Innocence and the License to Kill: How Class Rule Produces Its Moral Categories

The essays on this site have argued that class rule operates not only through direct coercion but through the reorganization of social reproduction into institutionally separated domains, each under class-structured control.^[1] Meritocratic reasoning is the logic through which this reorganization is made to seem natural: it sorts people into categories of more and less deserving, then treats the resulting hierarchy as evidence that the sorting was justified.

But the analysis so far has said relatively little about how these categories are produced — how populations come to accept the conceptual vocabulary through which exploitation is rendered invisible and organized violence becomes thinkable. Coercion is never enough on its own. Even the most brutal class societies require their subjects to internalize a framework within which domination appears legitimate, or at least inevitable. The question here is not the one addressed in the companion essay on competing solidarities — how belonging and need-fulfillment are organized along non-class lines — but the prior one: how do people come to think in categories that make class violence possible?^[2]

The category I examine here is innocence, which I argue is the form in which meritocratic reasoning gets applied to the question of who may be harmed. The deserving/undeserving distinction, which elsewhere sorts people by their access to subsistence, care, and belonging, is applied here to bodily integrity itself: those classified as "innocent" are entitled to safety; those found "not innocent" forfeit that entitlement. The result is a license for violence — one that intensifies as the concept becomes more refined.

To show how this works, and how the category of innocence changes with the requirements of class rule, I draw on a set of narrative traditions that are more closely interconnected than they are usually presented as being.

Why coercion is not enough

If class rule could be maintained by force alone, the ruling class would need nothing more than a monopoly on weapons and the willingness to use them. Some regimes approximate this for short periods. None has sustained it indefinitely, because naked coercion is extraordinarily expensive. It requires constant surveillance, constant readiness to punish, and a repressive apparatus whose members must themselves be kept loyal — which reintroduces the problem at one remove. The garrison state is a crisis condition, not a stable equilibrium.

What makes class rule sustainable is the capacity to make coercion largely unnecessary — to produce populations who cooperate with arrangements that exploit them, who enforce the rules on each other, and who understand their compliance as common sense, moral duty, or simply the way things are. People need not be deceived about every aspect of their situation. They need a conceptual vocabulary within which their situation makes sense — categories through which exploitation registers as exchange, hierarchy registers as competence, and violence against designated targets registers as justice or necessity.

Meritocratic reasoning provides the general logic: some people deserve more, others less; the sorting reflects real differences; those who end up at the bottom are there for identifiable reasons. But the general logic must be materialized in specific categories, embedded in narratives, taught through institutions, renewed in each generation. How this happens, and how the specific content of the categories changes as the requirements of class rule change, is the question this essay takes up.

A crucial clarification is needed before turning to the historical material. Class rule does not invent the capacity for symbolically mediated collective violence. It captures and industrializes a pre-existing dynamic. Symbolic self-conception — through art, ritual, and narrative — is itself a governance technology, and an ancient one: the mechanism through which human communities produce, maintain, and negotiate their boundaries. As the companion essay on competing solidarities argues at length, this governance technology is inherently dual.3 It produces in-group solidarity and out-group differentiation through the same neurochemical and symbolic processes. Under egalitarian conditions — the baseline for most of human evolutionary history — the duality is managed through coalitionary enforcement, group fission and fusion, and the fluidity of boundaries themselves: the same people may be in-group in one context and out-group in another, and the boundaries are subject to constant collective renegotiation. Specific material conditions — storable surplus, sedentism, defensible territory, population growth — weaken coalitionary enforcement and enable hierarchy to emerge, first within practices that are still integrated (the archaeological record shows patrilineality, elite burial, and monumental architecture serving lineage-status interests well before the institutional separation characteristic of class rule proper), and then, as institutional separation proceeds, through the freezing of boundaries that were previously negotiable into permanent categories backed by institutional apparatus. The narrative traditions examined below — beginning with the Akkadian and early Vedic material — are already well into this process. They describe not the origin of moralized violence but the refinement of legitimation categories under conditions of increasing institutional complexity. What came before them was not a world without boundary-work — egalitarian communities could be violent in their own right, and coalitionary enforcement was often brutal — but a world in which the boundaries were collectively governed, context-dependent, and open to renegotiation in ways that class rule forecloses.

Categories in common: the Indo-European dialogue

The narrative traditions through which most of the world's population has been taught to think about hierarchy, violence, and moral worth are not independent inventions. The conventional treatment — "the Greeks believed X, the Hebrews believed Y, the Indians believed Z" — obscures a history of sustained interaction.

The linguistic evidence alone is striking. Languages as geographically distant as Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Old Norse, and Gaelic share cognate terms not only for basic vocabulary but for specifically hierarchical concepts: deva and deus (divine being), raj and rex (king), dyaus pitā and Zeus patēr and Iu-piter (sky father). These trace to a common ancestral language spoken roughly five to six thousand years ago by populations whose descendants spread from the Indian subcontinent to Ireland. The shared vocabulary tells us that the concepts — kingship, divine authority, the hierarchical relationship between divine and human — were already in circulation before the dispersal, and were carried into the new territories along with the languages themselves.

The connection runs deeper than shared origins. The societies that developed from these common roots remained in sustained contact through trade, conquest, migration, and the movement of ideas along routes connecting the eastern Mediterranean to the Indus Valley and beyond.^[3] The Achaemenid Persian Empire, spanning from Egypt to the borders of India, was a conduit for exactly this kind of exchange; Greek mercenaries served Persian kings while Persian administrative concepts influenced Greek political thought. None of this means every tradition borrowed directly from every other. But treating them as hermetically sealed "civilizations" developing in parallel is historically untenable. They were in dialogue — sometimes direct, sometimes mediated — and the categories through which they understood hierarchy, violence, and moral worth bear the marks of that dialogue.

The pattern I want to identify — a shift in the form of legitimation as class societies become more complex — is therefore not an artifact of cherry-picking from unrelated traditions. It is visible across interconnected traditions developing in conversation with each other, under broadly comparable pressures of class formation.

From divine caprice to moral accounting

The earliest narrative traditions associated with institutionalized class rule share a characteristic feature: the beings at the top of the cosmic hierarchy behave capriciously, and this is presented as normal. In the Akkadian Atra-Hasis, the gods create humans to perform the manual labor they find tedious, periodically cull the population when it grows too large, and ultimately attempt a total genocide — averted only because one god breaks ranks and warns a single chosen individual. In the Enūma Eliš, cosmic order is established through generational violence: younger gods overthrow older ones, the world is built from the dismembered body of a defeated goddess, and the victor's authority rests on his demonstrated capacity for destruction. The Mesopotamian cosmos is a hierarchy of power in which the strong do what they will and the weak endure what they must.

The early Vedic tradition — a cousin rather than an independent development, given the shared Indo-European heritage — operates on similar principles. The Ṛg Veda depicts a cosmos ordered by divine combat: Indra slays the serpent Vṛtra to release the waters, establishing himself as king of the gods through martial prowess. The divine order (ṛta) is maintained through sacrifice and reciprocity between gods and humans, but it is fundamentally a power arrangement. The gods are honored because they are powerful, and their favor is secured through offerings — a transactional relationship that mirrors and legitimates the one between rulers and subjects.^[4]

What unites these traditions is a legitimation structure in which the behavior of the powerful requires no moral justification beyond the fact of their power. The gods act as they wish; kings, as representatives or descendants of the gods, act similarly; and the framework provides no conceptual foothold from which to object. If the most powerful beings in the cosmos treat their inferiors as expendable, then expendability is simply part of the order of things.

Such a framework works tolerably well in societies where the ruling class is small, its extraction direct, and most of the population kept in line through tribute, military threat, and the sheer difficulty of organizing resistance. It creates problems as class societies scale up. Larger populations require broader participation — soldiers who march willingly, cultivators who produce surplus without constant supervision, administrators who enforce rules in the ruler's absence. The legitimation apparatus must do more than normalize the power of the strong. It must give the subordinate population reasons to cooperate that go beyond fear of punishment.

Moral accounting enters here. The shift is visible across the interconnected traditions, taking characteristically different forms depending on local conditions, but the underlying logic is consistent. Suffering, which in the earlier frameworks was simply what happened to the weak, is reconceived as something merited. The cosmos acquires a moral ledger. Good behavior is recorded and rewarded; bad behavior is recorded and punished. The critical innovation is not a decrease in violence — there is none — but a change in how violence is justified: by reference to the victim's moral status rather than the perpetrator's power.

In the Brahmanical development of Vedic thought, moral accounting takes the form of karma and saṃsāra — the doctrine that one's position in the social hierarchy reflects the accumulated moral balance of past lives. The person born into a subordinate caste is not arbitrarily placed there; they are experiencing the consequences of prior actions. The system is comprehensive: every form of suffering has a moral explanation, and every form of privilege is earned. Arguably the most complete legitimation technology ever devised, it makes all hierarchy simultaneously deserved and self-chosen — not by the person in their current life, but by the moral agent whose karmic trajectory they inherit. Resistance becomes cosmically irrational: to reject one's station is to reject the moral order itself, compounding the debt rather than discharging it.^[5]

In the Egyptian tradition, the same logic takes the form of divine judgment after death. The weighing of the heart against the feather of Ma'at is explicit accountancy: the deceased's moral record is assessed, and the outcome determines access to eternal life. The pharaoh — himself divine — presides over a system in which the reward structure extends beyond death, giving the subordinate population a stake in compliance that outlasts their earthly existence.

In the Hebrew tradition, the development is more contested and more visible in the texts themselves. The book of Job stages the tension directly: a man who has committed no wrong suffers catastrophically, and when he demands an explanation, the divine response is not moral but hierarchical — who are you to question me? The book is remarkable because it dramatizes the failure of moral accounting. Job's suffering is not merited; the framework of deserved punishment cannot explain it; and the resolution is not justice but the reassertion of power.^[6] That the text was preserved and canonized suggests that the tension between divine caprice and moral accounting was felt as a genuine problem within the tradition — one that could not simply be papered over.

The universalization of moral worth — and its paradox

The next development — visible in both the Christian and Buddhist reform movements, emerging under broadly comparable conditions of imperial consolidation and social stratification — appears at first to resolve the tension in an emancipatory direction. Both traditions assert, in different vocabularies, something like universal moral worth. In the Christian formulation, all are worthy of divine love; the divine is reconceived not as a capricious power but as a being whose defining attribute is compassion. In the Buddhist formulation, all sentient beings are caught in the same cycle of suffering, and liberation is in principle available to all regardless of birth — a direct challenge to the Brahmanical doctrine that caste position reflects karmic merit.

Both traditions emerged from and spoke to populations for whom the existing legitimation frameworks had become insufficient. The Roman imperial context that produced early Christianity was one in which the traditional civic religions of the Greek and Roman city-states had been stretched far beyond their original social base; huge populations of slaves, displaced peasants, and conquered peoples had no meaningful place in a religious framework organized around citizenship and patronage. The Buddhist movement emerged in a context of urbanization and commercial expansion in which the rigid varna system and its Brahmanical legitimation were increasingly at odds with the lived experience of merchants, artisans, and laborers whose actual social positions did not match their ritual classifications.^[7]

Both reforms can be read as responses to a legitimation crisis: the existing categories could no longer make class rule seem natural to a sufficient proportion of the population. And both initially offered something genuinely disruptive — a framework in which the fundamental categories of hierarchy (divine vs. human, pure vs. impure, chosen vs. unchosen) were called into question.

Here is the paradox, and the crux of the argument. The universalization of moral worth does not eliminate the logic of moral accounting. It refines it. If everyone is in principle capable of moral worth — if divine love or liberation is available to all — then those who fail to attain it have failed on their own terms. The earlier frameworks, in which the gods were simply more powerful and the weak simply expendable, left room for resigned acceptance: the world is brutal, the powerful do as they please, and there is no moral claim to be made. The universalized frameworks close this exit. If everyone could be saved, those who are not saved bear responsibility for their own damnation. If everyone could follow the dharma, those who suffer must be suffering for a reason.

The institutional trajectories of both traditions bear this out. Within a few generations of its founding, Christianity had been absorbed into the Roman imperial apparatus, and its universalism reworked into a system of moral accounting more thorough than anything it replaced. Sin, confession, penance, absolution, heaven, hell, purgatory — a complete ledger system in which every action is recorded and every soul assigned its proper destination. The compassionate divine becomes the all-seeing judge; the universality of divine love becomes the universality of divine jurisdiction. As Buddhism spread and was absorbed into existing class structures across South and East Asia, the doctrine of universal liberation was in practice layered onto rather than substituted for existing hierarchies — and the karmic framework, supposedly transcended by the Buddha's teaching, was reintroduced to explain why some beings were closer to liberation than others.

What universalization accomplishes, in practice, is the moralization of violence. In a framework where the gods are capricious, violence against the weak is simply what happens — regrettable, perhaps, but not a moral statement about the victim. Where moral worth is universal and suffering merited, violence against the "guilty" carries the full weight of cosmic justice. The victim is not merely harmed but judged. And because the judgment is moral rather than merely coercive, it enlists the compliance of victim and bystander alike: the victim is encouraged to accept their suffering as deserved; the bystander is reassured that what they are witnessing is justice rather than brutality.

Innocence as a technology of legitimation

In the earlier frameworks — divine caprice, naked power — "innocence" is barely a meaningful category. When the gods of the Atra-Hasis decide to drown humanity, the question of whether the victims are innocent does not arise, because the framework provides no moral criterion against which innocence could be assessed. The victims are simply weak. Even in the Job narrative, which dramatizes the problem, the resolution is not the vindication of innocence but the reassertion of power: God does not say Job is innocent and therefore should not suffer; God says I am God and you are not.

Innocence becomes meaningful only when the legitimation framework shifts to moral accounting — when suffering is reconceived as merited and the cosmic order is understood as just. At that point, "innocence" names the condition of not having merited harm: the state of being, in the terms of the moral ledger, in credit rather than in debt. And its primary function is not to protect those who possess it. It is to license violence against those who do not.

The logic runs as follows. If harm is simply what the powerful inflict on the weak, there is no need to establish the victim's guilt before harming them — and no moral residue when they are harmed. But if the cosmic order is just and suffering is merited, then harming someone requires that they be shown to deserve it. The concept of innocence provides the negative space within which this demonstration operates: it defines the default condition from which people can fall, and it is the fall — the loss of innocence, the demonstration of guilt — that authorizes the violence.

Innocence is meritocratic reasoning applied to bodily integrity. The same logic that sorts people into those who deserve access to subsistence and those who do not, those who deserve care and those who do not, is applied to the question of who deserves to continue existing without harm. And just as the deserving/undeserving distinction in other domains is circular — people are poor because they are deficient, and their poverty is evidence of their deficiency — so the innocence/guilt distinction is circular in practice. Those who are harmed are presumed to have merited it; those who are not harmed are presumed to be innocent; and the distribution of harm, which is determined by the structure of class power, becomes its own justification.

When a state declares war, the population of the target country must be reclassified from "people" to "enemy" — and the mechanism of reclassification is precisely the withdrawal of innocence. The enemy population is presented as guilty: of aggression, of harboring terrorists, of threatening "our way of life," of supporting a regime that has crossed some line. The specific content varies; the formal operation is constant. Once innocence is revoked, violence is authorized. The concept of "collateral damage" reveals the logic at its most refined: even within the enemy population, a residual distinction between "combatants" and "civilians" is maintained, not to prevent civilian deaths but to moralize them. Civilians killed in a bombing are regrettable because they were innocent; combatants killed alongside them require no regret.

The same logic operates domestically. The person convicted of a crime loses their innocence and, with it, a portion of their claim to bodily integrity — which is why forced labor in prisons, solitary confinement, and the casual acceptance of prison violence are tolerated in societies that formally recognize human rights. The sex worker whose assault is dismissed as "part of the job." The homeless person whose beating provokes no outrage. The undocumented migrant who drowns at sea. In each case, the withdrawal of innocence — through moral judgment, legal classification, or simple social contempt — makes the violence invisible as violence.^[8]

The concept also operates asymmetrically with respect to gender and age. The phrase "women and children" in wartime discourse does real work: it identifies the categories of people whose innocence is assumed, which simultaneously implies that adult men's innocence is not assumed — that men, by virtue of being potential combatants, are presumptively guilty and therefore legitimate targets. The innocence framework, operating along gendered lines, produces the result that male lives are valued less in contexts of organized violence — a fact that is simultaneously real, widely felt, and almost never analyzed in these terms, because the concept makes it appear as natural moral intuition rather than ideological product.

Why the concept intensifies what it claims to restrain

The historical development traced above — from divine caprice through moral accounting to universalized moral worth — is usually narrated as moral progress. And if one looks only at the explicit content of the traditions, the narrative is not implausible: a cosmos in which everyone is in principle worthy of love is, on its face, more humane than one in which the gods treat humans as disposable pests.

But the development is also, and more fundamentally, a refinement of the legitimation apparatus. Each stage changes the form of legitimation that accompanies violence, in ways that make the violence harder to identify and harder to resist.

Under divine caprice, violence is visible as what it is: the exercise of power by the strong against the weak. The victim has no moral recourse, but carries no moral stigma either. They are unlucky. Under moral accounting, the victim is stigmatized: their suffering is evidence of their guilt, and resistance is reframed as refusal to accept a deserved punishment. Under universalized moral worth, the stigma deepens: the victim has failed to achieve a moral status that was available to them — squandered their opportunity, ignored the offered salvation, refused the path to liberation. The violence is now not merely justified but compassionate: correction, purgation, the painful but necessary consequence of the victim's own moral failure.

A society without the concept of innocence — one in which harm is understood as the exercise of power, full stop — may be brutal, but it cannot moralize its brutality. A society with the concept can do unlimited violence to those it classifies as non-innocent, and experience that violence as justice. The more refined the concept, the more thorough the license, because the criteria for losing one's innocence can be calibrated to match whatever the class structure requires. Colonial powers found the inhabitants of expropriated lands "guilty" of savagery, paganism, or inefficient land use. States waging war find the enemy population "guilty" of aggression or terrorism. Criminal justice systems warehousing surplus populations find them "guilty" of offenses whose criminalization is itself a product of class legislation. The concept of innocence is the hinge on which all of this turns — not because it creates the violence, but because it provides the moral vocabulary within which the violence disappears.^[9]

The internal critics — and the limits of their critique

It would be dishonest to present this analysis as if it were entirely external to the traditions in question. Every major religious tradition has generated, from within its own resources, currents that recognize something close to what this essay describes — that the conceptual categories through which adherents are taught to understand their relationship to the divine, to each other, and to reality itself can become obstacles rather than aids. These currents deserve serious engagement, both because they represent genuine insight and because understanding why that insight never generalizes into structural transformation is itself part of the argument.

The Sufi tradition within Islam insists that legalistic religion — the meticulous sorting of actions into permitted and forbidden, the accounting of merit and sin — can become a barrier to the direct encounter with the divine that is the actual point. The great Sufi teachers consistently warn against confusing the categories with the reality they claim to describe, and against the spiritual arrogance of those who believe their moral bookkeeping has earned them a privileged position. Meister Eckhart and the apophatic tradition within Christianity make a parallel move: Eckhart's insistence that one must "let go of God" to encounter God is a direct challenge to the institutionalized moral-accounting apparatus, an argument that the divine cannot be captured in the ledger of sin and merit. Within the Jewish tradition, strands of Kabbalistic and Hasidic thought emphasize divine immanence in ways that cut against the hierarchical separation of sacred and profane, worthy and unworthy. Within the Indian traditions, Advaita Vedanta's insistence on the identity of ātman and brahman dissolves the karmic categories from the inside: if the self is ultimately identical with the ground of being, then the entire apparatus of karmic accounting — who deserves what, who has earned liberation, who remains bound — operates at the level of illusion. Buddhist practice, particularly in its Chan and Zen expressions, pursues a comparable dissolution: the categories through which we evaluate and sort experience are themselves the obstacle, and direct perception — seeing suffering rather than judging the sufferer — is both the method and the goal. Even the Daoist tradition, emerging from a different civilizational context, converges on a recognizably similar insight: that the concepts through which we organize moral and social life are human constructions imposed on a reality that does not share their structure, and that wisdom requires learning to perceive what the categories obscure.

The cross-cultural convergence is itself significant. These are not parallel inventions in hermetically sealed traditions. As argued above, the traditions in question were in sustained dialogue, and the recurrence of the insight across all of them suggests it is a response to something real — a genuine recognition that the legitimation apparatus distorts perception. Anyone who has spent time with these traditions knows that the best of what they produce — the quality of attention, the dissolution of judgmental categories, the encounter with other beings as beings rather than as instances of moral classifications — is not fake. It represents a real capacity and a real achievement, and any framework that cannot account for it is incomplete.

But the insight has a characteristic limitation, and it is the same in every tradition. The mystical currents consistently locate the problem in cognition — in the individual's attachment to concepts, in the mind's tendency to substitute categories for experience, in the failure to perceive reality directly. The solution, correspondingly, is contemplative: meditation, prayer, ascetic discipline, the cultivation of interior stillness. What the mystics do not ask — what their framework is not equipped to ask — is why the categories exist in the first place, who produces them, whose interests they serve, and why the institutional structures that generate them remain untouched by even the most profound individual realizations. The Sufi master who dissolves the categories in contemplation still lives within a social order that enforces them. The Zen practitioner who sees through conceptual thought still inhabits a monastery sustained by the surplus labor of the peasants and artisans who feed it. The categories remain in force for everyone else — and the existence of the mystical path, far from threatening the legitimation apparatus, can be absorbed into it as evidence of the tradition's profundity: proof that liberation is "available" to anyone who sincerely seeks it, which restates the meritocratic logic at a higher register. The contemplative who transcends the categories becomes a deserving exception — a saint, a sage, a realized being — and the existence of such exceptions confirms rather than undermines the framework that sorts everyone else.

None of this is an argument against contemplative practice or the capacity it cultivates. A companion essay argues, drawing on the same cross-cultural evidence, that the capacity for wider empathic perception — seeing needs rather than judging desert — is species-typical and real, and that its development is part of what any emancipatory project must involve.^[10] The argument is about sufficiency. Individual transformation of perception, however genuine, cannot substitute for the transformation of the material and institutional conditions that produce the categories. The legitimation apparatus is a social product, generated by class-structured institutions to serve class-structured purposes, and it will not be dissolved by meditation any more than wage labor will be dissolved by thinking differently about money.

What follows

If the argument above is correct, then "innocence" is not a moral foundation to be defended but a conceptual technology to be understood and dismantled. The observation underlying it — that, relative to some specific act, a given person bears no responsibility — is not without value. But the generalization of that observation into a character trait, a permanent classification, a condition that can be lost and whose loss authorizes harm, is ideological through and through. It is the deserving/undeserving distinction wearing moral clothing.

Any political movement serious about ending class rule must learn to operate without this concept — must refuse to sort people into the innocent and the guilty as a basis for deciding whose needs matter. The alternative is not moral relativism but its opposite: the insistence that bodily integrity, like subsistence and care and belonging, is a universal need that cannot be legitimately made conditional on moral performance. No one's needs are forfeited by their actions. A society organized on the premise that they can be has built the machinery of unlimited violence into its moral foundations.^[11]

The implication applies with particular force to war, criminal justice, and colonial expropriation — the contexts in which the innocence framework does its most visible work. But it applies equally to the less visible, everyday operation of the concept: the quiet withdrawal of concern from those judged to have brought their suffering on themselves, the reflexive sorting of victims into those who "deserve" sympathy and those who do not, the entire apparatus of moral accounting that teaches people to experience solidarity as something that must be earned rather than something that is owed. As long as that apparatus is in place, class rule has a renewable resource: a population that will enforce its own subordination, and feel righteous doing so.

Notes