Tim Spin's Debate Tournament R1: Vegetarianism

Before I present the negative case, I would like to begin with a brief observation. The resolution mandates that the affirmative prove that vegetarianism is MORE ethical than omnivorism. This means that in order to prove the resolution false, I do not need to prove that an omnivorous diet is more ethical than a vegetarian one; I simply need to prove that there is no morally significant difference between the two choices. The crux of the negative case is twofold. First, recent studies have indicated that plants, in fact, do feel pain. Many advocates of animal rights contend that because plants do not have any form of a central nervous system, they do not feel pain, and it is thus justified to use them as a source of sustenance. According to recent studies, however, plants do possess rudimentary nervous systems that allow them to experience pain when exposed to the correct stimuli. In 2005, the First Symposium on Plant Neurobiology, which was sponsored by the University of Bonn, explained, "Each root apex harbours a unit of nervous system of plants. The number of root apices in the plant body is high and all brain-units are interconnected via vascular strands (plant nerves) with their polarly-transported auxin (plant neurotransmitter), to form a serial (parallel) nervous system of plants. The computational and informational capacity of this nervous system based on interconnected parallel units is predicted to be higher than that of the diffuse nervous system of lower animals, or the central nervous system of higher animals/humans." (Source 1) While the possession of a nervous system does not inherently prove that plants can suffer, studies have further shown that plants actually respond to pain stimuli. After studying the effects of microwaves, temperature, and cell inhibitors on the cell membrane potentials of plants, Dr. Jagadish Chandra Bose concluded that plants can feel pain. (Sources 2 and 3). Moreover, in 2008, other scientists began to confirm Bose's experiments when they discovered that in response to stress caused by local drought and other unfavorable conditions, plants create the pain killer methyl salicyclate for the purpose of "stimulating an immune response in animals that helps plants recover from diseases" and to release it into the atmosphere "warn neighbors of threats"; i.e. to communicate. (Source 4). Since plants can also feel pain, and the ability to feel pain defines consciousness, we can assume that plants are also conscious beings that have the ability to respond to threatening external stimuli. This means that slaughtering plants for food is equally moral to slaughtering animals for food, so vegetarian diets are not more ethical than omnivorous diets. Second, even if my opponent manages to defeat my contention that plants do feel pain, there is no reason to claim that some forms of life an inherently more valuable than others based on the fact that they may or may not be conscious of suffering. If we assume human life is not the only form of life that is inherently valuable, as many advocates of do, we must accept the fact that life is valuable regardless of the differences between the species. Animal activists, for example, contend that just because some animals are less intelligent and rational than humans does not mean that they should be forced to undergo suffering, because all life, regardless of intelligence, is valuable. Similarly, all life, regardless of the capacity to feel pain, is valuable. For example, some humans with congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis, a rare genetic disorder, do not have the capacity to feel pain, yet this lack of ability to experience pain does not render them less valuable than other humans and does not mean that we should slaughter them and devour their carcasses. (Source 5) Rather, we cherish these humans as equally valuable as others because they are alive. Similarly, we should hold plants as having equal moral worth to animals because they are life forms and deserve the same respect that all life does. Since all life is equally valuable, eating vegetarian meals is no more ethical than eating omnivorous meals. Let's examine the flaws in the affirmative case. Premise 1 is very important in this round because it actually flows to the negative side. She claims that we must not inflict unnecessary suffering on creatures if there is an alternative that requires no pain. Unfortunately, however, as I have proven in my first contention, plants also feel pain, so there is no alternative that minimizes suffering; in fact, because she advocates focusing on plants rather than animals, and because plants are less filling than animals, she maximizes suffering by forcing farmers to raise more plants for torture and slaughter. This means that her first contention is actually a reason to vote negative, because she is not achieving the same moral utilitarian standards that she contended were paramount in the round. In addition, you can turn the Singer analysis because by claiming that human-like species are more important than other forms of life, she is actually falling prey to the same "specieism" that she condemns as morally blameworthy. Premise 2, which states that moral actions ought to be carried out, is also flawed because it fails to account with the fact that decisions in the real world are excessively complex and cannot be defined in such oversimplified terms. For example, I would contend that if I were sheltering a Jewish child in Nazi Germany, and an SS officer demanded that I reveal the location of the child, that it would be repulsive to admit the child's location despite the fact that lying to the officer is morally wrong. (Revealing that I am sheltering the child cannot be considered morally wrong because I would not be directly participating in the murder of the child; however, I would directly be lying if I did not reveal the location, so that action would be morally blameworthy.) Premise 3 contends that health can be achieved through vegetarianism. The flaw with this premise is that it presumes that plants are lesser beings and thus deserve to be killed. As I have proven, all forms of life are inherently valuable, so there is no reason that humans should slaughter animals instead of plants. As a final general attack on the affirmative cause, I would like to point out that the premise of the affirmative case is that pain, not the slaughtering of animals, is evil. This means that if animals can be killed in a manner that does not cause them any suffering, then omnivorous diets are no more unethical than vegetarian diets. Since many techniques, including poison and tranquilization, can be used to induce death without causing harm to the animal, even if we disregard my entire case, modern societies should still be able to consume animals. Please do not accept any objections to this notion because my opponent would be contradicting herself; on one hand she would be claiming that slaughtering animals in a painless fashion is wrong, and on the other hand she would be advocating slaughtering plants because she believes that they do not feel pain. Thus, I urge you to negate. Source 1: http://ds9.botanik.uni-bonn.de... Source 2: http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in... Source 3: http://en.wikipedia.org... Source 4: http://www.msnbc.msn.com... Source 5: http://articles.cnn.com...