I don’t mean to suggest that plants are clearly sentient, just that it’s plausible, even for a human, to have a coherent value system which attempts to avoid the suffering of anything which exhibits preferences.
I’d agree with that sentence if you replaced the word “suffering”, unsuitable because of its complex connotations, with “killing”, which seems adequate to capture the Jainists’ intuitions as represented in the link above.
Although it is relevant to note that the motive may be to avoid suffering—I wasn’t there when the doctrine was formed, and haven’t read the relevant texts, but it is possible that the presence of apparent preferences was interpreted as implying thus.
I don’t mean to suggest that plants are clearly sentient, just that it’s plausible, even for a human, to have a coherent value system which attempts to avoid the suffering of anything which exhibits preferences.
I’d agree with that sentence if you replaced the word “suffering”, unsuitable because of its complex connotations, with “killing”, which seems adequate to capture the Jainists’ intuitions as represented in the link above.
Although it is relevant to note that the motive may be to avoid suffering—I wasn’t there when the doctrine was formed, and haven’t read the relevant texts, but it is possible that the presence of apparent preferences was interpreted as implying thus.