Do you agree with Richard Dawkins?

[mediamogul]

Actually ant's don't "appear to be suffering" unless the plant that shrivels from toxins at the root zone "appears to be suffering". They are both merely avoiding further injury. Flora and fauna respond similarly to negative stimuli. You have no way of knowing this objectively, and so rely on the effect. Again, plants exhibit effects. Even so, they can't be said to be "suffering like us". "Sentience" isn;t a very good metric for this anyway. Some human beings are less sentient than others. Do they have fewer "innate rights"? We've been woefully wrong about sentience in the past as well, are you really ready to hitch your wagon to this one? How about the hypothetical trouble of AI or simulated beings. If the effect is what we rely on to assign rights, then at what point would an illusion become so convincing that it was no longer an illusion, but a legitimate effect? Is there any difference? Do androids dream of electric sheep?

This is all beside the point, you're again promoting speciesism as a metric for assigning rights. Are you okay with this? ( I am, and I go one step further, we're the only ones that have any, and only those we grant ourselves and extend to other human beings. If we want to assign rights to other animals we can, and we clearly do and have. None of that makes it innate. There is no condemnation of eating meat in any of that, unless we decide that there is.)

I'm not convinced that stating plants do not suffer is speceism. It is simply the fact again that they do not suffer and has nothing specifically to do with the species.

On the other hand, you raise a good point which is, in my opinion, the most difficult challenge to this sentience argument. Is it ethically acceptable to kill and eat another human being provided that human being does not have the ability to suffer? I can't help but think of the abortion argument. Why is it that abortion is acceptable up to a certain point in the fetus' development and not afterwards? Is it because it has developed into a being capable of suffering? Is it because it is considered a "human being" after a certain point and therefore it has rights or is then ethically objectionable to terminate?

I want to say that it is wrong but under the sentience argument I'm not sure that it could be considered ethically objectionable. If the person was conscious and able to object to being killed then it's obviously a different story. On the other hand, we do pull the plug on people in comas often. I also want to say that a being either has sentience or it doesn't. There aren't degrees of ethics which correspond to degrees of sentience.

This is one I struggle with.