing to my faith is that those damned Darwinians (and I do mean damned, literally) say that they can explain these kluge-y features through the gradual accumulation of small, incremental genetic changes, or as byproducts of some other adaptation. My faith is shaken. I need to believe in the wisdom, infallibility and omnipotence of the Intelligent Designer.^* It’s a major crisis, a crisis of faith.

If the Intelligent Designer were a major corporation, we would not tolerate this level of sloppiness in product design. We expect things to work better. We would be filing class action lawsuits, writing letters of complaint, and demanding to know who the design engineers were. With that in mind, I have started my own letter of complaint to the Intelligent Designer:

Dear Sir or Madam,
I am writing to register a complaint about the following product you issued to me in 1963, my body. There appear to be some major design flaws and I would like you either to fix them or to compensate me accordingly. First of all, there’s the eye...

^* May we all be touched by his noodly appendage. Click here to find out more about the leading alternative to Intelligent Design, the Flying Spaghetti Monster.