Because, as you say, they are non-living. What is and what isn’t life is not arbitrary. It’s a distinction based on science.
Why does it matter? We can’t understand the subjective experience of rocks any more than we can bacteria. Why should we rule out their capacity and not bacteria’s? There’s no more evidence that one has more of a conscious subjective experience than the other, living or not.
By your logic, shouldn’t we opt to be more inclusive of rocks if they could potentially have some sort of experience that we have no current understanding of?
I suppose you could call me a lifeist. I expect similar attributes to be much more probable in things that already have something in common and are all related to each other. I find living things to be different enough from nonliving things to expect them to function differently. I expect pain in living things, because they are subjets of evolution and feeling pain is pretty useful.
I don’t think it’s probable stones feel pain because it wouldn’t benefit them in any way, and I agree with science that they are outside of what we call life.
I do expect the existence of life not related to ours thst can be quite different from ours. (To describe what life is, let’s use the commonly used attributes of evolution, propagatio and, self organization, although we could allow for some other definitions as well). If I came across a completely different life (and somehow cozld tell it was actuslly alive), I would definitely do my best not to harm it, even though there would be no way for me to tell whether it feels pain. There is, after all, the effect called convergence, and feeling pain is an advantage.
Now I’ve written quite a bit of a response. It seems you’re quite emotional about this topic. I have this vague feeling that my thoughts are somehow not your cup of tea, but I have no idea why. Would you mind sharing your own views?
I wouldn’t say I’m particularly emotional about it. A lot of people that make arguments similar to the ones you’re making do so as more of a bad faith “gotcha” rather than arguing something they actually believe in, most often as an excuse to kill sentient beings.
Responding to the same bad faith arguments is draining, so if I was bit kurt, that could’ve been part of it.
Now, if anything, I’d say I’m more curious. What does avoiding microbial killing look like, day to day? Do you avoid washing to preserve your microbial biome? I assume you’d avoid contributing to animal death as well since that would also kill their own microbial biome. I find this quite interesting, TBH!
To answer your question, I personally consider myself, for lack of better terms, a sentientist. And to me that entails veganism. I think sentience and consciousness is an emergent phenomena which occurs on a spectrum which roughly correlates to CNS complexity (although there are certainly beings with less centralised nervous systems which are also incredibly complex).
Consciousness produces the capacity for experiential existence and thus the experiences of pain and suffering, and I believe we have a moral obligation to minimize these unnecessary harms that we might cause.
