Plenty of plant life has senses and are able to “feel” things.
Having reactions to external stimulus is different from having feelings. Feelings require consciousness, or sentience.
Even having nociceptors doesn’t mean you can experience pain (see the above review in the “Defining sentience” section).
If something (living or not) cannot experience suffering then you can’t harm it, by definition
This follows no definition of harm that I am aware of, and I do not agree with it. If you are not aware that you have been harmed, you are still harmed. So you should also be able to be harmed even when you could not be aware of it. Therefore, I do not accept this sentiocentric (just learned this word) argument.
Yes you can be harmed without knowing it, but it still must have a negative effect on you. If something can’t have negative (or positive) experience then how can you say it’s being harmed?
If I throw a rock to the ground, it doesn’t make sense to say I harmed the rock, because a rock can’t experience being harmed. Being sentient is having this ability to experience being harmed. That’s why I meant it’s by definition that non sentient beings can’t be harmed. The word exists to distinguish what can and cannot experience harm (among other feelings).
There are good reasons to treat different beings differently but they should be based on the beings’ interests, not their species
And this is one of those reasons. A human’s (or any other animal’s) continued existence is mutually exclusive with the food’s continued existence.
But having food doesn’t necessarily mean harming something. And even if it does, different foods have different level of harm. We can choose the foods that minimize harm.
If we do not follow speciest dogma, we might as well eat other humans.
Indeed meat eaters don’t really have good reasons to exclude human meat.