One of the major worries that vegans have about humanity’s meat habit is that an advanced alien species will come to Earth, see that we’re eating animals, and then think it’s okay to eat us. Jonathan Safran Foer, just one of many meat abstainers to raise this concern, asks in Eating Animals:
If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?
The implication of Foer’s rhetorical question is that if we didn’t eat meat, then we would have an argument against being eaten. But what would that argument be? “We don’t eat meat, so you can’t eat us”? An advanced alien civilization would instantly see this weak objection for what it really is: the naturalistic fallacy in another form. When meat eaters say that animals eating animals in nature gives us license to eat animals too, vegans accuse them of the naturalistic fallacy — the belief that because something happens in nature it is okay for us to do it as well. Vegans hate this fallacy more than any other. Yet the alien hypothetical rests on it. Because if it’s incorrect to say that animals eating animals makes it okay for us to eat animals, it’s also incorrect to say that animals not eating animals makes it wrong for us to eat animals. An advanced alien civilization who saw us as we see fish should not look at our actions to guide their own.
And if it were okay for aliens to eat us because we eat animals, then by extension it’s okay for us to eat animals who eat other animals. So either way we get to eat meat.
As a thought experiment, the alien hypothetical is a misleading one. It wants to get us to see things from the animals’ perspective, but it botches this by putting us in the same situation as animals while maintaining our perspectives as humans. Asking a human how they would feel being raised free range on a farm with death for food being their inevitable end is like asking a human how they would feel being an industrially raised stalk of corn, with their legs stuck underground, unable to move, never being able to sit or lie down, pelted by rain, rustled by wind and pecked at by crows. With the physical attributes and cognitive abilities of a human, that would suck, but might not be as bad for a stiff, brainless stalk of corn.
Same with the humanely raised animal. A pig being raised for food simply will not suffer the same existential anguish as the forced human organ donors in Never Let Me Go.
It’s also worth noting that this hypothetical assumes that aliens would see humans as superior in some way. Why else would aliens single out humans for carnivorous judgment, dumping a special kind of responsibility on us while leaving the lions and sharks to their blood lust? If vegans are right that it is only our own speciesism that tells us there is something special about humans, wouldn’t aliens lacking that human bias see us as just another species of living creatures, with no more of a need to defend out meat eating ways than any other beings? Why would they challenge us but not the venus fly traps?
Furthermore, the alien hypothetical actually undercuts veganism by assuming that a race of advanced beings — more intelligent than even the brightest human — would be meat eaters. If ultra-enlightened, space traveling organisms see no problem with eating meat, who are we to question their wisdom by restricting ourselves to the plant kingdom?
A more troubling question for vegans to ask would be, “What if a hyper-intelligent race of aliens invaded our planet and didn’t eat us?”
