To bee or not to bee. 🤔

According to all known laws of aviation...

All the markets about consciousness seems to be ridiculously mispriced, but there are only so many philosophy markets I can dedicate myself to keep a sane confidence level of...

"But finding a way to mass-produce crops while reducing pain and suffering for bees is a daunting undertaking. If vegetarians and vegans who avoid eating animals for ethical reasons were to apply the same standards to foods pollinated by bees, they would have very little on their plates.

“We can’t produce nutritious food in this country without bees,” says a longtime agricultural entomologist working for the USDA. The scientist asked not to be named for fear of retribution by animal rights activists"

Ooof.

@Pickle doesn't make sense. Even if bees are conscious, why would them pollinating crops be considered suffering?

@a07c AFAIK vegans’ objection is not about suffering, otherwise humanely harvested milk would be fine. It’s often said to be about not obtaining consent from the animal. Although I think there’s a large component of poorly rationalized virtue-signaling as well

@Ansel Pickle specifically mentioned "pain and suffering", so that's what we are talking about.

Consent objection, however, also doesn't make sense. People are not making bees pollinate crops against their will, bees are just doing their own thing while crops and, therefore, people benefit from it. If cows could milk themselves and then bring their milk to your door, I don't think anyone would treat drinking it as violation of consent.

@Ansel As a vegan suffering and environmental effect are my main concerns. I’d be okay with humanely obtained milk from a moral perspective but it’s very hard to find verifiably humanely obtained dairy.

@ShadowyZephyr I don't think its possible other than edge cases. Frankly I can justify organ meat and bivalves much better than milk.

Related:

What if a single bee is not sentient, but a beehive of bee is?

@footgun Wonderful question! This market is about individual bees.

@IsaacKing Can you just add the word "individual" to the question? Will help people understanding market better (especially on Swipe mode) without opening it

@Dreamingpast Are there actually a significant number of people who think I might be asking about whether bees are a literal hive mind? Doesn't seem likely...

@IsaacKing yes! relevant!

@IsaacKing I can only contribute one data point, but yes, the idea that a single bee might be sentient seemed silly to me, so I assumed it was about hives.

@Shelvacu Interesting. That seems like a strange assumption to me; when we talk about humans being sentient, we mean individual humans, not "human society interpreted as an intelligent being".