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I don't want to disregard science. I want to err by being preemptively more inclusive, not more cruel, when I don't have sufficient information.
If you don't have any evidentiary basis for your inclusiveness, then that makes it completely arbitrary. Why not start worrying about potential cruelty to non-living things like air, or rocks as well?
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.
Yeah, thank you, I think I get you now. I've seen many "gotcha arguments" like you describe and I agree that responding to them is draining. And I can see how what I say can be seen as similar. My way of thinking about these things can be upsetting for both meat eating people and vegans/vegetarians, I'm afraid, but I'm just trying to do my best with what I know. In general, I sympathize with vegans and I think it's a great thing that veganism is getting a bit more mainstream nowadays.
You're asking me what I am and how I handle my sympathy with all that is alive. The truth is, I'm a biologist (botanist). I view killing life for your own survival (and even cruelty) as something natural and understandable, I don't find it a moral thing to do if it can be avoided though. I eat meat, although not often and I don't usually buy it for myself. (When I do eat meat, I feel evil and I own it. I try not to avoid the responsibility and I accept that a fully sentient animal was killed for me to eat.)
I think even unicellular organisms are well equipped for experiencing the world around them including sensations of being harmed - it's crutial to have something like this to survive.
My specialization is plants and I'm seeing a breakthrough of plant senses research now (which used to be kind of taboo in the past). There are so many things we didn't know or didn't want to know being finally objectively researched! Plants are alive too and their aliveness, striving to survive and to not be eaten is evident, even though we don't have enough data to say whether they can have some kind of consciousness by our standards. They do have ways to tell when they're harmed and they react.
My point is, I think many organisms were and still are rather underestimated when it comes to their ability to sense the world around them and to integrate the collected information, which are the basics for what we call feeling something and having some kind of intelligence and consciousness.
So the answer, I guess, is I do what I can and don't do what I can't. And I feel a lot of sympathy with all kinds of life forms, despite eating some of them regularly :)
I hope I've explained myself in some decypherable way, I sometimes find it hard.