Why wouldn't the murder of 80 billion sentient land organisms and 1 to 3 trillion sentient aquatic organisms per year by non-vegans and for non-vegans be morally wrong when it is possible to make vegan choices which prevent so much pain and death?
— Truth Seeker

Some plant and fruit lovers might say to you that how could you kill the plants pulling them out from the field, cut and boil or fry them, and eat them? You are killing the innocent living plants. Same with the corns and fruits. They were alive and had souls. But you took them from the fields, cut them and boiled them, and ate them killing them in most cruel manner. The panpsychic folks believe the whole universe itself has consciousness and souls. Even rocks and trees have mind. What would you say to them? — Corvus

That’s a fair question, and it touches on deep debates about consciousness and moral status. If plants or even rocks had experiences - if they could feel pleasure, pain, or suffering - then harming them would indeed raise moral concerns. But that’s precisely the point: sentience, not mere aliveness, is what makes the moral difference.

Plants grow, respond to stimuli, and even have complex signaling systems, but there is no credible evidence that they have subjective experiences. There is no “what it’s like” to be a carrot or a corn stalk. By contrast, cows, pigs, chickens, lambs, octopuses, and lobsters clearly display behaviors indicating pain, fear, and pleasure. That’s why I draw the moral line at sentience: it’s the capacity for suffering and well-being that generates ethical duties.

If panpsychism is true and everything has some primitive form of consciousness, then we’re faced with a spectrum: perhaps electrons or rocks “experience” in some attenuated sense. But even then, there is a morally relevant distinction between a rock that (hypothetically) has a flicker of proto-consciousness and a pig screaming in agony while being slaughtered. Degrees of sentience would matter.

So my view would be: we should avoid unnecessary harm wherever it occurs, but we must prioritize preventing the most intense and obvious suffering. And right now, that means reducing and eliminating the killing of sentient organisms when we can live well on plant-based foods.

Thank you for taking the time to unpack all of that - it’s a lot to absorb, but I think I follow the thread. If I understand you, you’re saying that Kant’s noumena don’t need to be treated as some unreachable “beyond,” but rather are already immanent within phenomenality itself - the givenness of the world. The cup, the keys, the pain in my ankle: these are not mere appearances pointing to something hidden, but the very ground of what Kant misplaced on the noumenal side.

That makes sense of why you think phenomenology “drops representation” and allows the world simply to be what it is. But then I wonder: doesn’t this risk dissolving the distinction between appearance and reality entirely? If noumenality is internal to phenomena, then haven’t we just collapsed reality-in-itself into the structures of givenness, making it conceptually impossible to say what, if anything, could be “other” than appearance?

I also found your point about language important - that ontology requires articulation, and that language both makes the world manifest and at the same time gestures apophatically beyond itself. Still, I’m left with a tension: if language constitutes beings, do we have any grounds left for scientific realism? In other words, can we still say physics describes how the world is, or is it only another language-game, a historically contingent way of structuring manifestness?

And finally, on the ethical dimension: I appreciate your insistence that value is not vacuous, that pain and joy are not abstractions but intrinsic to the manifestness of being. But if value is as foundational as you suggest, does that mean ethics is not derivative of ontology, but co-constitutive with it? That strikes me as both powerful and problematic - powerful because it restores seriousness to ethics, problematic because it blurs the line between descriptive ontology and normative claims.

Would you say phenomenology ultimately abolishes the metaphysical question, or only reframes it as a question of how manifestness discloses itself in experience, language, and value?

Just read what I wrote. Should read "thereof" not "thereby".

That makes sense of why you think phenomenology “drops representation” and allows the world simply to be what it is. But then I wonder: doesn’t this risk dissolving the distinction between appearance and reality entirely? If noumenality is internal to phenomena, then haven’t we just collapsed reality-in-itself into the structures of givenness, making it conceptually impossible to say what, if anything, could be “other” than appearance? — Truth Seeker

Is there a collapse in the openness of being? If God were to appear before me in all her splendor, and then to you in the same way, we could then talk about it, but to do so would take the current vocabulary as a basis for novel descriptions. The "otherness" of God would require articulation, and, unless God said otherwise, this articulation would be finite, historical, which is just fine, because this language never was a dogma of possibilities. Possibilities are wide open. This pen is what it is until recontextualized in a non pen environment, then the pen's essence becomes other than the pen and its familiarity. This other in this current analysis is "wholly other" and this is possible because the language of beingS is itself entirely open. This emerges as the foundation of indeterminacy that is our existence.

If I were to try an say what the is IS for everything, and this were some closed concept, utterly noncontingent, then THAT would collapse upon itself. But here, the definition defers to this Other, and the only closededness found is in the good and bad, which is terms are of course contingent. These are not God's commandments. But as wholly other, they are closed only in their manifestness.