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.