Ethics of uncertain sentience Puns

Bonus questions. Could a replicator replicate kelpian or even human flesh for the curious?

We know it can replicate raw/uncooked dead Targ cause worf was pissed Jadzia didnt get a real one for his mother in law.

Im sure some species would not have the restrictions that federation ones would have.

The more i think about it the more likley Quark had a hidden isolinier chip with illigal drink and food recipes and if he didnt those lobes of his could find the contacts that would provide them.

Ok i have convinced myself. No ethics on replicated meat. I would try both kelpian, human and wash it down with Romulan ale...

I think lab grown / cloned non sentient Kelpian would also be ok but defo allot more of a grey area.

Last night I watched A Muppet Family Christmas (1987). In the holiday special, all of the Muppets, including Sesame Street characters, and Fraggle Rock, come together at Fozzie Bear's mother's house for Christmas.

At one point, a turkey shows up, invited by the Swedish Chef to be served as Christmas dinner. The turkey convinces the Chef to try to cook Big Bird instead since he's bigger and tastier but it doesn't work.

This got me thinking: What do Muppets eat?

There are over a hundred Muppets in the house for the holidays and they are probably hungry. The only food being prepared is Christmas turkey dinner by the Swedish Chef. Are they all going to eat that one turkey during their stay at the house over the holiday?

Thus began the rabbit hole. The turkey is sentient Muppet who thinks and speaks, but they were going to cook it for dinner. There is precedent for Muppets, mostly monsters, eating other Muppets (usually whole,) and Cookie Monster eats cookies (and vegetables now?) but what about everyone else? While some may be vegetarian, surely there are some meat-eating Muppets out there.

What level of sentience is the allowable threshold for Muppet consumption? Does it vary per-Muppet as to what they will acceptably eat?

From watching this special I put together this list of types of sentience in the Muppet universe:

• Object — table, fruit (no sentience)
• Live Animals — dog, cow
• Animal Puppets - They look like animals, don't speak, but understand language — Sprocket the dog, The Chicken
• Puppet Animals - They look like animals but speak — Raccoons, Woodland Animals
• Muppet Objects - Anthropomorphized objects — Talking shoes, singing fruit
• Muppet Animals - Anthropomorphized animals — Rowlf, Kermit, Miss Piggy
• Muppet Monsters - Anthropomorphized monsters — Oscar, Grover
• Muppet People - Anthropomorphized puppet-people — Ernie, Bert
• Muppet Humanoids - Muppets that resemble humans — Swedish Chef, Statler, Waldrof
• Humans

Is there some sort of tiered system where a Muppet Monster can ethically eat Puppet Animals but not Muppet Humanoids? Would a Muppet Object, like a singing banana, be eaten by another Muppet, but also what does it eat? In this special, Swedish Chef (Muppet Humanoid) was ready to eat the turkey (Muppet Animal) and presumably so was everyone else!

Taking it further, all these Muppets must have different dietary needs! Preparing proper meals for each Human, Muppet, and Puppet

I've seen the argument made that vegans should act as though animals such as arthropods and molluscs are sentient because nociception and vertebrate-like responses to opiates might suggest they are.

But if we take an objective view of the world, those responses are the result of physical and chemical processes that could exist without any sort of internal experience. Of course, while we're remaining objective, sentience itself is also brought about only by physical and chemical reactions, but the systems involved are far more complex and not completely understood. I think it would be reasonable to say that sentience is inseparable from a sufficiently complex nervous system (or alien/robot equivalent).

I guess the question is what "sufficiently" means, because I'm quite confident in saying that a worm with only a few hundred cells in its nervous system is not sentient, and that Betty White is. The line separating sentient from non-sentient is in there somewhere; the only question is where.

So I guess where I'm going with this is, what do you think of vegans who would be willing to eat animals such as oysters, prawns and mealworms because they draw that line closer to big brain than you do? Are they ethically inferior to typical vegans? Are they vegans at all?

^(I'd like to ignore environmental concerns here and focus only on animal welfare.)

Will try not to spoil it - if worried about it being spoiled for you of course don't read this:

I like how it questions the ethics of creating sentience (probably unintentionally)on many levels, it looks at the creation of 3 different sentient organisms. I'm sure the writer and director were just going for the creep factor and weren't intending to convey any antinatalist sentiment or questioning but I found it did a great job of this and I found the film surpassed my expectations as I was only expecting a few scares from it. I had low expectations and was impressed! I especially liked how one of the characters had a strong conviction about not oweing their creator anything.

Animal Rights/Ethical Vegan philosophy of sentience - sentiocentrism - is rooted in 18th century European philosophy, which views sentience as the state of being responsive to or conscious of sense impressions, and further expanded by utilitarian animal rights philospher psychopath Peter Singer as having the capacity to suffer.

This contrasts to Eastern philosophies which according to Wikipedia, sentience is a metaphysical quality of all things that require respect and care & and particularly in Tibetan Buddhism and Japanese Buddhism, all beings (including plant life and even inanimate objects or entities considered "spiritual" or "metaphysical" by conventional Western thought) are or may be considered sentient beings.

Indigenous philosophies such as Animism encompasses the beliefs that all material phenomena have agency, that there exists no hard and fast distinction between the spiritual and physical (or material) world and that soul or spirit or sentience exists not only in humans but also in other animals, plants, rocks, geographic features such as mountains or rivers or other entities of the natural environment.

In my view, this is one reason why Veganism is fundamentally a Eurocentric ideology, & global proseletysing of Veganism a colonial endeavour. I'm interested in hearing thoughts & knowledge on this topic from other members of this sub.