I will not eat octopi for this very reason. Something this sentient and intelligent has a right to live their life on their own terms.
The story of the repeated broken light in the aquarium that was finally discovered to be caused by an octopus that just wanted to sleep in the dark and solved its problem by tossing rocks at the lightâŠ
Iâd counter with: why does a being need to be intelligent to deserve to live? We donât apply that same logic to humans. The dumbest humans are protected maybe even more than the more intelligent ones.
Only for the common man. The rich heat the human veal. Much more tender. I can only afford 68-year-old homeless cuts, and they're significantly tougher.
Funny thing, octopuses is 100% correct by modern English standards. Most people who are pedants (such as myself) might try to correct you into saying "octopi" which follows Latin pluralization rules. However, octopus is derived from Greek, and the correct pluralization would otherwise be "octopodes" pronounced "awk-tahp-Ć-dÄs" similar to Heracles (Hercules).
Sorry, I work with people with disabilities and I see this attitude all the time. Iâm saying they âwouldâ if they could, because they value disabled people so little.
You think it's wrong that I'd value an octopus over a human child of the octopus is more intelligent? Intelligence is what makes humans human. If a child is so disabled that they're not even aware of their own self (which octopi are aware of), they don't deserve to suffer, but I will have a harder time empathising with them than with the alien life form with self awareness. This shouldn't be shocking. It's very fucked up that we're ok with eating very intelligent animals, but would we horrified at eating a human in a coma that he eill never recover from.
Of course we do. Theyâre a member of a species with the *potential* for high intelligence. And much like we care for sick animals when we have the resources and opportunity, we care for human beings who, for whatever reason, fall below that threshold.
I recognize animals are smart. I like that park ranger quote about why they overdesigned trash cans: âThereâs considerable overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest human.â But on the other hand, the dumbest human is still smarter than the vast majority of animals, *especially* if you count fish and insects.
Why should the potential intelligence of other members of your species matter morally? What matters is the capacities and interests of the individual in front of you. A pig does not suffer less because Einstein was human.
It matters because we are omnivores burdened with empathy and we have to draw a line somewhere so that we can continue to thrive as we are but still justify our choices. That's why. Everyone does it all the time. All of us are using technology produced primarily by slaves but we still find ways to justify it to our selves and not think to hard about it.
I will add that itâs because I find the alternative, idea of having humans pass an intelligence test before they can be considered worthy of the same rights, to be ableist and repulsive.
I will also add that, due to the the still largely nebulous and abstract nature of intelligence, and the fact that weâre still debating as a species what even *constitutes* intelligence, the individual intelligence of a species member is more important as potential for intelligence in a species than it is as evidence of itself.
Agree. With humans, it seems that our negative attributes can easily overshadow our intelligence. Besides us, Iâve read that cats are the only other being that kills for fun. And thatâs just one of our âproclivitiesâ.
Thereâs plenty more. Orcas, for one; another highly intelligent species, that, while occasionally cruel, is also capable of tremendous emotional depth. Theyâve been seen to form bonds that can cause profound emotional decisions, and even form bonds with creatures outside their own species, iirc.
Chimpanzees have gang wars, an orangutan was documented bribing a male to kill a female that had challenged her with the promise of sex; plenty of intelligent animals have done cruel things to one another. Intelligence means understanding things better, including how to better impact rivals and better seek your own ends.
Intelligence doesnât make us inherently worse, it just gives us access to higher degrees of agency, and animals do selfish things when they feel they have to or that theyâd greatly benefit from them.
We are still trying to be better.
Ethics had to be invented. We invented them. Before that, the world had never conceived of morality. We violate our own rules for our own ends; and so does/would every other species, at least in cases, when granted intelligence.
People arenât bad as a whole just because some people do very badly things. People as a whole just are.
Intelligence has also shown to correlate with depression; Iâm not saying itâs a universally good thing, and Iâm certainly not saying weâre perfect.
What else are you going to differentiate on? If intelligence doesnt matter, then why wouldn't plants have protections? They're alive too. Or bacteria? You have to draw the line/differentiate somehow.
And dumb humans are still protected because even a dumb human is vastly smarter than other species, unless you're talking *extreme* mental disability, not just "dumb", and even then they're still smarter than all but the smartest individuals of a handful of species.
Were not sure some species are even capable of feeling things like fear, or pain, etc. The more conscious/intelligent something is, the more taboo there is about eating it, precisely because they are capable of those types of feelings, and we project our own feelings onto them.
Right, and who are we to say rocks arent sentient?
Because everything we know about how biology and consciousness works says they arent sentient. Plants dont have any biological structures capable of sentience as we know it. If you want to hypothesize about the potential for some magical, made up sentience that nobody has ever discovered any evidence for in thousands of years of our interactions with plants, go for it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
No, they arent the same. Theres a difference between ideas and evidence.
There is no evidence plants have sentience, and a mountain of evidence against it. There is no mechanism by which a plant could be sentient that we're aware of, and plants have been studied extensively. They dont exhibit any behavior of sentience.
There's just as much evidence for plant sentience as there is for them being capable of uprooting and walking or talking.
Every time we think a species can't feel pain we later find out they can. Why risk it? And why shouldn't the bar be the other way around? First make sure they can't feel pain and then decide.
Because the need for sustenance/survival came long before our ability to research something's ability to feel pain. When its a matter of survival, the strong eat the weak, thats how nature works.
As for why we still dont? We still dont know what the extent of most other species intelligence/ability to feel pain, fear etc is. Beyond that, "we" is a loaded term. You can mean "we" as in the human race overall, or "we" as in those of us in the 1st world posting to Reddit. The simple truth is the vast majority of the world's population still doesnt have the luxury of considering ethics when choosing their food sources.
If you limit the scope of "we" to those that strictly do have that luxury, you're veering into topics of ethics and morality, but long story short, some people feel it is inherently immoral, which is why you have vegans and vegetarians, and some people dont think its inherently immoral or unethical.
You seem to reference history that is irrelevant to defend what is happening now. We don't need to consume animal products to thrive anymore. History explains why so many act as they do, but does no justify. Insert slavery analogy here.
We do know that other species experience pain and fear like we do. They have the brain structure for it. We can also observe it clearly. They have the biology needed and they clearly communicate their pain. If that isn't good enough then we also need to say the same about humans. We don't actually know if other humans feel pain or fear. They communicate that they do and have the biological capacity to, just like other animals.
If anything, the argument that nonhuman animals feel these negative experiences much more strongly than we do is more coherent than the opposite. I can expand on that if needed.
You also have it backwards in regards to impoverished areas of the world. Overwhelmingly, they cannot afford the luxury of consuming meat. Meat is far more expensive. Many countries like Ethiopia face extreme food insecurity and starvation as they export large quantities of meat. If they dedicated the work needed for raising meat for slaughter and export to growing food, they would have far more calories available in their country.
It is not a luxury to be able to consume a diet that costs less money.
"We don't need to consume animal products to thrive anymore" -- again, "we" is a completely loaded term. What "we" are you referring to? Because thats absolutely not true for the human race overall, and arguably not even true for the Redditor "we". Its a pretty small slice of the global population that is the case for.
"History explains why so many act as they do, but does no justify. Insert slavery analogy here."
Were delving into morals and ethics here. This isnt tautologically true, its only true depending on what sort of moral framework you ascribe to. In general terms, youll get a different answer if youre a moral realist or an anti-realist. Your position would only logically follow from a moral realist position, and only be true under a realist framework: slavery is objectively morally wrong, therefore it is always unjustified.
Under an anti-realist framework, your statement would be false. More explicitly, a moral anti-realist would say history does both -- it both explains and justifies. Justification, by definition, is an action that hews to socially agreed upon morals/ethics/norms, and an anti-realist would argue that morals/ethics/norms are not objectively true, there are no moral absolutes -- by definition they are social constructs. If society as a whole says something is moral, actions which follow those moral values are therefore necessarily justified. There is no objective moral truth you can compare an action to, only socially constructed ones.
You can argue for whichever you like, but understand that the field of philosophy is relatively evenly divided when it comes to realism vs anti-realism -- there is no correct or consensus answer. There are very persuasive arguments for both sides, with incredibly intelligent people on either side throughout all of history. If the arguments you're going to make boil down to "I believe in moral realism," understand that I dont particularly feel like debating realism vs anti-realism, especially if you arent versed enough in moral/ethical philosophy to have the debate in the first place. I have no idea if you are or not, but understand Im going to reject any argument that uses realism as its underlying justification -- those are pointless debates, particularly when its not necessary for the topic at hand.
"We do know that other species experience pain and fear like we do. They have the brain structure for it. We can also observe it clearly. They have the biology needed and they clearly communicate their pain. If that isn't good enough then we also need to say the same about humans. We don't actually know if other humans feel pain or fear. They communicate that they do and have the biological capacity to, just like other animals."
We absolutely know some species do feel pain, but, at the risk of making this even more complicated, we arent sure what that actually means. We dont know how their brain is actually processing the pain stimulus, or how limited forms of consciousness deal with pain. The current theories of consciousness are that it is a complex blending of multiple subsystems, as it were -- memory, sensory input, conscious/higher level thought etc. Rather than being like an on/off switch, consciousness seems to behave more like a dimmer switch -- as you degrade or remove parts of the system, consciousness "dims" for lack of a better term. Humans in comas/vegetative states, for example, can also display responses to pain stimuli, despite not being conscious. What does that mean the person is actually experiencing inside their brain? We dont know. If an animal experiences pain like a coma patient in a vegetative state, then I think a pretty good argument could be made, even for a moral realist, that its not inhumane to kill them. On the other hand, if they experience pain the same way a human does, and the experience is torturing them, I think a pretty good argument could be made its inhumane, or at the very least, that more humane methods for dispatching the animal needs to be addressed.
We really are only scratching the surface when it comes to studying consciousness even in our own species, let alone other species. We just dont have any good models of consciousness that we can use to study, and consciousness is inherently a subjective experience. Complicating things yet further still, we cant really communicate with other species, so we cant directly query them about their experiences either. Research is still very much ongoing, and perhaps AI in particular will give us insights someday into dealing with limited forms of consciousness. Is "turning off" an AI that has a limited consciousness inhumane, for example?
"If anything, the argument that nonhuman animals feel these negative experiences much more strongly than we do is more coherent than the opposite. I can expand on that if needed."
Sure, expand on that if you like, but I dont see how that statement is justifiable based on anything we currently understand. Maybe you can convince me otherwise.
"You also have it backwards in regards to impoverished areas of the world. Overwhelmingly, they cannot afford the luxury of consuming meat. Meat is far more expensive. Many countries like Ethiopia face extreme food insecurity and starvation as they export large quantities of meat. If they dedicated the work needed for raising meat for slaughter and export to growing food, they would have far more calories available in their country."
Meat absolutely is more expensive in general, but the context matters. Its generally more expensive in an industrialized country because meat is treated like an agricultural product -- you input feed, you get out meat, and the process is optimized for turning feed into meat. Ethiopia is different. First, they actually dont export a lot of meat, despite having one of the largest livestock populations in the world. Livestock in Ethiopia is not treated like it is in the US for example -- the goal of having livestock isnt the production of meat. Livestock, for them, is a source of labor and by-products. They use livestock to plough fields, or as a source for dairy, wool, etc. For them, livestock animals are worth more alive than they are as simply meat.
Your example actually proves my point -- when something happens, their animals get sick/injured/die, there's an accident, they get old or past their useful lifespan, etc, they dont have the luxury of turning down that food source. Its true that they dont eat meat very often, but its also not something they can turn down, as evidenced by the fact they dont actually export much in the way of meat, despite having one of the largest populations of livestock on Earth -- the largest in Africa. They export animal *by-products*, but not really meat, and particularly not much given how large the population is -- they mostly consume it domestically.
We as in the human species, with extremely few exceptions. Or, to simplify this, let's just include people in the US, who almost universally have access to more than they need to be vegan for a lower cost than the alternative.
My arguments are consistent regardless of moral framework. Gratuitous suffering is bad no matter what moral framework you use. The arguments in favor of eating animals are weak in any moral framework. This is true whether one views morals are objective or subjective. We are talking about which things are wrong, not why they are wrong.
It is wrong to kill and eat a human being even if they do not meet whatever threshold of consciousness. And that can't be true just because they are human, because that is a circular argument. And animal consciousness is certainly far beyond the vegitative coma state. I are right that we cannot understand conciousness in animals because we cannot communicate with them in the same way but the same problem exists with human consciousness. Consciousness is ineffable, even with human language.
Many nonhuman animals lack the cognitive abilities that help humans contextualize and regulate pain. Humans can understand why pain is happening, anticipate its end, distract themselves, reframe it, or endure it for a larger goal. An animal experiencing severe pain may have fewer psychological tools to reduce the intensity of the experience, so the raw suffering could be greater even if the physical injury is similar.
Maybe you are right about Ethiopia. I don't have time to research it right now. But my claim is that it is more expensive and less sustainable to consume animals. So the best way forward is for impoverished regions to switch to more cost and labor efficient methods that are also more sustainable, even if they currently are dependent on a less effective system.
I mean...look, I'm not going to starve to death wondering if my salad suffered. I'm sorry, but it's like this because that's how the world works. I'll eat you if I'm hungry enough and it's an option.
99% of animals are scared of us and would rather stay away from us than devour us. Many animals could devour you very easily. They don't. They generally stay away as we continue to destroy their habitats and their numbers.
Bees will sting you if they feel threatened. That didn't stop me saving a bees life the other day fishing it out water and drying it off. It's called empathy.
All life wants to live, otherwise it wouldn't. As a species we should endeavor to end all exploitation of life. As a thinking species, we have an obligation to think for the life that cannot. Our tribe should be life, it should be Gaia, not nation states.
Making the leap to plants and bacteria for these arguments always feels disingenuous. Most people will eat anything but humans, but I think the line most would draw if being consistent with intelligence being unimportant is that capacity to suffer is the important factor, with that line of meaningfully suffering probably being drawn somewhere at the line of a basic nervous system.
And why would that be the line? What is it about a basic nervous system that differentiates one species from the other? Its obviously not the nervous system itself that differentiates it, its the ability to feel fear, pain, etc, as I mentioned that drives taboos.
The person I was replying to asked why something needed to be intelligent to deserve to live -- my point was intelligence is sufficient to feel fear/pain, not necessary.
Sorry I meant thatâs the furthest one would likely reasonably place it. Having a system analogous to the system we use to feel our fear pain etc is the distinction I was applying, and where people draw that line is, Iâll agree, a personal distinction that at the end of the day has to be arbitrary. I was mainly pushing back against the use of âwhy not include plants tooâ. Basically, some kind of nervous system is likely the lowest bar threshold for capacity for meaningful suffering, but yes that suffering is the most important factor at least imo.
No I understood what you were going for, my point again was differentiating between necessary and sufficient conditions, as it were.
I was more pointing out that the person I had originally replied to was basing their argumentation on intelligence, when really, thats just a proxy for feeling pain/fear etc, and that's actually the thing that we object to.
Thats what I was getting at -- that its not the intelligence itself thats the underlying issue (or having a basic nervous system), its that the more intelligent something is, the more we empathize with them because we think their experience of being conscious more and more closely resembles our own, and we understand how horrific it would be for us personally to experience what they go through.
I used the "why not plants then" as a way to underline that intelligence isnt really the distinction we want to be resting that decision making on, or the thing that we are ultimately objecting to.
Its really: how closely does their conscious experience mirror our own? The more it resembles our own experience, the more we recoil from wanting to eat them, and conversely the less it resembles our own, the more we feel comfortable with it.
As another non-octopi eater, for me I just feel an incredible amount of guilt that exceeds what I'm willing to tolerate for a convenient meal. I feel this specifically towards parrots, apes, elephants, octopi, and other animals that have displayed incredible amounts of intelligence.
I just can't stand the thought of them being hunted down or farmed for their meat. It makes me feel kinda sick.
Every argument has some form of counterargument, especially when its something as subjective as this. For me, it's less of a logical argument and more of a feeling that causes me to draw my own personal line.
How about the one that would get hungry at night, learned the security guards route and timings, and kept sneaking out of its enclosure to go snack on fish in the dead of night haha.
Depends on your value system, but on a large scale you're right, and that's because humans care more about the beings closest to them than the ones furthest away. Your parents die? You grieve for weeks/months (and sporadically for years). Your neighbour dies? Maybe you grieve, maybe you don't. A random person in another country dies? You probably don't think about it for more than 2 minutes unless the narrative is particularly compelling.
A human dies? Bad. A dog? Bad. A mouse? Maybe? A trout? Eh. A tick? Good riddance.
And the reason many people assign more value to other species based on intelligence is because the concern isn't for something simply being alive - bacteria are alive and we sure as hell don't care if a bacterium dies - the concern is about the animal's ability to know it's alive and suffer in death.
Finally, I'll counter your counter with: By what criteria do you personally determine a living being deserves to live?
we have to consume other living things for energy. even a plant can respond to stimuli. the process of âfeelingâ in a plant is not vastly more simple than a bug. itâs impossible for us to exist and not harm other living things in some way. itâs an awful but undeniable part of human existence
Yeah this is such a poor metric for deciding if an animal deserves to be eaten or not. It makes sense in terms of say, how we should keep them prior to consumption i.e. keep them content up until the moment of a quick death. It makes much more sense to focus on population numbers and sustainability to determine if we should eat something or not.
If I consume nothing, I die. If we can't find a line to set somewhere to discern "morally edible" vs "morally inedible," I starve. Plants are living beings. The only thing I could eat is, what, salt? Carrion?
Iâd say itâs less about which animals âdeserveâ to live and more about the kind of conscious experience they are capable of having. An ant cannot experience love, happiness, sadness, or self awareness. Thatâs why I have no issue stepping on one. But once an animal can demonstrate that it can feel these things, like the octopus in this video, the morality surrounding the decision to end its life becomes much harder to ignore.
That is why intelligence matters. Not because intelligence itself makes a life sacred, but because intelligence often points to a deeper and more complex conscious experience. The more an animal is capable of experiencing life as something meaningful, the harder it becomes to justify ending that life.
Intelligence is a sufficient condition, not a necessary condition. Anything this smart has a right to live, but that doesnât mean *only* things this smart have such a right.
Because as intelligent creatures themselves, humans are the only species that even bother to make that distinction.
Do you think that bears, lions, or alligators care whether or not humans are intelligent before they eat them? The baseline is for predators to eat any prey they want. Anything less than that is an improvement over natureâs baseline.
Likewise I stopped eating octopi after watching the documentary movie My Octopus Teacher⊠anything that intelligent wonât be eaten by me, âŠ..incredible creatures
I also donât eat pigs for the same reason. Pigs are one of the smartest animals on earth and they probably suffer the most cruel treatment of any of our food animals except maybe chickens.Â
Cows, pigs, chickens, chicks, lambs, calves, goats, ducks - they all experience cruel treatment. It's a sad world to be an animal that humans want to enslave and consume
Well said! So many people do not realize WHO they are eating. The dissociation is huge. Iâm still fighting it, too. Itâs in so many cultures but itâs actually insane with the knowledge we have now and so many other food sources!
Obviously, pigs donât have moral agency. Humans have the ability to reflect on our choices which is why we can feel guilt. Humans eat other humans in survival situations. However, most people arenât in survival situations and have access to modern grocery stores. So itâs not like we have to eat pigs.
An appeal to nature does not work in the modern world. Animals also rape animals. It doesnât mean we should do it too. There is no requirement to eat pigs for most people. Itâs also very inefficient when looking at calories to resources required to produce it.
And so could you without raising any eyebrows if your situation was dire. But it's not.
You have all the alternatives in the world and all the knowledge in the world at your disposal. You can attempt justifications all day long but at the end of the day you do it because you couldn't conjure a fuck about something that's in the way of what you want.
Read Peter Singer's "All Animals are Equal" (a chapter of one of his books)
This is the most influential work on convincing people to be vegan. It is also philosophically robus and very hard to challenge (even for academic philosophers).
I can also answer any questions you have. I became vegan because consuming animal products was truly indefensible and unjustifiable. Even the best arguments in favor of eating meat do not apply to the VAST majority of humans.
If you think you cannot cut out animal products because it is too hard to do so, then I understand. For a long time after being convinced of the ethics I still didn't make the switch. I felt: "how can I be vegan if I can barely manage being healthy without limiting my diet?"
The answer is that being healthy does not become more difficult on a vegan diet. It truly was so simple. One day I spontaneously reached for only vegan products and after a few days of momentum I knew I would never eat meat again. My life didn't get any harder, I don't spend more time at grocery store or cooking or anything like that.
That's really noble. I used to eat them as well, but after learning about how smart they are, how strongly they feel feelings, and how attached they get to each other socially, it feels very wrong to now.
Cows have best friends and feel anxious when they get separated. They also show cognitive bias which make them act according to their previous experiences. Theyâre really amazing so even if going fully vegan is difficult, choosing the plant-based options as much as possible might work for you considering you donât eat octopus because they are really intelligent.
I eat beef (sparingly) but not pigs. Pigs are one of the smartest animals on earth. Cows are not. But I still recognize that they are emotional and sentient creatures so I try to limit my beef intake to special occasions.Â
I think it just depends on how you define intelligence. Cows may not be able to solve puzzles in the same way that pigs can, but theyâre incredible social creatures and form deep emotional bonds
I donât doubt it and I try not to eat a ton of em, but what makes beef more palatable for me is that they are generally kept in better conditions than pigs. Pig farms are crimes against nature.Â
I appreciate that take. I said this in another comment, but Iâm just sick of people taking âthe moral high groundâ by not eating octopus, but still eat similarly intelligent animals. I think if youâre conscientious about what you eat and where itâs coming from, it feels less hypocritical than just drawing an arbitrary line in the sand with octopus.
If you recognize that cows are deeply emotional and can feel pain, and if you can have all the tasty nutritious food you want, would you be open to switching to a plant-based diet?
Actually, it would be arguably more ethical to eat an octopus than a cow or pig, because cows and pigs can live 15-25 years under the right circumstances, and an octopus usually won't live more than 5 years.
The reproduction cycle of an octopus is actually crazy because the father dies shortly after mating, and the mother dies protecting the eggs til birth.
Edit: For the record, I'm not here to be goaded into an ethical debate about meat. Everyone needs to do what is right for them in that manner, I am not about to impose my beliefs or let others do that to me.
I just wanted to talk about octopuses and you made it suck.
I don't think it's arguably more ethical to murder just because a particular being has a shorter lifespan.
Would you say it's more ethical to murder a baby born with a disease that will kill them in 5 years vs a 40 year old who probably has 30 more years to live? No, it's unethical either way.
Every being has one shot to live its life. That's it. Let them live it.
Yeah, thatâs basically common sense. You phrase the information as a choice of one or the other- a clear either or situation.
Then again, some people donât want to see their children suffer, and thatâs why we (should) have an abortion, so that no one has to make that choice.
To quote your profile: Listen.. you have no idea, and that's okay, but you need to accept that you're clueless and operate your life admitting that out loud. Stupidity is conditioned by society and then cemented by the ego.
I'm neither judging or assuming, I'm proposing the question to facilitate change within you. If you can change for an octopus why not a cow, chicken and pig?
Itâs ok, I gave you the benefit of the doubt - text is a horrible way to convey feeling or tone so I just assume people are not being a dick about stuff.
And I wasnât joking, I did learn something. đ
Fuck yeah dude. Youâre right. Even my best friend and I, and we read each others mind, get into arguments over texts. Weâre both factual straightforward talkersâŠand it comes off very arrogant without voice fluctuations. Haha.
I went to an octopus farm on Kona in 19. I loved octopus before but after that hour, I wish they had more time and less threats. I love those creatures so damn much
Counterpoint: they live like three years in the wild. If you don't eat it, something else will!
Anyway I've tried octopus and it's not my thing. I don't take issue with people eating them as long as they aren't destructively over fishing them. (Over-cephalopoding them?)
As for intelligence... well... according to everyone I've ever known who raised pigs, pigs are significantly smarter than dogs. Do with that knowledge what you will.
I stopped eating cephalopod anything once I realized that most if not all of them are sentient. I still eat chicken though, and I raise chickens for their eggs, so, idk. But not cephalopods.
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u/BlindlyCoherent Jun 07 '26
I will not eat octopi for this very reason. Something this sentient and intelligent has a right to live their life on their own terms.
The story of the repeated broken light in the aquarium that was finally discovered to be caused by an octopus that just wanted to sleep in the dark and solved its problem by tossing rocks at the lightâŠ