Neil Degrasse Tyson Is Crazy Wrong About Veganism

The fact that hypothetical aliens would disapprove of our actions tells us little about whether they're permissible

Neil Degrasse Tyson is an extraordinarily good science communicator. He has a unique ability to distill important ideas, making them interesting and clear. Were Neil to stick exclusively to talking about science, I’d have no problem with what he says. Unfortunately, he often talks about things that he does not know about—unlike me, of course—and often makes quite egregious errors.

He falls into a trap all too common among public intellectuals. Being a public intellectual is to be interested in ideas—public intellectuals are generally interested in more things than they can possibly know about. To the extent that one is constantly churning out opinions, and wants to avoid simply repeating the same material, they’ll inevitably speak about topics they do not know about. When one does this, they often make a fool of themselves. This is something I try to avoid, but I’m definitely guilty of it.

He recently took to the podcast of

Michael Shermer

and his book to argue that vegans are, in many ways, misled. But the things that he said were stupendously wrong, almost unbelievably so. They’re the sort of things you get if you write about a topic before having taken adequate time to reflect or consult with the people who disagree with you on the subject.

A brief preview of his errors. He:

1. Falsely claims that plants are conscious, ignoring the mountains of evidence that they’re not.

2. Egregiously misdefines speciesism, to a comical extent.

3. Falsely claims—totally without evidence—that more emissions are released by local animal products than non-local plants.

4. Says that caring about sentient beings is arbitrary.

5. Argues that it must be as wrong to eat plants as animals because plant aliens would be upset by our eating plants.

6. Saying that milk and honey are cruelty free, without so much as looking into the conditions that animals are raised in, in these industries.

7. Suggests that it must be fine to eat animals because other animals do it.

The first thing that he says about veganism in his book is that the primary thing of importance is whether your food is local, rather than what you eat. Tyson writes:

No matter what you eat, if you source foods locally, you minimize the transportation footprint, which may be better for the environment than a simple vegetarian diet that pays no regard to where the plants were harvested.

Tyson doesn’t provide a source for his claim in the book, which is no surprise. It’s much worse for the environment to eat local meats than non-local vegetables. Only a tiny portion of the environmental impact of most foods come from the carbon released via transport. Ironically, the only food for which this isn’t true is plants, because their carbon footprint is so tiny:

Note, the data for this chart comes from our world in data, summarizing the most detailed meta-analysis of global food systems ever done. It shows definitively that local beef emits almost 60 times as much as local vegetables. Tyson’s claim in contrast comes from…well, it’s not really clear where it comes from. He just asserts it totally without evidence.

Now, credit to Tyson, he discusses just how many animals we kill. He notes that about a million chickens are slaughtered per hour, and that we “cram [cows] into feedlots where they create mountains of manure and rivers of urine.” Additionally, he provides a vivid description of what it’s like to be a fish killed by the fishing industry:

The concept of flying does not exist because if they want to ascend from their current depth, they just swim there. That’s their entire world. The only existence they know. Then, all of a sudden, one gets yanked from above and pulled into a parallel universe. Nothing is familiar. The sky, the clouds, the Sun’s warmth beating down. The water’s surface was the edge of their oceanic universe—their cosmic horizon. They’ve never before seen it from the outside. Only from within. Moments later they begin to suffocate, and after they’re tossed into a pile of crushed ice, they freeze to death.

Neil notes that there are really two separate arguments for vegetarianism. One of them is about the wrongness of killing animals, the other about animal mistreatment. He notes:

Suppose all animals consumed by humans were humanely raised and treated. Suppose further that they led full lives and were slaughtered without pain. That might bring some people back from vegetarian-land, especially when you consider that killing and eating animals is not the unique province of humans. Entire branches of the animal kingdom are pure carnivores: lions don’t long for kale salads while mauling zebras; snakes don’t forage for berries; owls don’t ogle the broccoli in your garden.

Now, it’s true that in a world where animals lived good lives, there would be an interesting—and genuinely difficult—moral question about whether it’s fine to eat animals. But this is not the world we live in. The world where we live in is one where every time you eat an animal, you force an animal to spend days locked in a cage, drowning in a river of acidic feces, constantly injured by the metal cage pressed against its legs, never able to move or turn around. It’s worth, in a book dedicated to talking about veganism, discussing the meat eating nearly everyone does several times a day, rather than some far-off fantasy land (of course, it might be that thinking about distant possible worlds informs what we should do in the actual world, but surely a serious discussion of the topic would involve at the very least discussing the normal eating of meat).

Now, Neil’s argument that should “bring some people back from vegetarian-land,” is badly mistaken. Why would it make one jot of difference that animals eat other animals? Male lions also devour their young; rape is rampant in the animal kingdom. Many animals eat humans, but that doesn’t mean we should. The fact that animals do things doesn’t mean that we should!

Neil notes that sentience exists on a spectrum, before suggesting that it’s arbitrary which bits of the spectrum we care about. It’s true that many people have deeply arbitrary attitudes here, but caring about sentient beings isn’t arbitrary. There are different theories of what makes one’s life go well—having their desires fulfilled, a list of goods like love and happiness, just pleasure—but on all of them, at the very least, pleasure is good and pain is bad. So caring about animals is distinctly non-arbitrary.

The golden rule—a distinctly non-arbitrary principle—says do onto others what you’d want them to do to you. If I were gradually turned into a pig, I wouldn’t want people to lock me in a cage and torment me. In contrast, if I were turned into a plant, I wouldn’t care, and this would be totally rational. Plants aren’t conscious, meaning that nothing can go well or badly for them. Thus, caring about conscious beings isn’t arbitrary, for it’s just caring about beings with interests. It’s just caring about the beings the treatment of whom you’d care about if you turned into them.

After this, the arguments get much worse:

The urge to treat one species of animal differently in any way is called speciesism. Think racism or sexism, but in this case, you’re biased against some animals simply because of their genetic distance from humans in the tree of life, or because they’re repulsive to look at.

Wtf??? No, obviously not. There are some species (humans) who should be allowed to drive a car. There are other species (snails) who should not. This isn’t specieist (one might wonder where Neil got this definition from, but such people would be disappointed by his lack of a citation).

Instead, speciesism is caring about species in itself, rather than as a proxy for other things. One who’s anti-speciesist thinks that there are various cases in which animals matter less or shouldn’t be given rights, but only because of other traits they possess. The reason a snail matters less than a person is because they have less great of a capacity for welfare, rather than anything about their species. An anti-speciesist says that what matters is the capacities one has, not their species—if we ran a DNA test and discovered “oh shoot, some people we thought were humans really aren’t,” an anti-specieist wouldn’t think that diminished their moral significance.

But you don’t have to be opposed to speciesism to be a vegan. Even if you think humans matter way more than animals with comparable traits, you should be a vegan, so long as you think that an animal’s life is worth more than a few meals, that an animal being tortured and then slaughtered isn’t worth some hamburgers.

Following this argument further, one could choose not to eat animals at all, living life as a vegetarian, but when you think about it, that’s being speciesist against plant life.

…

What if brainless plants were secretly sentient? That concept might be hard to embrace because we’re biased by brain chauvinism

No, what? Again, speciesism isn’t just caring more about one species than another. Most all vegans would save a human over a mosquito. It’s caring about species for its own sake, regarding it as intrinsically morally relevant. The reason it’s fine to eat plants, like the reason it’s fine to eat rocks (though ill-advised) and to drink water is that plants aren’t conscious.

How do we know plants don’t feel pain? Well, they have none of the ingredients needed for pain. They have no brain, central nervous system, of nociceptors. They don’t even have the machinery to detect external damage, much less feel pain. While sensationalist media headlines often claim that plants feel pain, this view is fringe and based on bad science.

Now, if plants did feel pain, this would be tragic and would make the case for trying to kill them humanely. But crucially, it would make the case for veganism even stronger. After all, animals eat plants, and so many more plants are killed in the production of a burger than in the production of a chicken.

Here, Neil’s comments get deeply bizarre:

Imagine a pod of aliens come to visit who derive all their energy and nourishment from starlight and minerals. What would they think of life on Earth? They’d see their cousins—all that photosynthesizes—and delight in their taxonomic diversity, from microscopic cyanobacteria in lakes and ponds to the mighty sequoia trees of the American northwest that live for thousands of years. They would see all other life as hopelessly barbaric, killing all manner of living things for their survival. They would see humans as apex predators—persistent purveyors of violence—dividing themselves into those who kill and eat animals and those who kill and eat plants.

…

Morbid as that is, our visiting light-metabolizing aliens would be especially incensed by Earth vegetarians for slaughtering their plant brethren. Not only that, human plant eaters take special interest in reproductive organs—the flowers, the seeds, the nuts, the berries—and eat those, disrupting the life cycle of the plant.

This is perhaps the worst argument I have ever come across.

The fact that we can imagine some aliens that are opposed to an action doesn’t show that the action is wrong. We can imagine some aliens that are opposed to literally any action. You write on paper? Well, imagine some intelligent aliens that have bodies of paper and regard writing on paper to be deeply barbaric. You kiss your wife? Imagine some intelligent aliens that regard kissing to be worse than genocide. You kill bacteria? Imagine some intelligent aliens that evolved from bacteria and are incensed by antibiotics.

What in the world is this supposed to show? It doesn’t matter if the aliens would be against us eating plants, so long as they are wrong to be against it. And Neil hasn’t given a reason to think that the aliens aren’t wrong. Most hilariously, Neil’s argument implies the permissibility of cannibalism in a world where the only foods were humans and plants. Imagine:

Anti-cannibal Bob: Hey Neil, you should stop eating other people. As you slowly and agonizingly eat them, you cut their life short, and cause them great pain.

Pro-cannibal Neil: Ah, well you see, the alternative to eating humans is eating plants. But if we imagine highly intelligent alien bok choy, they’d be very upset by us eating plants, while not by us eating humans. So, you see, killing and eating other people must be fine—we have to kill to eat, and caring more about a baby than a baby carrot is speciesist.

Nuts! But if anything, it gets worse:

A blunt truth of human existence: our three sources of energy—protein, carbohydrates, and fat—all come from killing and eating other forms of life in our ecosystem. We can get some of our necessary minerals, like salt, from the environment, but you can’t live on minerals. Two foods rise above the “I must kill to survive” way of life: milk and honey. Combined, the two are rich in protein, carbohydrates, and fat and don’t require the death of any living thing for your nourishment. If you don’t otherwise metabolize sunlight, a milk-and-honey diet would be the least violent way you could possibly live on Earth.

Note that milk and honey are specifically excluded from the diet of vegans, on the grounds that you’re taking food intended for calves and bees. I imagine that lactating cows and bees don’t want their precious nourishment taken from them, although they can probably just make more of it. In any case, vegan philosophy prefers you kill plants for your nourishment, rather than steal milk from the cow and honey from the bee.

Most vegans do not have an in principle problem with eating dairy. If, in fact, the cows didn’t mind being milked and lived on some idyllic pasture, living perfectly good lives, it’s hard to see what would be so wrong with it. The reason people abstain from milk and honey is because, contra Neil, they cause enormous amounts of suffering. Cows are held down and forcefully artificially inseminated, then their babies are stolen. They live in waste and filth and feces—after a few years of this, they’re sent to slaughter, and their babies are sold for meat.

The honey industry is similarly cruel. They keep bees in small, poorly insulated enclosures that are frequently inspected, leading to great distress among the bees, and frequent stinging. Bees are frequently starved, and even the ones that aren’t are given an inadequate diet and left chronically malnourished. Their lives are short, their deaths are painful, and they’re often subject to stressful and dangerous transport. Disease and parasites are common. In total, about 97% of years of animal life brought about by the animal industry come from the honey industry, and consuming a kilogram of honey causes literally hundreds of thousands of years of bee mistreatment.

The chapter is, like much of what Neil writes, entertaining and well-written. If the sole aim is to have lots of sentences that cause the reader to say “wow” as they digest the supposed profundity, no doubt it’s a great success. But so far as the chapter is supposed to show what’s wrong with vegan arguments, it’s a failure on the scale of Hitler’s invasion of Russia.