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Viliam_Bur comments on Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013 - Less Wrong
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If I'm not mistaken, there have been some study on plant communication and data elaboration from their roots, enough to classify them as at least primitively intelligent. Anyway, since they are in fact living and autonomous being, I don't see why they shouldn't be considered subjects of ethical reflections...
If we don't say bacteria need ethical reflections, then it is very unlikely that plants will either.
Well, deciding when to stop caring at a certain complexity level is a sort of ethical reflection.
Anyway, if we care about humans and animals because they have some sort of thinking life, then if these studies are valid we should start paying attention to plants too. Of course we could simply decide we need to care on some other basis.
We can reasonably say that something has a "thinking life" if it functions as a state machine where 'states' correspond to abstract models of sensory data (patterns in external stimuli). The complexity of the possible mental states is correlated with the complexity (information content) of the sensory data that can be collected and incorporated into models.
A cat's brain can be reasonably interpreted as working this way. A nematode worm's 302 neurons probably can't. A plant's root system almost definitely can't.
Note that this concept of a "thinking life" or sentience is a much weaker and more inclusive than the concept of "personhood" or sapience.